Crazy Horse

When we visited the far-from-ever-being-completed memorial to Crazy Horse in South Dakota’s Black Hills on June 2nd, the dramatic clouds caught my attention as much as anything else, and probably even more. The “opening quotation mark” above the blue hole in the clouds is curious, isn’t it?

© 2017 Steven Schwartzman

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The colorful Badlands

Okay, so I’ve been holding out on you when it comes to the best color I saw in the Badlands of South Dakota on May 31st.

Well-travelled Austin photographer Rick Capozza explained the colors to me: “White layers are volcanic ash or tuff as they call it in Big Bend. Tan and gray are sand and gravel. Red and orange are iron oxide deposits, primarily ferric oxide. Purple shale colors represent manganese deposits and yellow layers are ferrous sulfate.”

© 2017 Steven Schwartzman

Two henges

I didn’t see it then and there, which was June 2nd in Custer State Park in South Dakota’s Black Hills. Now, back in Austin almost two months later, this ring of trees near boulders strikes me as Pinehenge. And maybe I’m a bit unhinged, but when it comes to the more contrasty view below from Mt. Rushmore three days earlier that also included pine trees and boulders, I’m inclined to call it Shadowscragglehenge.

Now surely, I thought to myself, that’s a unique name. And guess what? Google the Omniscient agrees:

Your search – Shadowscragglehenge – did not match any documents.

Suggestions:

Make sure all words are spelled correctly.

Try different keywords.

Try more general keywords.

Hooray for uniquity!

© 2017 Steven Schwartzman

Spearfish Canyon

Heading back to Rapid City from Devil’s Tower on the afternoon of June 1st, we turned off Interstate 90 and followed the Spearfish Canyon Scenic Byway into the Black Hills. How about those clouds above the cliffs? And how about Bridal Veil Falls along the same route?

© 2017 Steven Schwartzman

More from the Badlands

You didn’t think I’d go to South Dakota’s Badlands, spend seven hours there on May 31st, and dedicate only one post to it, did you? Of course not.

© 2017 Steven Schwartzman

More resemblances from Mt. Rushmore

In a post a couple of weeks ago you saw the naturally sculpted remains of a tree that had resonances of the carved rocks at Mt. Rushmore. Elsewhere at the national monument the resemblance went the other way. As I see it, this photograph of rocks could be a close-up of a tree trunk:

In the pareidolia department, does this other formation seem to any of you, as it does to me, like the blunted image of a face?

And in the back-to-reality department, notice the two sapling pine trees growing out of the rocks, one on each side of the “head” (the sapling on the right is hard to see at this size).

© 2017 Steven Schwartzman

A closer look at a Rocky Mountain iris

In the last post you saw a large colony of Rocky Mountain irises (Iris missouriensis) in northern New Mexico. The first time I encountered the species was on June 30th, when I found a smaller and less dense group of these irises in the Black Hills of South Dakota. The one shown here was in the process of opening.

© 2017 Steven Schwartzman