Writing-on-Stone

Petroglyph: The Hunt - Photograph by Ray Rasmussen

On my daily rounds of the blogs today, I was thrilled to discover at wood s lot a photo and link to the site of some wonderful photographs taken by several photographers in Writing-on-Stone Provincial Park in Alberta.

Why thrilled? Some readers may recall that I wrote about my plans to visit Writing-on-Stone earlier this year, which got cancelled because of heavy rains and floods. (I also wrote about the source of the word hoodoos.) Access to the Archaeological Preserve and majority of rock art is limited to guided tours (mid-May to early September only). We weren't able to make it for September, but there's next year.

Anyway, back to this excellent site. I really enjoyed the slideshow of the uniquely eroded sandstone and of the petroglyphs, the best pictures amongst the few I have found on the web. At the end is a list of inks to additional great photographs of rock erosion including hoodoos, at Dry Island Buffalo Jump, a Provincial Park located in the Red Deer River Badlands. The site also has a good information on visitng the sites. Noticing that Ray Rasmussen has taken most of the photos and is the web designer, I found that he has his own photography and Haiku web site that I shall be exploring further.

By the way, there are also a couple of images of works by Antoni Tàpies on the wood s lot page. It suddenly struck me how they resemble the petroglyphs in some way - the way he scrapes marks out of his textured surfaces. These made me recall how excited I was to see a large exhibition of Tàpies' work in a museum in Germany several years ago.