River Day 3 7 October 2014 : Caspar Institute

Up before dawn – living by River Time – and the sky starts a real show. The light, and the landscape, is almost impossible to photograph, because it so big and changes so quickly. We found ourselves taking the same picture over and over again: "It's better now." No, it's better now!"

Talking with Rochelle by satellite phone the night before, I heard myself saying how much we liked this place, and how we wished we could stay ... and Why not?

So we decided to spend the day here, take a grand walk over the fossilized sand dunes on our side of the river, and relax with a beer or two during the heat of the afternoon up in our parlor veranda.

About the time we decided to stay – by now we have our tea and coffee and are sitting comfortably watching the light show – we spotted something big, moving at the absolute limit of our cameras' ability to zoom, on the far bank. A beaver!

Our long walk through the dunes was astounding. The varieties of rocks, plants, textures, forms, and colors was rich and surprising. Rainfall here is so abrupt and violent that it moves rocks,. big and small, and creates strange collections of sand worked by water, and pebbles of distant origin everywhere. Even the soil is alive: cryptobiotic soil that has taken hundreds of years to organize itself (third row far right.)

The sky's show went on all day long. Perched above camp in our parlor, we watched sundogs and rings around the sun develop, disappear, and reappear. Here's a sundog so bright is makes a reflection in the river.

Watching the big show, we didn't miss the little stuff. Here's a grasshopper that posed for me. The above/below macro/micro of this place made us very grateful for our spry little cameras, Canon S95s.

The sky show never let up; sunset matched, then exceeded, the glory of the sunrise. Nevertheless, we took the sky's warning seriously: this much ferment in the clouds suggested that weather lay ahead. Hoping for a good morning, we laid plans for a good long paddle for the next day.