Shannon Rhodes
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The crinoids encased in the limestone boulders along the riverbank remind me that this place was once for millions of years, actually, an ancient inland sea. I find deliciousness here in the dry heat, the muddy grit, as a guest who will return, hungry for more.
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Charles Darwin suggested that “a taste for collecting beetles is some indication of future success in life."
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Did you know that Mormon crickets are not crickets, grasshoppers or cicadas, but large shield-backed katydids that walk or hop rather than fly?
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Decades ago my friend Amberly and I borrowed the phrase “purple mountain majesties” as we gazed at the larkspur dotting our way to Emerald Lake, and it has been a common exclamation for me ever since.
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"I wouldn’t make time this week for nature, so nature came to me, begging me to slow down, take notice, pause, breathe."
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My Grandma Eda asked that thistle be a prominent flower at her funeral. I’ve always been struck by how she saw past the prickly spikes to find beauty in the flower I know as a weed, certainly a metaphor for how she saw her life.
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What if Beatrix Potter had known Utah the way she knew the places she visited on family holiday outings in the English Lake District, North Wales and Scotland?
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I’m not a grandmother yet, but I will one day make a trek over Hades Pass again, gaze at the Grandaddy Basin below, and capture nature’s poetry with pen, camera lens and little hiker hands in mine.
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“We learned what it means to break pots and why the Ancestral Puebloans did that."
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Also called willowherb, fireweed seed heads are long pods filled with silky feather tufts that unfold to carry tens of thousands of seeds on the wind, signaling the end of the season.