Nature’s Studio
For most of my life, I’ve been lucky to live within easy driving distance of a bunch of great national parks. Yosemite, Sequoia, Joshua Tree – the names alone flood my mind with memories of towering waterfalls, raging rivers, incredible landscapes, amazing rock formations and campfires that couldn’t quite keep the cold at bay.
In all my visits through the years, I’ve seen these “neighborhood” parks as naturalistic-design laboratories, as settings in which careful observation influences the work, fills the spirit and send watershapers back to the drawing board with all sorts of general ideas that might be of use down the line. Conceptual and visual treats, in other words – the stuff of inspiration.
Last month, my wife and I ranged a bit farther afield than usual, hopping a plane to visit Yellowstone National Park. I have to say that the experience completely altered my sense of what a “naturalistic-design laboratory” might be. In this one park, I saw more formations and water flows and terrains that gave me distinct, actionable ideas and expanded my personal definition of “design inspiration” far beyond what it had previously meant in my other favorite parks.
| Although this area was, like so many in Yellowstone National Park, a bit on the malodorous side, it was utterly amazing to see Travertine in the process of being made, layer upon layer, literally step by step. The mineral-rich water flows at such a trickle and from so many tiny sources that the surfaces seem to be building up right before your eyes. |
Yes, our time at Yellowstone was about big things – grand waterfalls and streams and rivers and cascades and geysers and meadows and landscapes. But where the other great parks have tended to lock that appreciation on the grand/awesome/overwhelming side of the spectrum – think Yosemite’s Half Dome, for example – Yellowstone also pulled me to focus on tiny details, small contrasts, fine textures, nearly imperceptible color gradations – so much so that I couldn’t help feeling sorry for the too-many tourists who seemed to be rushing through the park as though bison were nipping at their heels.
| The outflows from geysers dribble across the terrain in hot little flows that build up and cascade in a variety of fascinating ways. Each little “pool” seen in this photograph wells up and flows down to the next, gradually accreting minerals in ways that reminded me of the traceries of cloisonné work. (For scale, the white rock at lower left is about the size of a small plum.) |
Lingering in Yellowstone with open eyes (and, on occasion, a tightly pinched nose to dodge the thermal vents’ rank, sulfurous exhalations) is, in other words, an incredibly rewarding experience.
To be sure, all wild, natural settings are in a constant state of change; no river, after all, is the same from second to second. But Yellowstone ups the ante: In the weeks leading up to the trip, I kept telling friends that we wanted to see the place before it blew up – a joke that seemed far less amusing while I was in Wyoming perceiving just how active the park is in geological terms. Reading about it as one of the world’s biggest and most threatening volcanoes just isn’t the same as seeing and feeling its actual uneasiness for yourself.
| Yellowstone plays mightily with your sense of edges and how they’re defined by water, color and slope. I can see the image at left as the model for an amazing hand-crafted hot tub, for example, although I’d hope the water could be inauthentically maintained at something less than the boiling point and might be stripped of its sulfurous reek. |
The captions that accompany the unusual number of images I’ve included tell some of the story. For the rest, you need to book your own trip to northwestern Wyoming, soon as you can. It’s not that you need to rush to see it before it explodes and blankets half the continent in volcanic ash: It’s that you want to see it as soon as you can because it will change the way you look at the world around you, immediately and forever.