ESSAYS

Desecration in the Desert
August 2021 – The Land Desk
I had expectations. That’s always my problem. Expectations.
Two weeks ago, I woke at dawn on a mirror-still morning at Lake Powell. To the northeast, a rim of dank smoke lined a sky lit orange by the slanted rays of the sun colliding with flakes of our northwestern forests. Somewhere, a fish splashed. Two ducks sliced a crisp V across the surface of the lake, making for their nest along the breakwater at Bullfrog. Read >>

ONE FAMILY'S QUEST TO COMPLETE A 120-HIKE CHALLENGE
November 2020 – New Mexico Magazine
As the pandemic reduced the size of their world, one Taos family took on a hiking challenge and found a new path. Read >>

Time to Rise – Cli-Fi and the Responsibility of New Visions
April 2018 – Modern Literature
Cli-Fi cuts too close to home. Climate Fiction isn’t exactly speculative fiction or science fiction. It is the right here, right now. Our destructiveness and carelessness already haunt us. We don’t have to look far to see that for vast chunks of the world this ‘fiction’ is all too real. Cli-Fi is both where we are and where we are going. Read >>

Taos Photographer in Cuba: Street. Justice. Values. Photography
2019 – Taos Journal of International Poetry & Art
There is a very fine line between the creation of street photography art and poverty pornography. As a photographer, it is a difficult and delicate balance to strike. I am not always successful. Sometimes, I don’t even know if I’m successful at striking that balance or if I’ve crossed the line. But I’m always on the lookout for that line and I’m conscious of the balancing act. Read >>

Things I Love. Well, Clouds
February 2016 – Vrai Magazine
A few weeks ago, I crawled into a cave. I saw a cloud carved into the soft volcanic tuft that sheltered this particular cavern and a number of others nearby. All are similar and the mountain is like an anthill, suffused with caverns and caves and tunnels. The cloud was nothing particularly special, a pyramid of six arcs at the center with staircase-like wings off to the right and to the left. Flowing lines trailing into the powdery walls hung from the underside of the wings. It was a six-hundred year old depiction of a summer thunderstorm and the virga that sweeps the arid American Southwest. Read >>

DIGGING IN: Learning to love New Mexico the hard way.
April 2014 – NM Magazine
By the time I woke, my body temperature had dropped to the point that I was shivering violently. I rolled over into the fetal position and my sleeping bag squished. Someone was calling my name. I could hear rain. Then my little pup tent collapsed around me. Read >>

Slovakia’s Tatras – The Heart of European Wilderness
Month and Year? – Thinking Wilderness
Vlado Vançura, volunteer wilderness ranger and member of the European Wilderness Society (EWS) pointed to lichen hanging from a spruce as evidence that things were indeed getting better. “You would have never seen that in communist days,” he said. Air pollution was such a massive problem before Slovakia joined the European Union that foresters even forgot that lichen on a tree was natural he explained to me. Read >>