About this Work:

Snow Canyon is the heart of a small but beautiful State Park located on southwest Utah's edge of the Mojave Desert. Painted with axel grease upon a small alcove or arch of the sandstone canyon is inscribed the pioneer whom this natural canyon fortress is named after—Erastus Snow.

Snow Canyon remains one of those weird geographic anomalies. A multicolor marmalade adventure molded in nature's clever hands of shape, shadow, and time. A rift formed by a narrow dagger incised into the desert cloak of a once desolate southwest. Sliced through red, white, and black textures, each artfully cemented together in course granularity, reads a tale that awakens the mind and fills the soul with gladness. It springs a verity of unpretentious purpose—whittled out with impressionistic carves of genuine tenderness and veracity. A work born deep in a divine artist's ever-practiced precept of empathy and dogged tenacity.

Within its hallows, petrified sand dunes sigh—worn out like globs in a twist of weathered wood, bound with grains etched in parallel lines and scuffed by nails and famishing teeth of rushing waters. Rolled in obstinate winds, then kneaded and rounded by the assiduous hands of a baker—they rise. Cast in burning ovens, sandwiched beneath slabs of a searing magmatic transformation, they eventually slid out upon nature's table of another cloistered display. Children swarm and climb upon these graceful formations—silhouetted against a lonely distance like black carpenter ants, itching out swells into deep burrows.

After this creative work solidified—some frailer glued concretions dissolved into bubbles of randomness, leaving pockets for falcons and hawks to nest while diligently watching across walls of vast hollow canyons. Halls filled with a menagerie of scorpions, coyotes, snakes, lizards, rabbits, mice—and most reclusive—the desert tortoise. Each shape of individual life seeks the patient sands of a selfless home. Some burrow into a night's residue of coolness, while others absorb the remnants of the sun's latent heat.

Red slabs labor on, to sluggishly wear away into time's gritty essence—only to be flushed down expanding drains of a winding desert wash. Between the blanketed layers of worn-out Navaho Sandstone spread rounded ball bearings of dark Moqui Marbles—splayed out in a rub—like black peppercorns covering a freshly thawed pot roast. These wait for their daily turn—to be tossed again into an oven encased in a relentless desert sun. Each day, dissolving one micron of a lick more.

The dustings born in the pulverizing powers of erosion leave its remnants in the lower canyon as dunes with swirling colors like mounded seasonings of cinnamon and paprika. Their dry chromatic hues blend softly into the smudgy blue-grey hazes of sagebrush. Deep sage-like odors rise like gentle smokes into the tilted and falling shadows that collapse behind the unfaltering apex of stone works. Creosote brush blends in with barbarous yucca, adding to the final flairs of this rich and unique desert garnishment.

In another angry era, sunk inside a past unsettled—murky lava and foamy basalt oozed from a nearby volcanic cone. The rubble solidified into darkened columnar slabs. Scattered lumps—frozen in divergent spells shattered over red and white sandstone cliffs. Over time, their edges have crumbled and left their crushed remnants in a decor of wild scree—like blocky chunks of dark chocolate. These accouterments make the bright rock below them stand out in strange resonant contrast. They loudly boast in booming voices of an unwavering magnificence to their final resting place. A sedimentary bed—stacked restless in vibrant folded night sweats then finishing in soft layered linens of time.

Hidden haunts of cool air caves whisper in the canyon winds. The remnants of basalt lava tubes offer a priceless refuge to life from the tireless waves of stone's sunbaked upheaval piled fiercely overhead. Floors troweled in the sharp piquant of bat guano—bid creatures who seek a much-needed respite and repose a cooler hibernaculum inside the deep twisting corridors of fissured rock.

Ephemeral water pockets formed in their eroded-out potholes leave secluded pools upon sandstone. Isolated and all alone, they absorb all they can. Coated in the micro faunas of a stranger mystery in time, they appear to harbor a minute existence. Like Swiss cheese, the captive cavities treasure every inch of precipitation they can store up and then reap—water that oddly clutches myriads of unique aquatic life. With bacteria, they float in a soup of synergy—embedded forever in these "Mesozoic lifeboat niches." I suspect it is stuff carried in from the whispering winds of some other ancient or alien civilization.

Across the lonely voids, rock climbers delicately fasten themselves onto sheer walls of hope—with ropes dangling like a spider's silk between their long skinny legs. Pitched in perfect harmony, they climb as a song upon sharp slabs content in their brushed shades of desert varnish. They move like old peeling paint, curling over faded butterscotch lichens and dark basils of green moss. Showers of sand fall like water as the upper ledges of an arrogant wall transition into the softer remains of gentle earth.

This creation of a solemn canyon forms a joyful story. A romance between unlikely shades and unusual statuaries. Old crusty rock curmudgeons fought for a relevant space, then tickled each other as they were inevitably blended. We witness this beauty of mutation as it laughs out loud. A breathtaking story of a colorful life—adapting and evolving through all their trials and triumphs. This ancient and authentic space of majestic variety and diversity in rock, sand, flora, fauna, texture, and smell electrifies us. So much stuff crammed into a timeless sanctuary of one brief but protective canyon—yet it all seems to join into one unforgettable spectacle. All these works have collectively conspired to form an unrelenting variety that brings distinctive beauty to each other and each thing. And enveloped in this divine endeavor, God skillfully touches and flavors a place that inducts us into its secret realm of peace.

If we—as God's overzealous and busy children could only appreciate such flawless beauty of variety found in all things different—we would understand a similar purpose designed for each of us and all of society. We would indeed become a world that works harder to diligently praise its natural spaces and all its people. A world that does not shrink or fear any essence of gratitude. We can learn a new prayer of thanks for both—the creator and the creation. And in such a transformation, we might inadvertently discover a lost and enduring peace or love within us. One that can sustain and feed us. A wave of peace like the stuff that rests in harmony within this hollowed-out embodiment—the pulsing, enduring, and colorful heart of Snow Canyon.