Photo Friday - PhotoTrice

Wilderness

Leaning Rock, Grapevine Hills, Big Bend National Park

People sometimes seek out wilderness for the demands it makes upon them. For the exercise of personal responsibility it requires. Wild undeveloped places allow us to use our evolutionary gifts.

Most of us live in cities where the natural environment is controlled as much as possible. About the only things uncontrolled are weather and geological processes. Wilderness is out of our control. We encounter wild places at our peril.

Quite large areas of the planet remain as wilderness. That does not mean that any part of the world is truly unknown. Satellites measure and catalog the earth in great detail. Still, in spite of our technologies wilderness exists unmodified by humans.

Being in the wild gives me with a feeling of exhilaration. Some of my earliest memories are of times spent in the mountains with my grandfather. He gave me a great gift of respect for the wild world.

Under Leaning Rock, Grapevine Hills, Big Bend National Park

Structural

The practice of civil engineering is fundamental to the success of modern human civilization. We could not dominate our world without roads, bridges, dams and other structures. We seldom think of transportation infrastructure as beautiful or elegant in design.

They Once Walked Here

Big Bend National Park, Texas

The canyon has a wide flat floor with ample evidence of natural violence from flashfloods. In places it is more than a mile wide. Huge boulders cracked and carved by the elements litter the valley floor.

At sunrise and sunset when the light is at a low angle you can see the remains of dozens of fire rings. Each was warm security for humans. Deep stone mortars are evidence of bounty gathered over long occupation of the land.

We can’t know their lives in the distant past. We can know them as we know all people.