Palo Duro Canyon Pt. 1 - Frog and Trails

Explanation

As I'm writing this a couple weeks after these pictures were taken, I just started a new job. Before starting a new job, I like to take time to travel and see the world a bit. Being single, this is almost exclusively done on my own and I find myself deeply at peace with traveling alone nowadays.

For this trip I decided to go out towards Amarillo and see Palo Duro Canyon. You might ask yourself, why drive out 6+ hours to go see some canyon in the Texas Panhandle? For me personally there are a couple of reasons. The first and less personal reason is that Palo Duro Canyon, though a Texas State Park and not a National Park, is actually the second largest canyon in the United States, behind the Grand Canyon. The second reason is that 5 years ago, back in the summer/fall of 2017 I had made plans to see Palo Duro Canyon as part of a significantly longer trip. Unfortunately, it was rainy and I made the decision to skip it and return home instead.

Honestly I'm kind of glad I ended up coming now, which isn't to say that I wouldn't have enjoyed it 5 years ago. But I do think that I am a bit of a different person now and my head was in a very different place then than it is now. That said, should I come back, which I do think I plan on doing sometime in the future, I would make probably a few changes. First off, I'd probably try to skip the weekend. Amarillo, being in the Texas Panhandle is very much in the part of America that is deeply religious and, as a result, most things are closed or only open for very short hours on Sunday. This doesn't necessarily affect the park itself but did make things a bit awkward when I arrived and was deciding what I wanted to do. Another thing, which I always tell myself but never do, is probably to plan a bit more carefully. I tend to be a very impulsive and spontaneous traveler, with very little planned out. This works well when on your own, but also can be very troublesome if things don't pan out one way or another. I'd also probably give myself more time, there's quite a lot to see in and around the area, including Caprock Canyon State Park and Lake Meredith National Recreation Area.

Anyway, these pictures were taken on Sunday afternoon after visiting the visitor center. One thing I've liked doing recently, especially when traveling to state or national parks is to get a little trinket or stuffed animal. This serves a couple purposes. One, in regards to stuffed animals, I don't generally keep them. One of my close friends recently had a baby and it's kind of fun to get a stuffed animal and take pictures of it from "where it's from" before giving it away. Two, I find landscape images difficult and having something to put in the foreground allows me to take pictures with the landscape in the background. The reason why I find landscapes difficult is that it's hard for me to tell a distinct story, many of them blend into telling the same story, of nature and perhaps majesty. Using something in the foreground allows for different stories to be told. Three, I don't like pictures of me, so having a sort of avatar is my way of saying that I was there to some extent without having my picture taken. And four, I find that small objects allow more flexibility in positioning which can be important on narrow trails.

The first three pictures here were taken relatively close together, probably within 40 minutes of each other. They were taken close to the beginning of the Givens, Spicer, Lowry (GSL) trail. While labeled a "difficult" trail, it's honestly not too bad. While there is some minor roughness to the terrain, it's a generally well worn trail that doesn't have too much in the way of elevation difference. Honestly, the difficulty mainly comes from it being a relatively long trail at just over 3 miles one way. At the advice of the worker who rung me up at the visitor center for the small frog sculpture I picked up, I ended up doing the GSL trail which I then turned off to do the Little Fox Canyon Trail before looping into the end of the Lighthouse trail, taking that back.

The last picture was taken on the Little Fox Canyon Trail. There's a small hill you can walk to the top of about halfway down the loop that has a solitary bench on it which is where that picture is taken.

When I mentioned that I like having small trinkets, I think that the second and third pictures are the best examples of that. Being able to balance something between tree branches or on a trail post allows for these kinds of interesting set ups that don't impede deeply on the landscape behind them but instead call your attention, either forward to the frog in the branches or away to the background. I find these pictures interesting because to me they serve very different purposes.

Unlike the pictures I took during SXSW, these pictures mainly use space and focus. The 1st and 3rd pictures call attention to the background by blurring the foreground. The 2nd and 4th do the opposite and call attention forward. As a result the 1st and 3rd feel more like landscapes, calling attention to the nature in the distance while acknowledging the existence of something in the foreground. On the other hand, the 2nd and 4th pictures feel more like portraits. Here is a frog and where it lives. It's quiet, there's solitude, but the focus is that something lives there in that quiet and solitude.

To me the 4th picture in particular also calls back to many other images. It brings up memories of quiet sandy beaches and sunsets, a lone figure lying on the beach, even with neither beaches nor a sunset. When I talk about evocation, I tend to think of other pictures I've seen or collections of images with a similar intent. Even without a person present, this frog sitting peacefully on a bench is every laid back peaceful traveler, trying to escape the bustle of the city or the restlessness of the mind.

While the day was quite cloudy during my hiking, I tried to be quite particular in how I took these pictures. Pretty much all the pictures I took were with quite a narrow aperture, I believe the widest open was maybe, f8 though I believe most were f16 or f22. As a result, the images are mostly clear throughout the entire image. I wasn't really too fussed with the shutter speed and I think most of these were around 1/30 or so. Ultimately the necessity for me was to have a generally sharp image throughout. Having some level of bluriness allows focus to matter, but too much here would obliterate the foreground or background which doesn't help these images at all. That said, it's not like I could have shot at f2.8, the widest open for the lens I was using, as even though it was cloudy, it was too bright to take pictures wide open.

One thing to note here is that this is a different lens than I was using for SXSW. I managed to get a Minolta 28mm f2.8 lens and also another Vivitar 28mm f2.8 which I was keen to try out. All of these pictures taken on the Portra 160 film were taken with the Minolta 28mm. Interestingly though, because of how these pictures turned out I would say that only the 1st and 3rd pictures really take advantage of the distance stretching effect that wide angle lenses bring.

This post has already gotten quite long and I think I'm done talking about the pictures now. But before ending off, I just kind of want to express my attitudes toward solo travel. To me, traveling on my own is both an expression of my personal freedom and independence. But it's also a way for me to communicate and understand the rest of the world and people in it. As much as I want to express my memories to others in the form of photography, I realize that it's a simple thing to say and at times a profoundly difficult thing to do. I find it hard to express the people I meet through photography.

For example, at the end point of the Little Fox Canyon Trail before it turns back around, I met a couple who had sat down for a rest. I talked with them for a couple minutes and learned that the man was from Ann Arbor and went to school in Austin. He also went back to Ann Arbor recently for his step dad's funeral. How do you express that in a picture? Ultimately no single picture can tell that story.

Or as a different example, after I had peeled off the GSL trail to see the end of the Lighthouse trail, I met another solo hiker, Katie. She was from Amarillo and was going back to school. We bonded over a shared hatred of litterers, especially those who litter in our State parks. She was kind enough to drive me back to the GSL trailhead after we finished walking back to the beginning of the Lighthouse trail. At this point, I regret not taking her contact details when she offered them and I also regret not taking her picture. But I also find myself wondering, how do I tell that story in a picture? Honestly, I think the right answer is that I can't but that I should still try to take those pictures.

One downside of film is that it's very restrictive. You only have so many pictures you can take per roll. You can't free up space on an SD card. You can only guess what something will look like. For my camera at least there isn't a live viewfinder. Changing your aperture does nothing in relation to what your image will end up looking like even though aperture can have a profound impact on an image. The film you use can and likely will drastically affect the colors and grain of your images. All that lines up to making me feel a bit hesitant to take pictures. At times, that works to my benefit. It slows my thinking, it makes me refrain from taking too many pictures of the same image. But it also makes it so that I don't take pictures that may be worth taking, not necessarily as "good" images, ones that can tell others stories, but instead pictures purely for me and my memories alone. I think in the future if I travel alongside someone for any extended period of time, I'll try and ask if I can take their picture. I think it's important for me to remember those things, if only for myself.