Last week, I painted Pikes
Peak near Colorado Springs to illustrate a blog post about a proposed energy transmission
experiment, the Sun Train, running from a solar array at Pueblo, Colorado to
Denver, about 170 kilometres to the north.
Colorado Springs is between the two.
This connection being
rather tenuous, I didn’t include Pikes Peak when I added the Sun Train to a
book of blog posts I’m compiling, ‘Visualizing the Anthropocene.’
We’ve lived in Colorado Springs for a couple of years (in fact our younger daughter was born there) and the painting gave me an idea for a series of blog posts illustrating places I used to live.
Full disclosure – I only
spent one summer working at a lodge on the Alaska Highway, and our particular
stretch of highway was nowhere near as picturesque as the part shown here (which was about 60 miles away). We were surrounded by muskeg and you couldn’t
even see the mountains. The only
accurate part of the painting is the late summer fireweed, with the blooms at
the very top of their 8-foot stems and puffy white seed capsules on the
withered flowers lower down. That’s what the fireweed lining our stretch of the highway looked like when I left in
September heading to Anchorage to fly over the pole to Europe and the next
place I was to live (almost as briefly).
I’ll write about that next week.
