Hiking in the desert of Big Bend National Park most often means boots crunching on hard pack white and crumbling with alkaline deposits. You look down and see your feet leaving footprints on bare earth, dust sprinkled on the rocks. But if rains have been good, come early spring, you can hike that same stretch of hard pack and never see your feet for the thick carpet of wildflowers that seem to have sprouted and blossomed overnight.

Foremost among these blooms are Big Bend bluebonnets, a species of the beloved Texas flower that remarkably can grow up to five feet tall out of land that only a few weeks earlier, you'd swear it was paved in concrete.

The volcanic rock cliffs towering over this flowering mesa are equally dramatic, though, with deeply shadowed crevasses and pocked palisades catching sunlight irregularly. I love those cliffs, and have scrambled up and down many of them in my time.

In painting this, I made the story the cliffs' to tell, with the rocks' angular patterns of darkness pointing down to the profusion of color below. After all, even the tallest bluebonnet will wilt and dry and disappear, leaving no trace of its former glory. But those rocks? Those will be there, no matter when I next return.