On the way to where I took this photo on September 13, 2008, well before the going got rough, he showed me and the others where he’d once dynamited a roadside cliff for gold. You could do that then, before the troubles—buy TNT and blasting caps at the hardware store, go out and seek your fortune. This wasn’t very long ago. What must it have felt like, crashing through the mountains in a beat-up 4WD with a box full of dynamite and a .44 revolver on your hip like he had when he showed us? (We’d be visiting a cave and he had to check for bears and mountain lions.) Damned alive, I say, and happy.
That same day we stopped beside a cliff on a steep rocky mountain, high above an abandoned gold mine where there were giant crystals. We couldn’t get there without ropes and climbing gear, but of course I heard the tale. He’d found one the size of a man and winched it out where we were standing—it took a whole two days! There were also bears. This is not a place you’d want to end up mauled or injured, but he made it out and later sold the crystal for a hefty price. There was more about the cave where the largest crystals were, important business I’ve forgotten about energy and light and pictures in his head, all this at the bottom of a cliff where no one else might ever go.
If I remember, it’s all yours.
John Hamilton Farr lives at 7,000 feet in Ranchos de Taos, New Mexico, U.S.A. As New York Times best-selling author James C. Moore tells it, John is “a man attuned to the world who sees it differently than you and I and writes about it with a language and a vision of life that is impossible to ignore.” This JHFARR.COM site is the master writing archive. To email John, please see CONTACT INFO on .png)
As a former flat lander moved to the mountains, I have to tell you how much I appreciate this picture. It evoked the feeling I had the FIRST time I saw the Rockies(at seemingly the top of the world, in Rocky Mountain National Park). Miles and miles of undulating terrain. I couldn’t live anywhere else, now, without mountains in sight.
That’s pretty much how I feel. I can’t imagine going back. Whenever we drive to Iowa to visit my wife’s sister in Dubuque, we drive north from here to Ft. Garland , over La Veta Pass to Walsenburg, and take Colorado Rt. 10 east before turning north again on Rt. 71, I think, and getting gas in Rocky Ford. After I climb out of the car and start pumping, I look around and think, my God, people, do you know where I’ve just been?
The mountain in the distance looks like Mount Taylor. This is a great shot. I always suspected there were lots of crystals in them there mountains.
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