Prequel
It was mid-year of 2013. In the past six months, I had lost my job, my health, my beloved Jeep and my sweetheart. I would be eligible for Social Security in one month’s time.
Miss Kitty and I went to my favorite RV Park in the whole world in South Park, where I would do nothing but pan for gold and take pictures while I began healing. One good thing: my eyesight had been restored and I was starting to “learn to see” again — meaning getting back my “photographer’s eye.”
Here’s a nice little fleck I got in my gold pan the day after arriving:
This is far smaller than it looks: on your computer screen, it is several times larger than life size. For comparison, those black pieces are grains of sand. Here’s another shot, from about a week later, with a familiar object for size comparison:
Isn’t this beautiful? My healing had already begun.
For the rest of that month, I did almost nothing else. I only took a few shots, all within a stone’s throw of camp. Here’s one:
I am certain that this pond, which is unnamed in the Real World, is the archetype for “Stark’s Pond” in the South Park TV show.
Here’s another, taken the same day, of some weather moving in:
This is the view from the very north edge of South Park, looking down from Kenosha Pass. It’s your first view of South Park if you’re coming up from Denver.
Note, if you will, the vastness of this place. It’s almost perfectly flat all the way to those distant mountains — and ten thousand feet above sea level. There are visitors who come here and find that they need oxygen!
Nothing grows here except grass: early pioneers learned that you cannot grow crops above approximately 6,500 feet. But grass grows very well. Cattle eat grass. Therefore, South Park is full of cattle. You can see a bunch of them if you click on the photo to zoom it in a little bit.
And here’s a shot of town (Fairplay) that I took from the highway bridge over the Middle Fork.
It’s a little bitty town, but not as small as this photo makes it look. I was mainly trying to capture those awesome mountains behind it, and didn’t get a heck of a lot of the town in the shot. On the left is White Ridge, in the middle is Mt. Sherman which is a Fourteener, and on the right with the little knob on top is Gemini Peak.
I would eventually go up into those mountains and explore them. But for the rest of that month, I was content to sit in the creek and dig for gold.
Pookie was happy. After months of her movements being restricted because of anal-retentive rules at the RV parks we were staying in, she was finally allowed to roam free in this RV park and look for mice in the gaps between the boulders. She was free at last - and with her favorite human in the whole world.
To be continued… for the next five years…
Even though I always do zoom in to your larger photos, I'm glad you suggested to zoom into the shot "Weather moves in to South Park". It IS vast and those cattle look as tiny as the grains of sand inside your gold pan. These stories keep getting better and more interesting as you continue on your journey