Every year I take a few road trips to eastern Colorado for the big skies, open plains and slow roads. I love shooting farms, grass on the roadsides, wildflowers and I consider myself lucky if I find water towers, trains or old cars. The old farms & dried up towns fascinate me and I never get tired of wandering to these out of the way places to see what there is to see.
This trip I decided to go to Pawnee National Grasslands. I’ve seen it on the map and dreamed about going for years but had never quite made it that direction, even though it’s only 2 hours from Denver. I had such romantic notions of majestic open grasslands for miles. Unspoiled, untouched and pretty much left the way the native Americans would have experienced them.
I was incredibly disappointed to find that these lands have been badly torn up for what I can only surmise is greed. I.nearly turned around to go home. The landscape has small pockets of manmade devastation everywhere. Dozens of gas & oil rigs, and the associated infrastructure, spill across these grasslands like open wounds festering on the land. Whatever protections they may have once had have been seriously degraded. The land is injured in ways that it will likely never recover from.
Needless to say, it was a very disappointing trip in this respect. But in terms of making photographs, I took it as a challenge to try to shoot around the spoilage and create something beautiful anyway. If you stop at just the right place on the hill or crouch down just low enough… you can create photos that don’t resemble reality at all. There were some beautiful things about this area but they were difficult to find. Challenge accepted. You can see my results below.
