Jul. 17, 2006 - 21:25 MDT

DISCOVERY

Now and then in the byways and highways of that thing called The Net it comes about that I have the good fortune to run across someone who is of great interest to me.

Thus I met Chris, who lives in Albuquerque, New Mexico and loves the SouthWest as deeply as I do.

He seems to be a superb cameraman as well as an accomplished writer.

I'll try to put a clickable url here.

chalkdust_and_caliche

Caliche exists in the southwest. Definition = A surface deposit consisting of sand or clay impregnated with crysalline salts such as sodium nitrate or sodium chloride. I think that Death Valley is one place where there is much of that soil, as well as other desert like places out here. Death Valley also has deposits of borax too I think.

Reading back in his blog, I see that his wife also has a xanga blog, but apparently is not going to be posting for a time.

He has been many of the places I have also visited, plus so many of the places I would dearly love to take in. He seemingly approaches all things with great respect for things that once were, almost religious relics of the South West past.

I say "met Chris" in the respect that I ran across his blog a few days ago. We lightly touched via "comments" sections and so forth. I do hope to establish communication with him, but as he is a graduate student in college he is probably too busy to e-mail too much.

Albuquerque is not so far south of Denver that he and his wife and son wouldn't come up here to look around sometime. Perhaps we can lunch and visit, much like Jeannie from Boynton Beach, Florida does when she comes to town each May. We have a grand old time visiting and noshing.

From his photographs he seems to be a man with vast distances of desert country in his eyes, swelling up from his heart. Dunno, perhaps that's the way it is.

There is another man of the wild west that I follow too, Grousin'In The Sage, also a man with an eye for beauty and excellent camera technique who by work necessity covers a lot of that territory near and around Devil's Tower, Wyoming.

Man wouldn't it be nice to be sitting around a campfire, sipping coffee and talking. I would do my best to be a fly on the wall and listen to all they have to say. A ten year old just a tad past eighty-five.

It gives me a glow to run on to someone like these two, a miraculous DISCOVERY . . . . . . . . . .

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