the light.

 Yesterday, I drove home in the gloom. The gloaming, I guess they sometimes call it.

We're in it now--the late fall, just a month away from the solstice, the light getting dimmer earlier. Leaving work and walking to my car as it gets colder. 

As I drove south on the long road before I turn onto my street, I glanced to the east. I saw light on the Wasatch. I looked west, and saw the sun sinking into the Oquirrhs. East, the high peaks white with snow, white with last light. West, the orange pink coral streaking the clouds. 

I thought, in two minutes, that light on the Wasatch will be gone. I thought, I maybe can grab my camera before it disappears. I raced into the house, threw down my stuff, grabbed my camera.
                                                                                         

By the time I got back outside, the light in the east was gone. But the pink in the west was still tangled in the trees.

Epiphanic.

The tallest peaks in the Teton Range are sometimes called the Cathedral Group. The comments of Fritiof Fryxell, the park's first ranger naturalist, said: ‘More evident here than in many of the great cathedrals of men . . . the gothic note . . . it is seen in the profiles of the countless firs and spruces . . . congregated like worshippers on the lower slopes. It reappears higher in the converging lines of spire rising upon spire . . . it obtains supreme expression in the figures of the peaks themselves . . . that towering above all else, with pointed summits, direct one’s vision and thoughts yet higher.’ 

There are two small chapels in Grand Teton National Park. One, the Chapel of the Transfiguration, frames those peaks, the actual mountains a simulacrum, at a distance, of an altar.

All day today, driving in the golden light, we were transfixed.

self portrait with camera & Tetons.

the duomo of the cathedral.

pattern

Teton glacier

The Cathedral Group itself.

At Jenny Lake.

At Jenny Lake.

It was hard to drive away from them.

cloud & light

cascading away, over Jackson Lake.

Georgic.

Today we drove north. We left an hour later than we'd hoped, which meant that, at the end, we'd be driving up a mountain in the dark.

The high valley between the two towns, the one just over the border and the one fifty miles further, was gold, the grasses drying and the fields stubbling.

We drove toward banks of cloud that darkened and thinned at their edges. Lightning burst over the mountains, lazily, intermittently.

Rain made curtains of mist.

The irrigation, here and there, in full throttle--an end-of-season, inexplicable all-directional spray.


 















Extravagant light tore through sheets of cloud in the west, poured from the sun, its source, as it sank.

Across the valley, the sky was dark, but somehow, even so, lit up. The ends of a rainbow shimmered into view. They rose to form the full bow. The bow doubled.

We traveled with the rainbow to the east of us for it must have been twenty miles. For those twenty miles and more, I was an ecstatic.

Looking into--for--light.

[click on images to enlarge]