Desert Tango

Snow is great if you get to play in it  and then head home to a city where all of your needs are a quick jaunt to the store, like I do. But living in a remote area when a big storm hits can make daily life challenging for some, especially on distant parts of the reservation. The Ramah Navajo reservation has seen it’s share of powder this winter, and the resulting mud from the melting of all that white stuff creates access problems. The chapter house has been delivering loads of supplies of food, water, firewood and hay to residents who either live on inaccessible roads, or are elderly and unable to make the journey into town.

Like many newspaper assignments, this one came down the pipes at the last minute. I believe it said something like “Get a photo of the water tanker at Ramah Market”; not really the most exciting photo idea for an impact story about the area’s recent bout with winter weather. Luckily, some of the information I received was incorrect, which forced me to track down a chapter official who put me into contact with his crew of guys delivering hay. So I ended up spending a couple of hours  delivering hay and mud bogging through remote backcountry on the Ramah Navajo reservation. Kevin Chatto and his crew were working 12-14 hour days, sometimes off the clock, trying to get hay and do welfare checks to old grandma’s,  grandpa’s and families stuck in the mud way out in the middle of nowhere.

It turned out to be a really gratifying assignment, I only wish I had had more time, but the daily newspaper deadline was looming and I had to leave.

This past holiday season, I was hired to photograph a Navajo wedding by some friends of mine. This was the first time I’ve witnessed a traditional wedding. Brian and Dionne Tandy were married right here in Gallup, New Mexico at a relatives house.

What I found interesting was that, while the many of the rituals and ceremonial stuff  were based on Navajo wedding traditions, there were elements of a contemporary wedding as well. This manifested itself to me in the cake cutting. Earlier in the day during the heart of the wedding ceremony, Brian and Dionne had fed each other blue corn mush. Later they cut cut the cake fed it to each other as well.

It was a beautiful, relaxed and open ceremony full of  Navajo traditions I was unfamiliar with, but in the end it sort of amounted to the same thing; two families unified by the act of marriage.

To see a more complete gallery of images, please go to my website.

Like the rest of the country,  western New Mexico has had it’s share of snow this winter. To a Midwesterner like myself, I can’t say that it rivals the amount we would get living along the western coast of Lake Michigan, but it’s no less fun. In fact, it’s more like an invitation to continue to getting out and having fun, even as the biking season winds down. The Zuni Mountains are a fantastic set of mountains to explore, their smooth and rolling nature lends itself to short backcountry excursions with your choice of up and downs along the small ridges,  or just cruising along in the open  meadows.  And when it’s all done, there is nothing better than coming back to the warmth of a friends cabin.

New Mexico Magazine called me a few months back looking for images to illustrate a story about the works of author Tony Hillerman. Much of Hillerman’s detective novels are set in western New Mexico and deal with crime on the Navajo Nation.

While I do not consider myself much of a stock photography shooter, I do maintain a Photoshelter website with images from my outdoor adventures in the Southwest. I happened to have a couple of images that they were interested in, and in the end they picked this one of my friend Nicholle Kovach hiking at Chaco Canyon.

The cool thing about this photo is that it was shot during what was more of a vacation than a photo excursion. While I try to take a camera with me everywhere I go, sometimes it’s nice to not always be in that creative mode of shooting. This image was more of a result of me immersing myself in the beauty of my surroundings than me looking for compelling imagery.

Yikes! It’s been almost a month since I last posted something. No worries, I’ve got a few things in the works in the coming weeks. For now, I wanted to post this photo from the Tour of the White Mountains mountain bike race I shot this fall in Show Low, Ariz.  It ran as a double-truck in Mountain Flyer Magazine this month. I first blogged about this event here, so this is sort of the second half of that post.

The second in a series of posts about a recent trip to Tuba City, Arizona on the Navajo Nation to photograph people affected by the Bennett Freeze. Please go here for more information and to see the first part of this post.