It's better than mistaking a Moose for a Poodle....

In Maine a woman mistakes a Bobcat for a housecat.

TSRA Calendar: 2014.

K22 and K38 Smith & Wessons.

  Jackson and I shot the calendar today.  I worked at the studio and brought guns in from Coyote Sam's Bar and Grill.  Plus a few others.

  Long day shooting but was certainly easier in the studio than on location.  Mostly new backgrounds.  I think we shot 12 to go with the three or four I already had.  Did two backgrounds, a Shiprock chiseled stone from the ruin of a house and the star in a blue field off an old American Flag.  Ready to go in the morning.

Nikon 300 and RAW files.

Glad to have it done.  In the studio I could set up a couple of photos, shoot one, go to the next and come back and correct the previous before tearing it down.  Always nice to have a little time to reflect.

Ought to make a wonderful calendar for 2013 and be a valuable fundraiser for the TSRA.

Shot this with a couple of backgrounds.  Worked tabletops mostly but did go into horizontal for a few.

Softboxes.  Reflectors.  Tape and clamps.  Shot wide and telephoto.  I've got a bunch of old cameras in the studio currently so we worked a few of them into shots.

  Ebay-bound Canon rangefinder, my Sig 220, concertina gloves from the army, HXP 30-06 crate from the CMP.  

  Didn't have the Good Doctor Sneed this year due to scheduling, but I used his rifle rack several times.

4th of July Open Carry March.

  A couple weeks back at the Tyler Harvey Hall Gunshow a guy was outside by the line handing out little paper announcements of an open carry march on Independence Day.  Sounded nuts.  Folks were to gather at City Hall and walk to Bergfeld Park carrying, (as is legal in Texas), rifles or shotguns.  I'd always thought this was  the proper way to spend the 4th but considered it as likely as a rain of golden meteorites.  Less than 20 people would show up.  Half of them would be from LEO agencies.  All you would accomplish is getting on everything from the Fusion Center Terrorist alert computer to the TSA no-fly list.  Then if your face was on TV you would get marginalized, blacklisted as a troublemaker and then fired from whatever job you had managed to hang on to in Obama's America.  When it came down to a choice between slavery and rebellion, most everyone pretty OK with slavery.  Why be a target?

  Beyond that, as the date got closer, I couldn't find a news story or a facebook page or any other mention of the event.  

  Still, I'd always thought of walking with a rifle in a march on the 4th to be...well, a red-blooded American thing to do.  And I hardly have a job anyway.

  So I sorted through my gun rack and finally settled on a rifle, dropped in an old chamber block, grabbed a water bottle and had Jackson run me down to City Hall.  I might be walking by myself, but I was resigned to walking.  If anyone showed up they were likely to be nutcases, not competitive shooters.  Anyone half lucid would no doubt be an FBI plant who wanted to get a drink after it was over and speculate on bombing some public building and would know a guy, you know?

  So imagine my surprise when we pulled up and actually saw a crowd building.  Boys and girls.  Kids.  Folks in wheelchairs.  Decent looking folks.  Flags.  Pellet rifles and scoped Remingtons.

  So away we walked.  

Safety briefing by sensible guys and a few simple instructions.

Crossing Bonner Street headed to downtown.

KETK Info-babe interviewing.

Coming off the square after a couple of go-rounds.  The Farmers Market folks were a little surprised to be surrounded by the hardware enhanced marchers!

Walking and rolling for Civil Rights.

South off the square on Broadway.

Hot date.

Hand-made sign.  The real thing, not printed propaganda.

Diversity: Rifle and Shotgun people getting along.  Any movement that has good looking women and kids along is on the way up.

The head agitators.

Under the shade trees at City Hall after the march.

Politician from out of town on the stump.

Young Civil Rights activist.

Not one of our local elected folks showed their face.  I'm sure they secretly support the Bill of Rights. Probably.  Somewhere they were no doubt making a patriotic speech!

Austin Reeve Jackson running for Smith County DA.  I'd be for that.

Harder to pick a rifle than one might think.  The Garand?  The other Garand?  The other, other Garand?  The M1 Carbine?  How about a 1903 Springfield?  Or Justin Burn's scoped 1903 Springfield.  Or just a plain old Rem 700 sighted in at 300 yards?  Or my Swiss K31 with its four Texas Championships plus the National Vintage Rifle Championship?  10/22?  Ruger #1?  Swedish Mauser?  Krag?  Arisaka?  Argentine Mauser?  German K98?  Finally made a choice: my little wood-stocked AR carbine.  That's Rick Crawford's old Chamber Block in the mag well.  My cute little Civil Rights rifle.  It marched.  How about yours?

Took about 45 minutes to make the circuit.  We went around the square a few times.  No counter-demonstrators.  The police were friendly and helpful and actually blocked intersections and watched out for us.  I'm sure they downloaded the NSA cell phone data and looked at my photos before I did but that's the way Obama's America runs these days.  The count was 192 folks.  That beats the outside agitated 99% march a couple years back.  We didn't have to bleat a slogan, just walk and talk with each other.

  And now I'm a Civil Rights marcher!  Next year I'm going to borrow a flintlock from Sam and lug it around.  Or maybe I will go Garand.

  No loud BOOMS.  (That would have wrecked the narrative of our event and been on every TV station.)  Good job of everyone being safe!

  So maybe....like Dr King...we could have a dream of about 1000 folks next year......



Update:  Wonder what a Freedom of Information request might reveal about how much surveilance we were under?

Shiprock Stills Video, June 2013.

Second video featuring stills and some short video clips.  There isn't a third video....two is enough.

Shiprock Videos.

  Due to the scenic tour and work after I got back it's put a little sidestep in the schedule.  Here's a little set of video clips showing locations and scenery around the rock during my trip.  It's not a teaching thing, though there always are lessons to be learned,( especially by me.)

  What a summer.

Side-tripping to the hospital

  A long week at Shiprock, then a following week of steady work at the lab processing film and then proofing the negatives.  This last Monday morning I just couldn't seem to get up and get going.  I didn't have a schedule so I hit the computer, went back to bed, tried to sleep in a bit, read, but nothing seemed to fit.  Just couldn't get comfortable.  My energy wouldn't kick in.

  Katie got up and headed for her pilates studio.  By 10 I'd noticed that I didn't seem to have any arm strength or any grip strength in either hand.  I had it, but resting, it was hard to believe I had it.  Plus I had a subtle ache in the top of my chest.  Katie came back in and read the symptoms into the computer which said "head for the ER.  I already had Jackson on standby for the same destination so he came and got me and away we went to Mother Frances.  The ER doc didn't like the EKG so they ran a heart enzyme test.  Looks like I had an event.  Tuesday morning I went through the cardiac catherization lab and Dr. Kumar put a stent in to open up an artery with over 90% blockage.  It was in an easy place.

  Out yesterday to get home and sleep in my own bed.  Amazing medicine and really great care from the folks at TMFHS.  I'm beyond grateful.  The follow-up will be finding the right meds to tolerate the stent and drop cholesterol and triglycerides.

  This will no doubt shake up my summer schedule but...so what?  I'm alive and healing.  Thanks to everyone for your care and concern.  Thank God for family and friends....and hotshot cardiologists with the latest technology.

Shiprock shadow, East side.

Update:  This morning I realized I felt back to normal, energy-wise and otherwise.  I'm sure it's not completely true- and I'm not going to push it, but that's a nice sensation to have!

The Bone Shrine

  Years ago.  No, DECADES ago.  Last century.   A Navajo man told me about a place where bones littered a ledge up on Shiprock.  You could walk there.  Eagles nested overhead.  I was a child and had hardly any concept of how to get around on the rock, which places would go and which wouldn't, and didn't have the map of experience in my head.  On top of that, though I didn't realize it at the time, the Navajo are notoriously vague direction-givers and as a practice never use any term for distance, time, compass points or left and right.

  Here's typical Navajo instructions, as given to me last week about finding my way to a point by a professional fire watcher who knows azimuth, grids, USGS mapping, GPS points, et:

  "Go down there, behind little hill.  Along behind ridge.  Go along there for a while past where man used to have corral, maybe little bit more.  Bad spot in road maybe.  Then watch over that way, up a little more and into tree.  Road go along there and maybe join up.  Might be open spot past that side."

  Or maybe not.  At any rate, I kept an eye out for the bone-littered ledge for this century and a good chunk of the last.  Just by elimination I had narrowed what I began to call the Bone Shire down to a certain area.  I'd been everywhere else.

  Last Thursday, after some fits and starts I stepped off a little before sunup with camera, tripod and plenty of water to go up behind the White Tower on the North East corner.  Aerials showed a big cleft behind it.  On this side, the Climbers Cave and a very comfortable ledge where I had slept many nights.  There's no close way to get there though I had walked below it circumnavigating Shiprock a couple of times.

  It's a sporty walk.  Bouldering.  Scree climbing.  Trail and route finding.  All at 7000 feet.  I made pretty good careful time as the light broke and went past the point where I had ever been and hugged the base of the tower curving up and right.

  One of the first features I saw was a detached slab sitting on the trail.  This is unusual for Shiprock.  It's the only one I know of, though who knows what rock climbers find above.  I walked past it and made a note to shoot it when I came back.  I was trying to get to my far point as quick as I could and then work in reverse toward the car.

  Just a little bit past I saw a big ledge overhead and scrambled around up on it.  Before I even shed my tripod and pack I saw a small set of articulated vertebra, probably jackrabbit, just under the overhang.  The closer I walked the more bones there were.  Back in the shadows under a vertical cleft there were so many bones in the dust that you could scoop them up by the double handful.

  The bones rattle down a long vertical crack system from a traditional Golden Eagle nesting site somewhere overhead.  I've seen the Eagles coming and going from this corner, seen their chick sitting on the peak and heard them above for years.  A few days previously they were in the air in this area.

  Very satisfying to sit back with a stripped jackrabbit femur in your hand and have the pieces all come together.

The Danes

What a wonderful thing.

Shiprock, 2013.

I hadn't been there this year in reality, though I go there often in my imagination.  A solo trip.  Through the portals and procedures of the air with a packed crowd and then out on the highway in a vehicle who was a stranger, up through the concrete and wind until finally I was alone in that very raw and familiar place.  Seven nights in the desert.  Days alone among the ravens and rattling poltergeists. I shot all my film but two sheets.

Texas Service Rifle Championship, Bayou Rifles Range, Houston.

  By all accounts a great weekend and a very well-run match near Pearland.  Keith Stephens won the Service rifle Championship with a 776X24.  Nearly 100 folks shot.  The club had the range in terrific shape.

  On Sunday the LEG match had 63 non-distinguished folks firing in hot and windy conditions.  Buddy Reich finished his Distinguished Rifleman's badge and several other folks got closer.  Great matches all around.

It's all fun and games....

...until the bear eats the monkey.

Tough Rock Climbing. Aux! Bees!

Guess they need to add hornet spray to belt.  It's happened before here and there.  Never thought about it.