The mountain landscape through the upper Arkansas Valley is one of open wide vistas and great distance. It reminds me of the lines of a poem by Edna St. Vincent Millay...."the world stands out on either side, no wider than the heart is wide....above the world is stretched the sky, no higher than the soul is high." These land forms force us to extend ourselves beyond the confines of streets, towns, highways, buildings...the structures of daily life.
But the mountains also contain intimate spaces...below tree line are dense forests, places to lose oneself in micro-climates where sight lines are limited. Sometimes these are in juxtaposition to one another. I was cross country skiing on a mountain road, enjoying the silence, watching the tread of my skis as the layer of new snow was thin on the gravel surface. As I came around a bend, I looked up and saw a high mountain wall above the forest...defining the edge of the canyon where I was skiing.
This brusque convergence of small-scale and large-scale perspectives is one of the on-going joys of this mountain valley...narrow canyons leading away from the broad ranches on the valley floor.
