Jason Hatfield Stills & Motion

Looking up at a garden of ghostly white hoodoos in the remote desert of Utah.

The largest concentration of glaciers in the lower 48 states of the USA are in the Wind River Range of Wyoming. Sourdough Glacier pictured here sits on the ridge of the Continental Divide and terminates in a lake filled with icebergs. This single shot captured the Milky Way rising over the glacier and a carpet of wildflowers as sunset still lingered on the distant horizon. Getting to this viewpoint requires a couple days of off-trail backpacking and route-finding above tree-line from a remote backcountry trailhead.

Mountain biking down the Potato Bottom switchbacks along the White Rim Trail.

Viewing the comet NEOWISE over Uncompahgre Peak in the San Juan Mountains of Colorado.

A Falcon 9 SpaceX twilight launch as seen from the Little Painted Desert in Arizona.

This year’s bounty of brittlebush blooms and plump Saguaro in the Superstition Mountains. My last image talked about enjoying nature’s beauty when you can but this time I wanted to consider the other side. While traveling through the surrounding desert I passed through several areas impacted by 2019’s Woodbury Fire that were instead full of cacti skeletons. While it might seem like the Sonoran desert would be one of the places most resilient to wildfire Saguaro and other cactus are not adapted to regular fire like a ponderosa pine forest. Native desert grasses were sparse and limited the travel of flames to a small area so fire was rarely a widespread occurrence. Unfortunately the introduction of exotic grasses for cattle changed the ecosystem enough that climate-change induced drought allows the rapid spread of fire through this harsh landscape. While saguaro can live as long as some trees they’re much slower growing and typically don’t form their first arms until 50-70 years old meaning any damage done by wildfire now will take generations to heal if at all. Please keep this all in mind as you travel public lands this summer and consider if a campfire is really necessary.