Photography

Time On Earth, Vol. 1

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In his 2016 book The Big Picture, Cal-Tech physicist Sean Carroll brought eternity and the cosmos down to Earth, so to speak, by noting that a contemporary human can expect to live for roughly 3 billion heartbeats. He wasn’t trying to be dour or morbid, just trying to help put our individual existence in the context of deep time, given that the universe is 13.8 billion years old, and the Earth itself 4.5 billion years old, as best we can tell.

Maybe you don’t need a photographer to console you, to point out that a lot can happen in the time and space of a single heartbeat, or the blink of an eye in which a quality moment can transpire. But it’s true and there’s nothing more satisfying for a photographer than a well-focused instant of reflected light that reveals beauty, poignancy and perhaps a lasting hint of the eternal.

—-tjc

  • Red HIll at John Day Fossil Beds
  • Canada geese at the Granite Dells near Prescott, AZ
  • Ancient slab of Belt Basin argillite in a crib of Grande Ronde basalt, Spokane River
  • Magpie briefly still in a wintering locust tree
  • River bank ice droplets, Spokane River
  • Autumn at Tumwater canyon in the Washington Cascade range
  • Flowing water and Grande Ronde basalt, Spokane River
  • Autumn on the Spokane River west of Spokane
  • Frost on the marsh, Turnbull National Wildlife Refuge
  • Clarno volcanic rock formation, John Day Fossil Beds
  • Lichens on Grande Ronde basalt, Riverside State Park, WA
  • Latah Creek near Spokane, WA
  • Blue Darner dragonfly at a scabland marsh
  • Ice age flood cobbles on Spokane River shoreline
  • Young mule deer buck, Riverside State Park
  • Water flowing over ice age flood cobbles
  • Precambrian granite formation atop the Bighorn Mountains in northern Wyoming
  • Morning snowfall, Coeur d’Alene Park, Spokane, WA
  • Winter at Soda Lake, north of Othello, WA
  • Raindrops on lupine
  • Saguaro cactus in the Sonoran Desert near Phoenix, AZ
  • Ice age flood cobbles, Spokane River
  • Sunset at the Granite Dells near Prescott, AZ
  • Autumnal ash leaves, Fish Lake Trail in the Latah valley near Spokane, WA
  • Schnebly Hill sandstone formation, Sedona, AZ
  • Ice bobbins, Latah Creek
Effervescent rapids, Spokane River
Field Notes

The Old Testaments

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Images from a long summer on the rocks

I remember two things about my first visit to the Grand Canyon. The first is we all got in trouble. By “we” I mean the four oldest of the Connor children who were deemed old enough to know better than to go over the barrier along the rim. The second is the layers in the rocks, all the way to the bottom, thousands of feet below.

The idea that the Colorado River carved its way to the impossibly deep bottom was clear enough, yet still hard to imagine. That had taken 6 million years. What wasn’t so clear then is that the youngest of the rocks the river had cut through—the limestone/marble of the Kaibab Formation—are more than 250 million years old. That’s about 3.5 million human lifetimes. There’s no need to run the math for the deepest rocks in the chasm, the 1.7+ billion year old gneiss, schists and granites that make up the Vishnu Formation. At that trench of time, we are so deeply into the unfathomable that the mind twists and spins.

I can’t well explain the comfort I receive being in the presence of very old rocks. It’s just better—here—that I not try, that I just let the rocks speak for themselves in the photographs. Most of the images are from travels in the summer and fall of 2021, often with some of my favorite people, children and dear friends who allow me to just climb and wander up and down range from time to time, to visit with the earth and the rocks, and the ever-changing light. —tjc

Some of the rocks shoved up to the top of the Bighorn Mountains in northern Wyoming are nearly 3 billion years old. These soaring basement rocks include the Archean pink granite in this photo, exposed and artfully weathered by the nearly relentless wind at 9,000 feet.
The Painted Hills unit of the John Day Fossil beds in north central Oregon expose a volcanic world that is roughly twice as old and quite a bit more colorful than the black/brown basalt lava that covers so much of eastern Washington and eastern Oregon. The vistas include hillsides of fossilized soils–paleosols–that accrued over millions of years in successive lake beds dating back 33 million years.
Skirting the Bighorns and extending into Colorado and Montana is the vividly red Chugwater formation. An enormous, stratified pile of silt and sandstone it dates back to the Triassic period (245 to 208 million years ago)–basically to the dawn of the dinosaurs. The cliffs in this photo are only a few miles from the “Hole-in-the Wall” hideout of Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid, near Barnum, WY.

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Essays

Gracias Roberto

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A note of thanks to a brave and wise Panamanian, 45 years overdue.

It is a sultry Sunday in early July and I am seated on a shady lanai on the Banana River just south of Cape Canaveral, the guest of one of my high school classmates. Across from me are Lionel and Mark, the spouses of two other of my Balboa High School classmates, class of ’75.

Three sips into a mango margarita—and well into a conversation about how a bunch of gringos wound up in Panama going to a high school that no longer exists—I share a story about a confrontation that changed my life. It happened 45 years ago. It goes like this:

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