Sacred Ground
A little over nineteen miles from my doorstep is the Red Cliffs Recreation Area, a BLM piece of land that hosts early Jurassic dinosaur tracks, remnants from the Anasazi, and a beautiful little box canyon that tempts lesser-aware visitors to swim in her pools. I say that because the small river that's cut this canyon flows through hundreds of acres of largely populated pasture land up Pine Valley mountain before it deposits all kinds of biology in her red basins. You really don't want to swim in it, though that's a secret we like to keep to ourselves. Besides dinosaurs and natives, I have history here, too. It's a sacred place to me, thirty years of memories beginning as a college student, then as a father, now as a companion, and always as a photographer. Thirty years is enough time to watch a massive lightning-struck juniper turn into the elephant tree, to see the thumb of the Okay rock vanish leaving its dangling forefinger, and to witness the gradua...