Review by Ed Quillen
Wilderness – June 1997 – Colorado Central Magazine
Sangre de Cristo Wilderness – A Territory of the Heart
Photos by Bob Thomason
Text by Mary Jean Porter
Published in 1997 by Music Mountain Press, Westcliffe
ISBN 096561266-X
When I’m in a name-dropping mood, I can say I know somebody who “made the cover of Time.” That person is not a celebrity, but photographer Bob Thomason of Westcliffe, whose work graced the “Boom Times in the Rockies” cover of Time four years ago.
Bob’s mountain photos are, well, exquisite. He can capture the panoramas when the light is just right, a process that requires far more patience than most of us possess. He’s also got an excellent eye for detail — the texture of bare rock, the delicate petals of a wildflower, the gnarled grain of an ancient bristlecone pine.
That talented eye is present throughout Sangre de Cristo Wilderness, which is primarily a collection of his photos.
Sometimes the colors seem more exuberant than certain scenes as I remember them from my visits to the Sangres, but then again, there are those magic moments when the light works perfectly, and he was there with the camera.
Mary Jean Porter’s text, which includes a few poems, explains how the Sangres were finally declared an official wilderness in 1993, provides some natural history, and muses about why modern people seem attracted to wilderness. The musing is partly a colloquy; among the participants is Colorado Central columnist Hal Walter.
Her prose struck one strong chord with me: “To a girl growing up on the flat, hot Southern Colorado prairie, the Sangre de Cristos were an exotic paradise — a cool blue dream of wildflowers and dancing water and shy fawns.” When I was a boy growing up on the plains of northern Colorado, I felt exactly the same way about the mountains to the west.
Books like this, a celebration of a protected place, raise questions that no one can answer, though. By writing about, or photographing, a place, do you encourage more people to visit it, thereby diminishing it?
Porter grapples with it: “It would be a cruel irony if, in seeking to preserve what is best about the mountains, we have drawn attention to them that will eventually lead to their ruin.”
Other outdoor writers argue that increased visitation means more people appreciate the place, producing a greater political constituency for preservation.
I put the question to John Nichols once at the Rocky Mountain Book Fair, and he replied, in essence, that it’s a writer’s job to write about what he deems worthwhile or interesting, not to worry about the consequences.
And then there’s the question of mountain photography — sometimes it reminds me of Playboy. Real women have moles, ripples, and sags — but not the Playmate of the Month. Real mountains have road scars, power line rights of way, heaps of talus, and fields of sparse, grayish-brown tundra — but not the mountains of scenic calendars. In pictures, the grass is greener, the skies are bluer, and the autumn foliage glows far more colorfully than it ever seems to outdoors.
Granted, mountains in protected wilderness aren’t usually marred by tailings piles and electric lines, or they wouldn’t be in official wilderness zones. But still, I have to wonder about what sort of expectations people might develop after gazing at such exquisite photographs.
Back to the book. You can’t bring the Sangres into your home, but you can keep this around and discover scores of pictures that show you something new every time you look at them. That’s good art, no matter whether it was produced with a brush and pigment on canvas, or by photochemical responses of silver halides.
–Ed Quillen
