The Pawnee, A Working Theory

Colorado is famous for its mountains and quietly excellent at its prairies. Two-thirds of the state is, technically, the Great Plains, and most of the people who know Colorado primarily as 'mountains' have never driven the seventy-five miles east of Greeley into the grass.

The Pawnee Buttes are the case in point and the rebuttal at once. Two sandstone monoliths, about three hundred feet tall, standing in a sea of short-grass prairie. They are the only vertical thing for a long way in any direction, and the sky above them does work that mountains do not allow it to do.

I have come to think of the Pawnees as Colorado's other Bells — equally photographed by a much smaller community, equally suspect for that reason, and equally rewarding once you stop trying to photograph the buttes themselves and start photographing the grass at their feet.