#Indian canyon

[morpheus-ravenna]

Friends, Indian Canyon has a new fundraiser rolling, with the goal of getting to safe housing for Native elders on the land with ADA needs. If you can, please consider sending something their way? It’s such an important sacred place and these elders deserve to be safe in their living accommodations on ancestral land.

Fundraiser link: https://www.gofundme.com/f/indian-canyon-elders-ada-dwelling-safety-needs

Also here’s a blog post from Kanyon Sayers-Roods with more info about the current situation and needs at Indian Canyon:

[quo-usque-tandem]

Indian Canyon by Cara Romero

[corupriesthood]

Last weekend we had the honor to attend and provide hospitality at the Indian Canyon Storytelling Gathering.  Indian Canyon is unceded Mutsun Ohlone territory near Hollister, California, and has been sacred land and home for Ohlone/Costanoan people for thousands of years.

Coru priest Patrick Graeme has been volunteering his time and skills there to assist in oak rehabilitation efforts. He heard from Kanyon Sayers-Rood, one of the caretakers of Indian Canyon and founder of Kanyon Konsulting, LLC, that the storytelling gathering was in need of support. 

For the Coru, supporting the local Indigenous community is as essential to us as any of the work that we do.  We were thrilled to be able to come to the gathering and do some of the work that we are passionate about, helping to keep people comfortable, healthy, and safe.  We assisted in providing food for the potluck, setting up a warm and dry hospitality pavilion, keeping a pot of elderberry and rosehip tea going, and filling in to help wherever needed.  We were deeply honored to hear stories and songs, to begin new friendships, and to be in that sacred space on that sacred land.

It was a privilege to share in labor, nourishment, and tradition in a respectful and consensual way, coming together acknowledging our shared responsibility to care for the land we live in and each other.

Many Pagan groups are making an effort to acknowledge the sovereignty of the Native and traditional keepers of the lands that they practice in.  For the last few years we have integrated making land acknowledgements into our rituals and events as well as paying land tax directly to the tribes where we predominantly function and reside.  Our goal has always been to directly work with Native communities whenever we are needed and use our skills to their advantage.  For us, this is how we honor Native sovereignty in the land and how we continue the constant work of being in right relationship with the landscape that we exist in.

We encourage other groups and individuals to take the steps necessary to move past simple land acknowledgements into actively supporting the local Native communities around you in whatever way you can and they request.  

To that end we are providing a link to the support page for Indian Canyon.  They are in urgent need for funding, materials, and a number of skills, some in person and some that can be done over the internet. If you are able, look at the needs of Indian Canyon and donate your time, energy or funds to the amazing work that they are doing: https://www.facebook.com/IndianCanyonNation

Or reach out to the tribes near you to see if they want your help. Make your commitment to the sovereignty of the land a manifest blessing in addition to a spiritual one. 

[lilmonster-dee]

[thorsenmark]

Wide Open Spaces in Yosemite National Park by Mark Stevens Via Flickr: While walking across a grassy meadow in Yosemite Valley with a view lookin to the northwest to more distant ridges and peaks. This setting would normally include Yosemite Falls, but the autumn timeframe had dried up the waters of the falls and river. So my focus was on capturing the setting present with the grassy meadow, forest of trees, and then mountainside and finding a balance with the angle of the image captured. I did some initial post-processing work making adjustments to contrast, brightness and saturation with DxO PhotoLab 5. I then exported a TIFF image to Nik Color Efex Pro 4 where I added a Polarization and Pro Contrast filter for that last effect on the image captured.

[visitheworld]

Kalisan Canyon, Socotra Islands / Yemen (by Kristina Makeeva).

[gravelish]

Palm Springs CA

29 January 2023

The winds were strong on the I-10 corridor near the wind turbines - Indian Canyon Drive was actually closed between the interstate and Palm Springs due to blowing sand. I was concerned about my planned early morning ride in Palm Springs, but it turned out not to be an issue with nothing more than a gentle breeze.

I parked at Victoria Park and rode south through, or just west, of downtown, up into Indian Canyons area. I paid my $7 senior fee at the booth and rode the pavement up to Andreas Canyon and then all the way to the parking lot at Palm Canyon. These provided the only real hills of the day, both on empty roads.

The second half of my loop was on a mix of bike lanes and bike paths farther east and past the airport. The streets and neighborhoods of Palm Springs don’t do much for me and certainly didn’t lend themselves to photos, so most of my pictures are from the Indian Canyons section.

I guess the whole ride was about two hours. I tossed the bike back in the car and headed back to Desert Hot Springs where we were staying. We packed up and were in San Diego by dinner, but not without having stopped at Bombay Beach, Slab City, and Borrego Springs.

[autotrails]

American Auto Trail-Castle Gate to Duchesne Road (Helper to Duchesne UT)

American Auto Trail-Castle Gate to Duchesne Road (Helper to Duchesne UT) https://youtu.be/qNJOq1dMvio This auto trail explores U.S. Highway 191 from Helper, through Castle Gate, to Duchesne, Utah.

[beyondtheadobe]

[thomaswaynewolf]

[morpheus-ravenna]

We're organizing this fundraiser to gather funds for a wood splitter that is greatly needed for care of elders at Indian Canyon, an important site of Indigenous revitalization in California.

Your contributions will help in revitalizing Indigenous Ohlone land and culture, supporting connection and learning about the natural environment and bringing Indigenous knowledge forward. Please contribute what you can, and please share this link far and wide!

Donation link here: https://gofund.me/4a5be3d1

[vandaliatraveler]

I snuck in a late spring hike in Cheat River Canyon yesterday, before the dreaded heat dome builds in early next week. Between Brazil's Pantanal going up in flames and the massive heat spikes in North America and elsewhere, I wonder what will be left of this planet's beautiful wild places in twenty to thirty years. For now, I celebrate and cherish every day the glorious diversity of living things that nature has gifted us. This includes the magnificent poke milkweed (Asclepias exaltata), a shade tolerant member of the dogbane family, which feeds and hosts a great many of those living things, such as the extraordinary Himmelman's plume moth (Geina tenuidactylus). Or the comical-looking rock harlequin (Corydalis sempervirens), which clings to the rocky outcrops of the canyon. And the exquisite downy skullcap (Scutellaria incana), a gregarious summer mint that associates with wild bergamot and tall thimbleweed at forest edges. And how about the peculiar dangling flowers of Indian cucumber (Medeola virginiana) or the pale, ghostly stems and bracts of the parasitic Indian pipe (Monotropa uniflora), just now emerging from the forest floor? In a couple of weeks, the rhododendron bloom will start in the canyon and summer will be in full swing.

[corupriesthood]

Kanyon Sayers-Roods speaks about the support needs at Indian Canyon: “Maintaining the Canyon is no easy task. We have a sacred obligation to tend our ancestral homelands and be good Ancestors-In-Training.”

The Indian Canyon community is in need of funds to help with off-the-grid land maintenance and resources needed to care for our two elders, both of whom are in failing health and require ongoing care.

The primary goal for this fundraiser is $6,000. This will support the purchase of a reliable, high-quality log-splitter for firewood to keep these elders warm and to provide for ceremony for years to come. If we raise enough funds, we will also direct funds toward desperately needed upgrades and repairs, such as the over 20-year old solar power system and other crucial infrastructure projects.

Who is handling these funds?

The Coru Cathubodua Priesthood (a Celtic polytheist religious order) is organizing this fundraiser. Your contributions will be received by the Priesthood’s nonprofit GoFundMe account, and then passed on directly to Indian Canyon. We are serving as the organizers for this fundraiser simply in order to relieve some of the labor of fundraising so that the very busy Indian Canyon folks can focus on other tasks. 100% of all funds raised by this fundraiser will be passed on to Indian Canyon through their registered 501(c)(3) non-profit organization, Costanoan Indian Research, owned and held by the Indian Canyon Chualar Tribe of the Costanoan-Ohlone People, aka “Indian Canyon Nation” since 1985.

Check out the donor gifts that have been donated to benefit this fundraiser! :D

[sumbluespruce]

A little sun

8/14/24

[thorsenmark]

It Isn't Hard to Imagine a Beautiful Place in Yosemite National Park by Mark Stevens Via Flickr: A view looking to the northwest towards what was a dried up Yosemite Falls. As a friend and I noted from online sources, this can happen from time to time in the late summer and early autumn months, before rain storms and snow provide that water relief towards the end of the year. My thinking in composing this image was to have that portion of the waterfalls and the nearby ridges and outcroppings be more or less center in the image. I would angle my Nikon SLR camera to capture some of the grassy meadow as a foreground leading up to the trees and finally the mountainside. As with many other images I captured that day in Yosemite Valley, there was the haze from nearby forest fires and that smoke. That brought about much more highlights scattered in any image captured. I used the ClearView Plus tool in DxO PhotoLab 5 to bring out more of the setting present and did some initial post-processing work making adjustments to contrast, brightness and saturation. I then exported a TIFF image to Nik Color Efex Pro 4 where I added a Polarization and Pro Contrast filter for that last effect on the image captured.