Chimney Twins, Fort Union National Monument (click to enlarge)
Here is another image of the remaining chimneys at Fort Union National Monument (click here for another blog entry). Like the previous blog entry image, this one also has that time marches on quality to it. The background chimney still has some wall attached while the foreground chimney is bereft of walls. You can almost imagine this set of chimneys slowly disappearing like a row of dominos.
Fort Union Chimneys: N35 54 25.28 W105 00 45.06
Melting Chimneys, Fort Union National Monument (click to enlarge)
Here is an image of the chimneys that remain from the buildings at Fort Union National Monument. This image reminds me of the soft melting pocket watches in the Dali painting The Persistence of Memory.
As Dawn Adès wrote, “The soft watches are an unconscious symbol of the relativity of space and time, a Surrealist meditation on the collapse of our notions of a fixed cosmic order”. Pretty deep stuff. But then again, the above image is a symbol of the slow erosion and collapse of Fort Union over time. As you walk around the grounds, you will notice many braces holding up walls, and areas where workers are repairing the adobe remnants of the walls. Abandoned in 1891, it is hard to imagine the remnants lasting another 126 years.
I guess this could also be one of those glass half full/glass half empty tests. Are the chimneys melting into the blobs, or are the chimneys arising out of the blobs?
Fort Union Chimneys: N35 54 22.23 W105 00 50.67
Pecos National Historic Park (click to enlarge, or maybe not)
This is a “stacked focus” image. I took three images, one focused on the foreground, one focused on the poles in the middle, and one focused on the pueblo. I have done this many, many, many times on the images in this blog and always had great results. However, this image just did not stack up properly. To see what I mean, zoom into the right side of the pueblo or the pole in the middle. Zooming in you will see ghost edges. Also, look at the flowers in the lower right corner, these are blurry. I might be able to blame the flower blur on the wind which could shift the flowers between exposures. But I have no explanation for the edges of the poles and pueblo ghosting. I used a tripod and all of the images have the same focal length and exposure settings.
So why include such a technically bad image? Well, I wanted to show that Pecos National Historic Park is definitely worth a visit!
BTW, after spending time in the visitor center, it is possible to drive and park next to the pueblo. Drive out of the parking lot, take the first right, and you can park within yards of where this image was taken.
Pecos National Historic Park: N35 32 58.1 W105 41 21.69
