Heading north from Pinedale with Isabel, we spent a night in the Grand Teton National Park.

For awhile I was riding in back with Isabel, and she poked me in the ribs. Just like old times. When our three kids were little, we sometimes called the back of the car the “pigs’ nest.”

What makes the Grand Tetons so impressive is that as seen from the park and the road they rise straight up from the flat valley carved by the Snake River. More commonly, big mountains have a scrim of foothills covering them.

We crossed paths with two elated men returning from nice three-day hike around one of the Tetons, the Cascade Canyon/Paintbrush Canyon loop, I’d like to do that some day if my legs hold up. But, actually, Isabel, as a native, tends to know of equally interesting but less travelled paths.

A moose was lolling around near one of the paths, and there must have been twenty photographers clustered there, many of them with tripods. The shutterbugs looked tense and disgruntled, maybe because the moose was standing up to strike a grand pose. Or maybe becauase they’d already taken their “big picture” and didn’t know what else do to.

I don’t quite get why someone would use a tripod for landscape photography. If nothing much is moving, you don’t really need to stabilize the camera. Maybe they want to use an extreme telephoto, in which the slightest jitter is going to be amplified. Or possibly they like to use long shutter speeds so as to damp down to tiny apertures and get deep depth of field. Or maybe they’re just gear-fetishists. A tripod really slows you down. I’ve learned to do a kind of Zen-moment shutter-squeeze thing so I can shoot a 1/60 or even 1/30 sec exposure fairly reliably. Also I keep an eye on the ISO setting, and dial that up if I want a faster shutter speed so I can get less tele-jiggle and more depth of field.

We looked in at a little chapel in the park, with a stained glass image of the Sacred Heart. Whose heart is that, exactly? The Virgin Mary’s? No, research shows it Jesus’s. It’s a good icon. When I’m tense and unhappy because I’m being a jerk, my heart feels that way, as if it has barbed wire around it. I try not to go there very often.

A few years ago, I blogged a picture from a chuch in Kecskemet, Hungary, they went one step further with the Sacred Heart image, and showed it with a knife sticking through it. More dramatic.

There was some nice morning light on the wood in the church. But really you’d be more inclined to think of God as being up in the mountains. The Grand Tetons. Which is French for the Big Breasts. Nearby is the Gros Ventre range. The Plump Belly mountains. I’m picturing some very lonely fur trappers…

Sylvia and I spent about a week in Pinedale, Wyoming, with our daughter Isabel . Isabel took us on what I came to call a “death march” every day…meaning that it was more exercise than we’re used to, particularly in the mile-high elevation of Pinedale. But I loved it.

We saw an osprey in his or her nest near Half Moon Lake. The big fish hawk rose up and circled, making skirling chirps.

My favorite hike near Pinedale leads to the so-called “Sacred Rim,” a cliff at an elevation of nearly two miles with a sheer drop of perhaps a mile. Sitting on the edge of the cliff, I began getting some serious worries about being unwillingly sucked down by the great volume of empty space, and I moved back.

Pinedale was having a lot of growth a few years ago, due to the boom in natural gas drilling. That’s died down a bit, leaving, for instance, this blank real-estate developer’s sign. It looks like installation art, an abstract painting.

There’s a guy right outside the city limits who keeps a large number of abandoned vehicles in his yard. I like this one thirties-style car of his.

One day we went canoeing at the deserted Willow Lake near Pinedale, and picnicked on a tiny spit of sand halfway down the lake.

As usual, I was happy to look at the gnarly shapes of roots, water, rocks, clouds, and trees. It opens up my head to be so continuously away from the clamor of civilization.

We got back in the canoe soon after we noticed that there were grizzly-bear footprints on the beach.

Coming into Wyoming, we spotted some UFOs in the sky over the Wind River Mountains.

One of our trip goals was Pinedale, in the northwest corner of the state, where our daughter Isabel lives with her husband.

One of the major landmarks in Pinedale is the giant fish mounted above the local supermarket/variety store.

Isabel has recently opened a physical storefront for her online business, Isabel Jewelry. Dig the special gnarly pine logs that they found for the porch. The place used to be a pub.

She has some cases of jewelry on display, and a work area in back. It was great to see her in her store, with a lot of unique new pieces. One of Isabel’s new rings is hammered to look like a piece of wood.

Isbael’s strange-looking dog Rivers keeps her company at work. It’s possible that he was brought by the UFOs.

The commercial ebook version of The Ware Tetralogy is now available for purchase. This version will soon be for sale on other sites well.

The Prime Books paperback is still available in stores and from online booksellers such as Amazon, Barnes and Noble, Powell’s Books, and others.