~Art or Not~

~The Spirit Trees Of Forest Highway 99~

I saw these ghost trees all morning long while I rode through the Kern River Valley. From Lake Isabella at a 3,000 foot elevation up to the 9,200 foot Sherman Pass, these specters of past forests haunted me and my ride. There is a hideous beauty here, the McNally Fire of 2002, the largest forest fire in the history of the Sequoia National Forest. It burned for 37 days and decimated over 150,000 acres, created by the careless hand of man!

I almost have a revulsion for photographing the beauty that I find in this vision of Hades revisited. The destruction and the creation, the shapes and the colors, the death and the rebirth, the shadows and the light. Please tell me there is beauty here, not something man can be proud of, but something man can look at and say "Oh my!"

TucsonJim, with a tear in his eye . . . .




(Shot with my Canon G12, not an iPhone as stated below)