Hinterlands

Michael Farrell practices the traditional craft of photography using large-format cameras and lenses, developing his own black-and-white negatives and making enlargements in his darkroom. The prints are archivally processed double-weight gelatine silver paper lightly toned in selenium for added permanence, matted and framed using archival materials. He is currently preparing for a major one-person exhibition of landscapes titled “Hinterlands” at the Great Plains Art Museum.

Smiley Canyon Overlook:

It is Friday, May 23, 2008— Memorial Day weekend. I’m sitting in my car, which is packed with photo gear, in a steady drizzle parked at an overlook near Fort Robinson, Neb. My cell phone says “No Service.” I’m writing on scrap paper unearthed in the car. The laptop is back at the Hilltop Motel in Crawford, which has no Internet service let alone wireless connectivity.

I’m out of touch. And that’s a good part of the reason I’m here.

Even though the primary focus of this trip “out west” this weekend is to make photographs and I’m dead in the water waiting for the weather to lift, I’m a happy man. As Dwight Yoakum sings, “I’m a thousand miles from nowhere. Time don’t matter to me. ’Cause I’m a thousand miles from nowhere and there’s no place I wanna be…”

The photographs displayed here are all from places characterized by very low population density, stark but striking landscape, relative inaccessibility and not much conventional or commercial tourism appeal. These are parts of Nebraska, Wyoming and Colorado where you can spend an entire day on backcountry roads or trails and not see another person.

These places, even though they appear rugged or harsh, are also fragile environments that may not survive, as we experience them now, too far into the future. The effects of climate change, the demands for new energy development or other dramatic forces may alter them in major ways, both in terms of their appearances, but also in their ability to sustain diverse communities of plants, animals or people.

Many of the photographs in this collection are from places I’ve visited over and over for many years. Many embody a particular “genius loci,” or spirit of place who has the power to challenge, jolt one out of familiar patterns of thinking, and who can help heal the soul frazzled and frayed by the incessant demands of a frantic media environment in unrelenting fast forward.

I go to these places to stop and take a look. Full stop—long look.

Nebraska

Whenever I head west to photograph I try to stop at Oley’s in Paxton for a buffalo burger and then on to an overnight at Ogallala. The next morning it is up early for the short drive north across Kingsley Dam and on out just past Lewellen to the first right turn that follows the Blue Water upstream into the Sandhills. That’s where the trip really begins.

This first stretch was where the Sioux under Little Thunder were camped in September of 1855 when Gen. Harney’s men fell upon them at first light in retaliation for the Grattan Massacre near Fort Laramie a year before. Crazy Horse was a youngster in one of the villages and witnessed the destruction of many of his people that morning.

The Blue Water flows out of Crescent Lake in the heart of the Sandhills. It’s easy to imagine why a horse-based culture would value this avenue through the dry country. It is a beautiful way to get where I’m going and it usually takes the better part of that first day to get rid of the tensions and start to see anew.

By early afternoon the Pine Ridge is in sight and we’re almost there.

The Oglala National Grasslands in Sioux and Dawes Counties, Neb., is characterized by gumbo roads and two-track trails across the vast prairie, abrupt eroded bluffs and stark sculpted landforms, and the occasional lone cottonwood. And it is mostly dry, too dry for the six or more years I’ve been coming here to photograph—a sensitive landscape perched on the dry divide between the Sandhills and the Black Hills.

In 1877 Crazy Horse and his people passed through here on their way in from the Powder River country to surrender at Fort Robinson. Less than a year later he was dead and one way of life passed with him. A generation later, after many of the early homesteading and ranching families started going belly up in the ’20s and ’30s, the government stepped in and bought them out, converting this area to leased grazing land, managed under the U.S. Forest Service.

This is the far corner of the state, mostly suited to short-grass ranching, although even that can be dodgy. Now a big problem is finding young people willing to live in relative isolation to carry on the ranching way of life into the 21st century now that they’ve experienced the Internet.

In recent years proposals have been put forth to try to increase ecotourism, turn a few cowboys into guides, provide a new source of jobs for the youngsters and increase revenue for ranchers and townsfolk alike. All of this would depend on changing traditional ranching practices to allow species like prairie dogs and bison to share land with range cattle and thereby create a more “eco-friendly” experience for visitors. If you un-build it, they will come…

In the six or so years that I’ve been visiting this area to photograph (usually for a week at a time), I’ve only seen or talked to four local people, a small group of university researchers and one pair of tourists while out on the grasslands. It is rare to see another vehicle, let alone have a conversation.

The locals were a lone grizzled rancher on an ATV who wanted to know if I was lost and a ranch couple who saw me photographing their pond and Angus from the dirt road and wanted to have a look at my camera. The other guy was also a rancher, but works as a contractor to manage the pastureland for the Forest Service. He was fixing a gate I needed to drive through.

The pair of tourists were two guys in their late 40s from Pennsylvania who come out every spring to hunt prairie dogs, both on the grasslands and on private ranch property. As they said, “We get to shoot at deer or elk once or twice in a hunting trip, but here we can shoot at prairie dogs 300 times a day!”

These random encounters say a lot about the isolation of the place and about the way it is perceived both by people who live there and those who might be drawn to visit.

While the ranch folks I met were friendly enough, it is very apparent that the casual tourist is not welcome to wander onto private land—for photos or otherwise. Given well-meaning but cow-ignorant tourists, tricky barbed-wire gates, tight fences and the likelihood of getting the family sedan very stuck in sand or mud, this is totally understandable—but still not very welcoming.

Most of the time I’ve spent there, I’ve been all alone. Typically I get up at dawn and go out with a location in mind for the morning. I find myself thinking about all the great American landscape photographers who went west in the 19th century to bring out photographs of places that later were designated national parks or valued wilderness lands.

My hero is Carleton Watkins who packed a glass-plate camera that made 20 x 22-inch negatives that had to be coated with a liquid collodion/silver nitrate emulsion in the field and then exposed and processed on the spot before drying out! He made some of the first pictures in Yosemite in the 1860s. And his work helped convince Abraham Lincoln to set aside the place in trust for the public, a first step in creating today’s national park system.

I think of my work as a part of that same tradition: taking the time and trouble to get to an area well off the beaten path and to find the iconic images that characterize my visual experience to bring back and share with people who probably won’t go there themselves but whose curiosity or sense of “belonging” may be aroused by seeing the images. And it doesn’t hurt to have a few stories to go with the pictures.

My day usually begins at dawn when the light for landscape is good for a few hours and doesn’t end till an hour or so before sunset. I use lots of maps and usually have a few places in mind as I start the day, but it almost never goes the way I imagine. Wind, clouds, rain, even hail can change what or where to try to photograph. So the day usually is an improvisation with driving, hiking and lunch out of the cooler on the car hood.

Out in this part of Nebraska I’ve been in a severe hailstorm that caused $3,000 in dents to my vehicle, been backed up slowly by an angry bull, came as close as I’d ever want to stepping on a rattler, realized that my adrenal glands work just fine and gotten comfortable with the idea of talking to myself when under extreme stress.

But that’s a big part of why I do this. It sure isn’t because there is any money in it.

I have used four different cameras for this body of work. Most of the images in this collection were done with a Swiss-made Sinar monorail view camera that makes 5 x 7-inch traditional film negatives. The majority of the panoramics were made with a 4 x 5-inch Sinar and a few with the 5 x 7-inch. In the past year I added an 8 x 10-inch back for the bigger Sinar and then I bought a special 8 x 10-inch field camera that can be backpacked to places I can’t carry the very heavy Sinar.

I have a collection of 10 large-format lenses with focal lengths varying between 65 mm to 400 mm. I develop my own film and make my enlargements in a darkroom that I built decades ago. My enlarger only handles negatives up to 5 x 7-inch so recently I bought a scanner and digital printer to make large prints from the 8 x 10-inch negs.

Each of these pictures takes a long time to set up and shoot. The camera has to be assembled on a big tripod. Composition is on a ground glass the same size as the negative where I see the image upside down and reversed left to right. I have to choose a lens, make a composition, decide on filters, take light readings, and then when everything is ready, load the film into the back of the camera, wait for the calm moment or passing cloud so I can trip the shutter for an exposure that lasts anywhere from a quarter of a second to 15 seconds or more. Ten or 15 set ups sunup to sundown is a very productive day.

It is very easy to make mistakes and you don’t get to see the results until the film comes out of the chemistry in the darkroom weeks later. This isn’t instant gratification.

Spend a few days out alone in this landscape and it is easy to come a bit unglued in time. Once when I was photographing an anthill and waiting for the wind to die down, I was pacing around near my camera. I noticed a pile of broken rock and stone. I was on a high point overlooking a valley. Some of the flakes of stone had sharp edges and looked to me to have been worked. (An archaeologist friend later verified this.) It was easy to imagine Paleolithic hunters sitting here waiting for game to come to the stream below— working chunks of stone into points and scrapers.

From where I was standing it was only a couple of miles across the valley to the bluff called Round Top. Below that hill along a creek bottom is Hudson-Meng Bison Kill where ancient people trapped, killed and butchered hundreds of bison as long as 10,000 years ago. Now, very near that same spot, here I was, a middle-aged Irish-American guy with a big camera waiting for the wind so I could take an image of an anthill…

Wyoming — Rocks, sand and canyons

My Wyoming is characterized by the kind of places that must have inspired Hanna-Barbera when they created the background art for “The Flintstones.” Most of my explorations have been in the North Platte Valley and on west up the Sweetwater—the path of the old Oregon Trail (about which I made a PBS documentary that originally aired in 1997). Recently I’ve branched out a bit farther afield looking for similar landscapes.

The North Platte in Wyoming is well suited to big dams and reservoirs. The river has cut deep canyons and gorges along much of its path throughout the southeastern quadrant of the state. And the same geologic uplift and erosive forces have made for interesting formations and natural rock monuments throughout the region.

Beginning in far western Ne­braska with the well-known attractions like Chimney Rock and Courthouse and Jail Rocks and on west into Wyoming past places with names like Devil’s Backbone or The Boar’s Tusk, from well before the time of the fur trappers and overland emigrants who wrote about them, these places have aroused our natural human curiosity and sense of wonder and have made for tall tales, storytelling and myth.

I’m drawn to these monoliths and canyons because they stand in contrast to the landscape that I call home but more so because of the connection they provide to a version of “America” that preexists the name. Here the bones of the continent show through. These are places that have gone by other names, have been seen by peoples whose ways of perceiving the world is vastly different than ours is today. And these rocky places have seen species come and go before there were any conscious beings present to remark on their passing.

Now the area is home to a new wave of energy exploration and exploitation. Natural gas and coal-bed methane extraction are expected to increase in many areas of Wyoming, putting pressure on today’s sensitive habitats and species.

Like the other places depicted in this exhibition, for most of us much of the North Platte drainage in southeastern Wyoming is out of sight and out of mind. Beginning in the late 19th century we’ve altered parts of this landscape to irrigate croplands downstream and to generate electricity. When I first started going there to see the big dams, reservoirs and canyons, I only saw people at the Bureau of Recla­mation campgrounds boating or fishing on the weekends. I could drive my car right up to the dams and have free and solitary reign to photograph.

Today that has changed with increased fear of terrorist attack on major infrastructure sites. Signs warn the public to stay away. I’ve been stopped a few times by armed security guards who appear from nowhere in response to my attempts to photograph. They must have their own cameras and video surveillance devices.

I suppose a guy with a big black box on his back and tube-like device in a bag over his shoulder walking across a dam that holds back a couple of million acre-feet of water could be up to no good.

But I’m actually just a wandering Nebraska photographer interested in the light on these ancient American rocks at this particular time of day, in this mid-summer season of this young and unsettling century.

Colorado — Further upstream

For almost two decades I’ve been drawn to the North Platte River in Wyoming and Colorado. Beginning with a shooting trip in 1990 for my documentary “The Platte River Road” for NET Television and every summer since, I’ve followed the river upstream through western Nebraska into Wyoming, past all the big dams and reservoirs, then south through North Gate Canyon to the mountain-ringed headwaters in North Park, Colo.

North Park is not characteristic of Colorado’s more developed areas. It is a broad valley ringed with mountains. There are only four tiny towns and the countryside is dominated by a large wildlife preserve and cattle ranches surrounded by national or state forestland in the high country.

There in the valley the North Platte is like the frayed end of a rope dividing out into tributary rivers, creeks and streams that originate high up in the Rockies on the Continental Divide in the Park and Rabbit Ears ranges west and south or in the Never Summer and Medicine Bow ranges to the east.

There are a few places in this headwaters region that I’m drawn to over and over, sometimes photographing the same places many times year upon year. Lake Agnes is at the base of the Nokhu Crags in the Never Summers near Cameron Pass in the Colorado State Forest. A relatively short but fairly steep hike brings one to a spectacular mountain lake that never has looked the same to me twice. I try to go up there every year and it’s usually my first stop. Last year we saw a moose cow and her spindly calf just as we got to the trailhead.

I think of Lake Agnes as the origin of the North Platte in a poetic sense even if it isn’t in a strictly geographic definitive sense. I’ve taken most of the people who are important in my life to see this remarkable place, and I never tire of going there.

Once a sudden and powerful gust of wind blew my decades-old favorite wide-brimmed hat into the lake, where it eventually sank. I thought for a minute about trying to jump in after it, but it was blown halfway across the lake before I knew it. The sun was already low and the water was really cold. One dumb move in these environs and a person could regret it. After Lake Agnes claimed that hat, I drove into Walden for gas and a yellow baseball cap. Hubris.

North Park is a valley surrounded by U.S. Forest Service lands. Access is primarily through rough roads cut into the surrounding mountains for logging. And although now logging is not as widely practiced, it is still a big part of the local economy. It is occasionally unsettling to be on a Forest Service road and suddenly see a very large truck full of fresh cut timber hurtling down the mountain toward your much smaller vehicle.

In these same high country places we’ve seen bear, moose, elk, coyotes and, I swear, a wolf just below Rabbit Ears Peak once when we hiked up past the snow-blocked road to the top.

Hunters like this area. Some places are designated official “Wilderness” by dark borders on the maps and accessible only on foot or by horseback. Weekend campers start to fill up the Forest Service campgrounds in the lower elevations late on Fridays and are usually gone by Sunday evening. I try to plan my trips for early in the week but still run into the occasional ATVers or dirt bikers vroom-vrooming up the roads to the open passes.

Still, North Park has an undeveloped quality that stands in high contrast to Steamboat Springs just the other side of Rabbit Ears Pass. There the town is full of high-end shops, ski hotels and condos—just the kind of ersatz culture that homogenizes even “remote” places of harsh and rugged beauty. When I tell people who know Colorado that I spend time in and around North Park, most look puzzled until I tell them that it is the big empty valley on the road to Steamboat. I hope it stays that way for a while longer.

Another place with rugged beauty and a particularly calming effect is Jack Creek in the Routt National Forest near the town of Rand, a small crossroads on the edge of the ranching valley. Jack Creek was a part of a silver mining boom in the 1880s, but when that played out it reverted to wilderness, although with a not-so-well-maintained twisty four-wheel drive Forest Service road that parallels the stream up along the rapids, rock gardens and chutes through a series of jolting switchbacks up to the pass above at 11,000 feet. If the spirits live anywhere in this region, I’d expect to encounter them here along Jack Creek’s narrow runs.

For some reason every time I come here I’m reminded of those who’ve gone before… “But come ye back when summer’s in the meadow / Or when the valley’s hushed and white with snow / Yes, I’ll be here in sunshine or in shadow…”

The water that comes rushing out of the mountains past my lens eventually makes its way down the Platte and into my darkroom. I think of this water as a living thing, one of my female relatives—without whom I would be incomplete.

It is tempting to think of all of these far-off-the-beaten-path places as pristine—as though we are seeing them in some “original” or “untouched” state. We’d like that to be true. Something in us wants to be the first on the scene, to be the explorer.

The qualities that signal timelessness abound in dramatic granite extrusions, deep canyons and gorges, the layers of sedimentary rock tilted skyward, rushing mountain streams, crystalline alpine lakes, pine-covered bluffs, gumbo badlands washouts and rolling grass as far as one can see. Those features will no doubt remain relatively unchanged for some time into the future. But these areas have already seen enormous change on a very large scale in a relatively short period of time.

Cross fencing and windmills changed the grasslands; dams changed the rivers; cattle replaced the bison; railroads, highways and logging roads cut into the desert and mountains.

As our hunger for more and more energy tempts us to develop, drill or mine these areas even further and the unknown future effects of climate change begin to alter the relationships between plants and animals, these photographs may be a record of a relatively brief moment.

Back at the Smiley Canyon Overlook:

Now it is the end of the day. Although the sun broke through in the afternoon, the wind never let up, pounding in from the south at 40 miles an hour. No photographs today—and now the wind has shifted abruptly and another big dark front is racing in from the west.

We’re headed east fast, away from what looks to be major hail, on Sugarloaf Road past several of my favorite places, small spots with no names but totally characteristic of the Oglala National Grasslands, when a group of three antelope doe spook up and start racing the car. They get up to 35 miles per hour and cut across the road in front of us. Up ahead we see the big buck. This is their place. Always has been.

Around the bend is a little seasonal wetland with avocets and yellowlegs wading. I’ve never noticed it wet here before. Maybe it is greener this year?

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