Setting the Stage

My love of adventure started with Westerns.  Truth be told, it probably started earlier than that when Dad was working swing shift and had afternoons off and would pick me up from school, make us a sandwich and we'd watch Bonanza together.  It was great.

Later, my Papa would give us a book titled Under the Tonto Rim, by Zane Grey.  At this early stage in life, I had no idea that Zane Grey was a writer of many wonderfully eloquent and descriptive westerns.  And not the shoot-em-dead varieties - but one fraught with development of a character, full of descriptive scenes of nature.  Beautiful, inspiring and intriguing. 

With descriptions that journeyed through my mind and took me on trails "and across the windy uplands into Utah, with its verdant valleys, green as emeralds, and its haze-filled canons and wonderful wind-worn cliffs and walls, and its pale salt lakes, veiled in the shadows of stark and lofty rocks..."

"...ever westward, up from desert to mountain, up into California, where the white streams rushed and roared and the stately pines towered, and seen from craggy heights, deep down, the little blue lakes gleamed like gems...."

Ahh...smell the pine?  The water?  The clear air of the Sierra's?

And down, ever, downward, "sloping to the great decent, where the mountain world ceased and where, out beyond the golden land, asleep and peaceful, stretched the illimitable Pacific, vague and grand beneath the setting sun."

And so, with its early beginnings, so set the stage for my love of Westerns, Adventures, and Yarn...(more to come on that)

-Quotes taken from The U.P. Trail, by Zane Grey, 1918
-Photos by me :)