I did a quick pair of paintings on my recent bicycle trip up Mckenzie Pass. And while I wasn’t particularly excited about the results, I found the idea that I was trying to explore interesting.
If you look up at these peaks long enough, you see that the snow isn’t only white, but stained with browns and reds from the surrounding rock.
Both of these paintings were based off of that basic insight that snow is not white, but tinged in placed with shades of browns and grays and reds.
That red color is particularly exciting to me. It is the color of blood, the color of the earth’s blood, so to speak.
I couldn’t get close enough to see if those colorful stains on the snow were caused by materials that resemble those cinder rocks used in landscaping, as in the picture to below.
Although it wouldn’t’ be too surprising if they looked just like that.
I continue to be fascinated by that utterly raw and elemental feeling that pervades Mckenzie Pass. The volcanic-rock-strewn vistas on the pass are the closest one can get to seeing geology in action, apart from being near an actual erupting volcano, of course (or maybe being in an earthquake if we get really precise.) This is how rocks form, this is how the planet earth formed, it is how human beings formed, that is, if we are conceived of as beings made from the same elements as the rest of the planet.
Off the coast, the Juan de Fuca Plate collides with the North American Plate, and is forced down, into the earth, around 50 to 100 miles underground. Heat forces fluids out of the Juan de Fuca Plate, and these fluids rise up, percolating through the crust above, creating mountains like the Cascades, and the Three Sisters.
From 35 million years ago until around 7 million, the western Cascades formed, back when the Willamette Valley was still under water, part of the Pacific Ocean. These so called Western Cascades consist of the more heavily eroded hills that stand in front of the snow capped peaks.
Then as the Juan de Fuca Plate move farther east, the source of the volcanoes shifted to the east as well, and the newer peaks of the High Cascades were gradually formed. You can see it pedaling east on 242, heading gradually up through the trees, a long u-shaped valley, so long and wide (with the trees so big) it is hard to see that it was formed by a glacier. Then the road abruptly hits a series of sharp switchbacks, this is the beginning of the more recent lava flows that characterize the High Cascades. These switchbacks traverse lava flows that were produced by Sims Butte and Collier Cone. But it is Belknap Crater, Little Belknap and Yapoah Crater that produced the really spectacular lava flows at the top of Mckenzie Pass. Lava flowed from Yapoah Crater around 2000 years ago, and the hardened lava seems frozen in time, like a river that suddenly became still.
A painting, of course, cannot capture the drama of this place, its magnitude. It is absurd, it is surreal.
But I think the dramatic colors of those two paintings above are a way to at least approach it, to put a frame around what cannot be framed.