backcountry

Thoughts on going into well-worn wilderness.

The backcountry is vast but dense, gnarled and twisted and ingrown and rocky. The deep wood doesn't just gently stay at the same lax elevation gradients, beckoning you along the same sad tired trees as anywhere else you've been staring at the entire time. It is fantastic tableaus set out before you, one after another. All unique in their rugged beauty. You can feel at ease among these things, despite in many ways courting death much closer than you would at any time in your placid and manicured day-to-day lifestyle. In your mind, you may picture the gentle unchanging nature of a city or neighborhood park, yet this is very far from the reality in even the most urban-adjacent of backcountry parks.

Most art gets this terribly wrong. It seems like many artists think of the wild as though it were like your average city park. Very flat, manicured, some layer of leaves on a flat ground and trees flat on a plain. The actual backwood is rarely that, if ever, and no two clearings look alike. Every single area is only itself. You aren't going through endless hallways of flat trees out there. This is difficult to describe in text, but self evident to anyone who has spent time hiking. It is dense. A lot happens over even a quarter mile in the mountains But it's hard to impart this feeling. You can look at hudson valley masterworks and not really get it if you haven't been there yourself, in the thick of it. Moving from one place to the next, as though traveling through these wonderful paintings one after another. The impression you may get from such things is that they are exceptional, but the truth is that if you go looking this is simply what the entire thing is like.

Each place a stage unto itself. None like any other. When you show someone a photo, they may get the impression that you are showing them something particularly standout, a view that took hours to find, a grove unique in its special woodland beauty. But the truth is that every step unfolds an entire new landscape contained in one small place. An un-self-contained, unmaintained beautiful terrarium, one run directly into the next in reams of endless beauty and mystery. If one were to take in each of these in their proper measure as they came across them, they'd never make it more than a half a mile in a day. Whats more than this fractal pattern of nesting terrariums is that you are in the middle of it. Even a 360 video cannot really capture what it's like to be there. (Though I do plan to try out making such a thing someday, hopefully soon.)

A picture holds an expectation within itself. That this flattened sight was somehow standout enough that it was worth capturing in lieu of all other possible sights. While on occasion this holds true, far more often you are presented with an embarrassment of riches. Nature unfolds into pockets of splendor unknown.