The summer sun has made the Colorado prairie grasses grow their tallest, but on the trees a few bare branches are beginning to appear as golden autumn leaves start to fall.
In Wyoming, there are miles and miles of open countryside under an expansive sky. Here, in this quiet minimalistic scene a tiny pond dots the open prairie.
In geological terms, Heart Mountain’s flat-topped shape is caused by a thrust fault, the pushing up of younger rocks above older ones, and subsequent erosion. These distinctive formations are called klippes. In human terms, it was in the shadow of this mountain outside of Cody, Wyoming, that over 10,000 Japanese-Americans were held in an encampment after the World War II bombing of Pearl Harbor by the Japanese. Today the site is a National Historic Landmark comprised of an outdoor interpretive center and a museum, which together provide visitors with an intimate view of what daily life was like in the camp.
Prairie grasses grow wild in the arid lowlands and mountainsides of Colorado. Even though they gradually give way to the winter snows, they always bounce back triumphantly in the spring.
Milkweed Seedpod, East Boulder County Trail
Foxtail Barley, Rocky Mountain National Park
The badlands of South Dakota form a vast protected wilderness today. However, paleontological evidence shows that ancient Native Americans used the area as their hunting grounds, as did the tribes of the Sioux Nation in later years. The stratified layers of sedimentary rock show the changes over eons in the earth’s surface, which first emerged from under the sea as tropical land and then slowly changed to open woodland. Gray bands show evidence of volcanic eruptions at certain times in history. Geologists now have a good idea of what each layer represents, and there are many strata!
The sun is sinking in a bright orange sky over another wilderness 9,000 miles away from my last post featuring a desert in Western Australia. Pictured here are the badlands of California’s Anza-Borrego State Park at the westernmost edge of the Sonoran Desert.
The warm glow of sunset silhouettes a row of limestone pillars in Western Australia’s ancient Pinnacles Desert. The pinnacles were formed by strong winds blowing in from the Indian ocean and eroding the surrounding sand. Thousands of these formations spread across the desert floor.
