Having spent most of my life in places surrounded by mountains, the thought of seeing vast open spaces, or in common parlance, 'big sky country' was limited to my visits to National Parks along the eastern edge of the Rockies and the long drives across in the Great Plains. I remember my first glimpse of such a sky while hiking up to a mountain vista in Glacier National Park and looking east into the vast undulating hills of Montana. I remember seeing the land and sky stretch endlessly to the blurred horizon. The great machinations of industrial agriculture, barns, silos, harvesters and tractors were but mere dots on this landscape, where even mile long grain trains seemed like tiny caterpillars crawling across the earth.

Theodore Roosevelt National Park was another place where I got to experience this big sky country. And on that fateful day, the sky was made even more dramatic by the appearance of a chain of nascent cumulonimbus clouds stretching across the badlands and the great plains beyond. I tried to capture the light falling on the precipitation from the middle of these thunderstorm cells as they resembled mushrooms marching across the parklands.

Theodore Roosevelt National Park
ND USA