Poise Between Something and Nothing (7 Lakes Basin)

Col­ors are like a cal­en­dar; the pas­sage of time is charted by the landscape’s color shifts. Col­ors can also act as an indi­ca­tor of other envi­ron­men­tal changes. Stud­ied over time, they may point to a shift in the times when cer­tain plants sprout and bloom or when the rains begin and end. Col­ors also carry a psy­cho­log­i­cal impact, sub­tly affect­ing our per­sonal rela­tion­ships with place. If the land­scape is manip­u­lated, chang­ing the pro­gres­sion and pat­terns of color, what impact does that have on us?

Most predominant colors in the landscape of the Olympic National Forest’s High Divide Loop (7 Lakes Basin Trail) between September 19 – September 23 arranged vertically by predominance and horizontally by time/location: 5 days, 5 locations, 5 miles apart with a 3050 ft. elevation change.

The title taken From Rebecca Solnit’s collection of essays on landscape, gender and art, As Eve Said to the Serpent. Thoreau’s ideas on walking opened this essay. …’He praises what walking can do for thinking. Walking is nearly alone among all our human activities in its poise between doing something and doing nothing; it is not idleness, and yet as the legs move and the eyes gaze, the mind can roam with a kind of discipline hardly possible in an armchair, As the rhythm of the walk is interrupted by the surprises and irregularities of the landscape, so ideas arise from lengthy concentration interrupted by epiphanies.’