Valles Caldera National Preserve
In September 2025, I spent three weeks as an Artist-in-Residence at Valles Caldera National Preserve. The caldera is literally a textbook example of a resurgent caldera. The 14-mile-diameter caldera blew out and in the following million plus years small volcanic cones filled in places in the caldera and as an interesting detail, they emerged in a counter-clockwise direction. My proposal was to work on understanding and representing the fire ecology of the park. I stretched the boundaries of these ideas to include the fire of nuclear fusion (the sun), Earth’s vulcanism, and the nuclear fission that was put to use at Los Alamos National Lab, about 10 miles away.
Of the unexpected aspects of the park was the abundance of wildlife. Early September is the beginning of the elk rut, while coyotes, prairie dogs and other critters are probably always in abundance. The first night in the park we heard the bugling elk and realized that we should be out every day at sunset and every morning at or near dawn. The park rewarded this effort by an abundance of animal sightings.
A condition of the residency is to donate a work to the Park art collection. My contribution was three prints which present “bad fire,” as have severely impacted the caldera: Memory of One Hundred Years of Fire Suppression, the ecological response of the Caldera: On a Sunday Afternoon the Coyote Dreams of the Valle Grande, and “Good Fire” which can restore the ecosystem: Fire Restoration Once and Future.
These prints, especially “On a Sunday Afternoon…” represent the culmination of ten years of work in establishing the techniques to print from pieces of tooled leather. My goal has been to make the process as flexible as possible and to introduce multiple-color prints. Although I thought this might be the final end point, subsequent work has taken the techniques even further, and there are more steps to follow.
But the animals. Here is a small smattering of favorite wildlife photos.
Everywhere you turn there is something unexpected.
