A Visual Chronicle of 2022
I ended up working on some interesting stories this past year: a historic fire, local controversies involving mail delivery and abortiion access, and political stories with statewide interest to name but a few. I even squeezed in an out-of-state photographic adventure.
That said, here are some of my favorite images from 2022.
January: The Marshall Fire Aftermath
The most destructive wildfire in Colorado history tore through Boulder County on Dec. 30, 2021. The Marshall Fire raced through the town of Superior and Louisville that day, driven by winds in excess of 100 m.p.h. In less than 24 hours, the 6,000-acre fire destroyed over 1,000 homes in mostly densely constructed neighborhoods. The Boulder County Office of Disaster Management’s assessement of the blaze estimated the Marshall Fire resulted in over $500,000,000 in losses. A year later, the cause of the fire has yet to be be determined.
February: Marley Reappears on the Pueblo Levee
About three years ago a reconfiguration of the Arkansas River levee in Pueblo essentially wiped away three miles of public art. For nearly 40 years, artists had painted murals along the levee, drawning the attention of the Guiness Book of World Records, who declared it was “the longest painting in the world.”
In 2020, through the efforts of the Pueblo Levee River Project, muralists armed with their buckets of paint and rapelling ropes, began reappearing on the levee. By the end of 2022, over 30 murals adorned the reconstructed levee. Artist Robert Hall was one of the mural artists that have left their mark on the revamped levee. His punchy portrait of musician Bob Marley, completed in February is one of the more distinctive pieces on the levee. It also pays homage to the Marley mural that was part of the original series of levee murals that first began appearing during the 1970s.
March: Utah’s Austere Landscapes
In March I spent a week driving around southeastern Utah, documenting its austere landscapes. I concentrated mostly on BLM lands, but did spend a day driving the Cathedral Valley loop in Capitol Reef National Park. All in all, I drove 1,400 miles, spent my nights camped out in the back of my truck, and only got lost once. Highlights of the trip include The Valley of the Gods, Castle Valley, and all things Hanksville. Utah’s stark panoramas aren’t everyone’s cup of tea, but I’d go back and do it all again—in a heartbeat.
April: May Ranch Wildfire
The May Cattle Ranch near Lamar isn’t your typical cattle operation. They raise their cattle under strict conservation guidelines that promote a harmonious relationship wildlife habitat. It’s a rare animal. I shot photos for The Colorado Sun for a story on the ranch and its unique practices in 2021.
On April 22, high winds sparked a 9,000-acre wildfire that scorched the ranch stem to stern, seemingly destroying the pasture land and wildlife habitat rancher Dallas May and his family had worked so hard to build. “What the family fears now,” Colorado Sun reporter Michael Booth wrote, “is a one-day reversal of years long transformation.”
I went back out to the May ranch four days after the fire for The Colorado Sun. I ended up shooting photos and video of the aftermath as well as recording audio of Dallas’ brother Bon May’s account of events the day of the fire. The uncertainty the May family was facing in the days after the fire was palpable.
You can read the full May Ranch Fire story by The Colorado Sun’s Michael Booth here: Fire tore through a Colorado ranch sanctuary. The humans are fine, but the damage is deep.
May: Howdy, Pard
I like this picture of Dave Wade for a couple reasons. His is a great face, weathered and not quite symmetrical. Sporting a 10-gallon hat and neckerchief, he appears to have stepped out of central casting for some Hollywood western. But Wade was just taking part in Pueblo’s Chuck Wagon Rendezvous in May, an event celebrating the inventor of the chuck wagon, Charles Goodnight. I was covering the event for The Colorado Sun.
I also like the picture because it was made with a piece of glass I’ve been lugging around for nearly 30 years, since my days in Coos Bay: a Tokina AT-X 300mm f/2.8 lens. There’s some fringing, but it’s still pretty damn sharp.
June: Sand Green Golf
I never turn down a chance to work with Colorado Sun writer Kevin Simpson. He’s a pro. It’s like taking a master class in journalism and getting paid for it. When he called in June about teaming up on story about golf on the Colorado’s eastern plains amid drought conditions, I said, “certainly.”
One facet of Kevin’s story would be a visit to the Hugo (Colo.) Golf Club and its sand green golf course. I’d never heard of such a thing, but apparently they’re plentiful in locales where water isn’t. Golfers in Hugo long ago opted to embrace its arid prairie condition instead of pumping hundreds of thousands of gallons of water in hopes of maintaining a grass-green course. Its sand greens are just that; where on a conventional golf course one putts from smoothly manicured grass surrounding a given hole, at the Hugo course, it’s sand that surrounds the hole.
Sand green rules are a bit more forgiving than standard golf rules, too. Whereas a golfer can’t remove sand from a traditional green, on a sand green “the putting surface may be smoothed or scraped prior to all shots made form the putting surface or from within 10 feet of the edge of the putting surface.” Go figure.
July: A Fiery Fourth
I’d done some preflight planning for my Fourth of July Fireworks drone flight. I would launch from a vacant lot free of power lines along Corona Ave. Then paralleling Main Street, I’d fly down to the Pueblo Riverwalk. Strobes would make visual-line-of-sight rules a snap. The fireworks show would last maybe 15 minutes, making this a one-battery affair. As long as the weather held, I was set.
Then the Eisenhower axiom of ‘plans being worthless, but planning is everything’ kicked in. Seems most of Pueblo’s south side had the audacity to set up their lawn chairs to view the fireworks from my vacant lot spot. After making a couple minor tweaks to my preflight plan, I was on my way.
August: May Ranch Renaissance
In August, the Colorado Sun’s Michael Booth asked if I wanted to head back out to the May Ranch to shoot the photos for the follow-up he’d be writing about the 9,000-acre fire that scorched the Lamar ranch that he and I reported on earlier in the year. I told him yes, I’d like to be a part of that. While making the two-hour drive through the Arkansas Valley to the May ranch, it became more and more evident that this story—at least this chapter of the story—was going to have a nice ending. Two weeks of monsoon rains had transformed the prairie from an aird plain to a verdant expanse. It was an amazing, 180-degree change.
Booth’s prose summing up the metamorphosis nails it:
But for all the disappointment and disaster that weather has delivered to Colorado in recent years, the gods appear to be making amends where County Road LL dives under Big Sandy Creek.
Thick, emerald green grass stretches from the creek to the horizon, a table of green felt pinned down by blackened willow stumps.
Dragonflies crowd the airspace over the creek, executing their lateral dashes in a rewarding search for an in-flight meal.
A healthy bloom of algae floats under masses of fresh bullrushes, the fluorescent green that would be unnatural it were Kool-Aid appearing vital as the accent color to recovering beaver ponds.
Dallas May spreads his broad shoulders as wide as his grin.
“It’s all back,” he beams.
You can read Michael Booth’s account of the stunning May Ranch summer renaissance here.
Mail Call
Mail delivery is something most of us take for granted. But that wasn’t the case in Colorado City (pop. 2,500) over the summer. A local bakery that had contracted with the U.S. Postal Service to be a Post Office hub terminated their contract, citing a lack of USPS support. Residents then had to make the 30 mile drive up to Pueblo to pick up their mail. The Colorado City postal snafu was part of a national trend involving rural postal delivery stoppages. The Post Office finally resumed Colorado City mail delivery in late September.
September: Mascot Sale
A 2022 Colorado law went into effect banning its public schools from using Native American imagery and iconography as part of their school mascots. Schools failing to do so would face fines of $25,000 a month until they complied. One of those schools was Lamar High School, home of the Savages. After some initial push back from residents, the local school board capitulated in June and The Lamar Savages became The Lamar Thunder, and its mascot, a stampeding buffalo.
The school held a sale of sports equipment and memorabilia featuring the Savage name and mascot in September to help offset the cost of the name change. It raised just over $14,000.
Gubernatorial Debate
Pueblo was host to the first of three Colorado gubernatorial debates this election cycle. Jared Polis, the incumbent, was in the Blue Corner, and in the Red Corner was challenger Heidi Ganahl. Both candidates gave as good as they got, trading shots about fentanyl deaths and election denial. I was there shooting photos for Colorado Newsline.
There was one snarky exchange that stood out, about renewable energy and fossil fuels. Ganahl, a fossil fuel proponent, chided the governor, a renewables guy, for for his “green energy” policies. Polis countered, saying Ganahl drove a Tesla. Ganhal’s response: because she was wanting to learn more about electric vehicles, that yes, she bought an EV, but her everyday driver was a gas-powered van with 120,000 miles on it. She suggested since Polis was a millionaire many times over, he should “walk the walk,” ditch his internal combustion engine vehicle and buy an electirc car of his own. Polis’ rebuttal: “I’ll just borrow your’s since you’re not using it.”
Jared Polis defeated Heidi Ganahl in the November election, winning 58% of the vote to Ganahl’s 40%.
October: Power Plant Roundabout
The Colorado Trust published a story in October about air quality in Pueblo and the impact of the Comanche Power Plant on same. I shot the photos for the story. Shortly after it appeared online, I got an email from Julian Kessner, the Colorado Trust’s editor I worked with on the assignment. He was forwarding an email from a reader, Ethyl Mercaptan, charging I had “photoshopped” the article’s lead photo.
“Dear Collective Colorado
The lead-in photo on Jennifer Oldman’s October 5 article about air emissions from the Comanche Power Plant titled, ‘Advocates, Officials Seek More Clarity on Air Quality in Pueblo ostensibly shows the power plant nestled in the tree lined streets of Pueblo…. I wonder why you would choose to use a highly doctored photo as the highlight for this article….This seems fairly disingenuous for an organization that claims on its own website to be a source of “reliable, non-partisan information”. I think a group with that goal would offer a full throated correction for this deception ASAP….”
“The letter writer makes quite a charge, Julian,” I replied trying not to seethe, and went on to explain outside of normal tonal, contrast, and sharpening corrections and use of the Spot Healing brush to remove CCD blemishes, the file had not been doctored. That the lens I used to make the picture, the aforementioned Tokina 300mm lens, compresses perspective, and “finally, the amount of time it would take to photoshop the power plant, with all the power lines, shadows, and trees, and shrubs that appear in the photo, would be prohibitive—prohibitive with a capital P. Certainly more than the 1/1000th of second it took make the exposed image that ran in the Colorado Collective….”
Ethyl replied and wasn’t having it: “With all due respect, hogwash! …Tell me what telephoto lens can pull off that feat of selective magnification? Further, with the lens you describe, that amount of zoom from this location is likely impossible. More likely, the image of the power plant was taken from a point much further south and maybe even from the road immediately north of the power plant then superimposed on the other image.”
I cited Ben Franklin in my response to Julian after reading that. “We are all born ignorant,” I wrote back, “but one must work really hard to remain stupid,” and left it at that.
November: A Razor Thin Outcome
Political pundits in Colorado had U.S. Rep. Lauren Boebert cruising to re-election via a double-digit win over her opponent Adam Frisch in their Dist. 3 race. But on Election Day, voters essentially said “not so fast.” The CO-3 race ended up being so close, that two days after Election Day, the outcome was still unresolved.
Outstanding votes in Pueblo County, it turns out, would decide the issue. I reached out to Dana Coffield at The Colorado Sun to see if they’d be interested in photos from the vote count. Her response was an emphatic “yes,” and asked me to file throughout the duration of the vote count. By the end of the night, Boebert held a minuscule lead.
Frisch conceded the race that Friday, although by law, an automatic recount would take place. The recount showed Boebert did indeed prevail, but by the slightest of margins, a mere .17%, according to Colorado Secretary of State Jenna Griswold.
Lighting Ceremony
I got an email from Nicki Hart in October asking if I’d be interested in reprising my role as drone photographer for November’s Pueblo County’s annual Courthouse lighting ceremony. Nickk’s in charge of assembling the team that covers the event. It’s a challenging gig, given the regulatory constraints (flying over crowds) and technical challenges (shooting at night), but it’s a fun one, too. And I jumped on it.
But the event draws a few recreational drone flyers, too, none of whom fly with required strobes, which leads to a lot of hard- to-spot drones in dark, crowded air space. Fortunately, because the drone platform most people fly—DJI—they’re prevented by geofencing software from flying near prisons and other critical infrastructure. I fly the Autel platform, which has no geofencing. And the Pueblo County Jail just happens to stand kitty-corner to its courthouse. So I kept close proximity to the jail, and covered the light and fireworks show without having to worry too much about a mid-air collision.
December: Dobbs Fallout
With the U.S. Supreme Court reversing itself in regards to a woman’s constitutional right to abortion in June, 2022 (Dobbs v Women’s Health Organization), pro-life advocates have begun waging campaigns into pro-choice states. One such occurrence took place in Pueblo beginning in November and came to a head during a Dec. 12 City Council meeting. After Clinics For Abortion and Reproductive Health purchased a building in Pueblo in November, Council member Regina Maestri introduced an ordinance, drafted by Texas anti-abortion activists, prohibiting the delivery of tools and medications used in abortions by enforcing a set of federal statutes called the Comstock Laws.
Pueblo City Attorney Dan Kogovsek said the proposed ordinance conflicted with Colorado’s Reproductive Health Equity Act which ensures the right to abortion in the state. He said he was confident Colorado Attorney General Phil Weiser would sue the city over the matter “before Christmas.”
Council President Heather Graham didn’t mince words on the matter. “I can tell you this is not how City Council typically operates, and procedures were not followed. It can only be assumed this ordinance is being used as a political ploy, because it should have never reached this point,” she said, reading from a prepared statement. “If you want to ban abortion, I would suggest you take it up with the legislature, the state medical board, or file a federal injunction. Or quite frankly, you move out of Colorado, because the city council is not the arena to be bringing this forward,” she said. Graham added the “only job” City Council has with an incoming abortion clinic is to issue a use tax license, while holding up a photocopy of the Clinic For Abortion license.
Graham then moved to indefinitely table the ordinance, effectively ending Council’s debate on the matter. Her motion passed, 4-3.
