Page, Arizona.

This week, Lignum Draco asks us to think about time. In his challenge, he references a sign relating to time passages and asks us to interpret our own feelings about time. You can read the entire post here.

My visceral response was almost immediate… as a landscape photographer, I find myself in many places that time’s passages have tailored and textured the environment around me. Page, Arizona, site of the Glen Canyon Dam on the Colorado River, is one such location. I could have picked many other sites, or sampled from different sites, but I decided that there are several examples fitting the description at Page. In the image above, the centuries of wind and sandstorms have sculpted the landscape. Near one of the trails we hiked that day, we discovered a sandstone “breaker” frozen in time. Here, the wind worked for centuries molding the sandstone wave into the same shape that it molds the ocean waves millions of times a day throughout the seas of the world. The sandstone looks malleable and easily disturbed, but I can assure you that this wave is “solid as a rock.”

The small gallery of images below display the workmanship of millions of years of wind erosion on the relatively weak sandstone. Click on an image to enlarge it and to scroll through the gallery.

An early morning hike on the Hanging Garden Trail features a wide variety of sculptures in eerie flowing sandstone.

At this Page, Arizona scenic overlook, a walk down a slippery sandstone slope requires a steel handrail

This sandstone monolith displays a beautiful natural sculpted surface

Sandstone Breaker near the trail.

The sandstone bluffs take on unusual layered shapes as they erode over the centuries.

John Steiner