Southern escarpment

Animals:
Darkling beetle (Gonopus tibialis)
Sparrows
Cows (in the form of cow pies) (Bos primigenius)
Gnats (Culex pipiens)
Ants (Formicidae)
Deer (Cervidae)
Coyote (scat) (Canis latrans)

In this area we also identified several patterns in the nature around us, including concentric, spiral, parallel, tessellate, and scatter patterns.

At the southern escarpment, it was windy and slightly rainy, which created the sound of rattlesnakes rustling in the grasses. There were some light clouds but mostly dark grey ones covered the sky. A rainbow appeared towards the north midway through the day. There were plentiful gnats and bees at lower elevations and between bluffs, but once we were on top of the bluffs they disappeared. There are signs of trauma in burned wood on the ground.

Sunlight.  There is sun here.  I descend to the largest rock, giant and glowing in it.  Rocks of all sizes, twisting squares in layers neither random nor predictable, accrete protectively around this small home, bringing water here, ringing this curious sky.  I leave my rock to look under one of the larger bushes, finding some small seeds among the roots, blown here by the wind.  I smell the place where there is water.  I scurry up to the edge of this place in the mornings, watching others come and go, scattering their cans and poison and taking their fish and thoughts.  At night I curl into my safe, warm place in the dark rock, nestle my nose into my breastfur, and dream.

We have explored this place.  In the morning we set out on a long walk, snaking over bluffs and valleys, allowing our landscapes of thought and place to merge. Passing over, under, and through a barbed wire fence we wander up a grassy ravine toward a cliff. Droplets fall on our dirty heads and birds cry.

We take refuge from the storm under an outcropping, allowing ourselves to fall deeper into the trance. As the space between droplets increases we venture from the cave opening, pulled by the landscape up the cliff, over ridges and along the curving swales and ripples of the land. We come together quietly in an open circle of pebbles, taking our places to listen, beginning to feel our surroundings as we unclench our thinking minds and allow our senses to guide our perceptions.

Everything is round, flowing channels twisting and circulating, expanding and contracting.  It is easy to see the movement of water here. The rock escarpments break in tessellations, spreading and scattering. Sagebrush, grasses, bushes at edges of elevations, reeds and forbs in the potholes.

Everything grows in rings and patches.  We sit in a similar manner and are here.

Grasses in the wind

Land. It has seen 10,000 years of our past and has lived through more than we can know completely. Each rock tells its own story, carved with patterns of geologic lineage. In the valley below, boulders open to a barren, white circle. It is the residue of Green Lake, which has all but dried. Another ring of wet, this one nearly filled with cattails and tall grass: red alkali lake.

We set out in a circuitous path, a large group from the camp with our reality bunched up around us and slowly, as we walk over the land, through the air and plants, the bunches divide like cells and we begin to feel the place. To feel the desolation, to hear the solitary bee hum by. Rocks, grasses, dry flowers, knobby worried foreheads of giant stones buried in the soil. As we walk into the remains of green lake, cracked, alkali crusted earth swallows our boots and the fecund, complex scent of mud fills our senses. We sink in the mud, or try to balance on top of it, and it ripples beneath our weight: we feel the place.

Finding our own patterns in this place, we spread out. Some of us follow a path, some circle into a point, some scatter. We all find a place. We sit in a cave, high above the arid ground, perched like the golden eagle that peers down at us. Alkali lake is below, newly furnished with our footprints. Positive energy surrounds and fills us as we gaze out on the canyon below. Turning and looking into the cave, it is quite shallow, about 4 feet across. There is evidence of life here, and we too feel our place.

We explore the patterns further, encountering rocks, plants, tracks in the soil, growth spiraling into the center of red alkali lake. Inside the thicket, reeds fall on one another, following the evaporation rings of the lake, becoming thicker and thicker until they form an upside-down, giant woven basket. Clambering onto the basket, gently at first in a wobbly unsteadiness, we look to see the protective semicircle of the giant inner channel cataract.  Becoming quadruped, seeing the water circle to the center, we feel in place.

As we come back together and sit, the cells of our knowledge regroup, forming an organism of being: a living system of knowledge.

Orange, green, white crustose lichens

Basalt loose rocks and cliffs

Sagebrush (Artemisia tridentata)

Cheat grass (Bromus tectorum)

Cattails

Nettles

Wild Roses

Saddle fungus

Rotting Elf fungus

Algae

Animals:

Gnats

Bees

Wasps

Gardner snake

Bull snake
Rattlesnake skin

Hobo spider

Golden Eagle (Aguila chrysaetos)

Crow (Corvus brachyrhynchos)

Red Alkali Lake Map