The National Palettes

My personal research project on the National Park System. I’m studying color through an analysis of the unique geology, past and present inhabitants, and infrastructure of each park. To paraphrase the first director of the NPS, Stephen Mather, each park is highly individual but the whole is a revelation. I can’t wait to see where it takes me.

On August 16, 2016 I found myself on top of Yosemite National Park’s Sentinel Dome at dusk.

I was mad as hell.

My partner Nate was determined to get me, his city-loving girlfriend, to appreciate the outdoors more. He said it would be an easy hike, and in comparison to many of the trails I have since followed him up, he was right. But at the time, my mind was clouded in negativity. I was out of shape, out of breath, and dreading the return hike well after dark with only a small headlamp plastered to my sweaty forehead. We scrambled up the slick granite dome and I smiled in the photos at the top. Most of them.

Nate had lugged up his medium format camera to capture the Yosemite Valley as night fell. I took in the panorama view, chugging tepid water and swatting away bees, begrudgingly letting appreciation creep in. I looked back at the man I love happily engrossed in his art. Idle time while he set up the perfect shot was nothing new for our adventures.

This trip I had elected to pack a little sketchbook and a few markers to commemorate our time in my own way. Trained as an architect, I envied my peers who came back from studies abroad with sketchbooks full of ancient piazzas and colonnades. Nearly a decade out of school, a little bit of that jealously remained. I still longed for delicate drawings of beautiful places that I could proudly sign my name to as well.

As the sun continued to set and a collective hush fell over the valley, I hangerly pushed my twelve dollar canteen ham and cheese sandwich toward the swarm of bees refusing to leave me alone. I crouched on the side of the warm granite mound and began to draw as my mind raged. Fuck bees. Fuck hiking. How the fuck am I going to draw this goddamned majestic view?

The National Palettes was born from the book I couldn’t find.

More sketches followed after Sentinel Dome in the little book I packed. As my calmness returned, I began to enjoy the process more and began thinking about getting a reference book that would help me know what type of colored markers to bring in my art bag for the next trip to a national park. Yes, I’d probably need green and brown, but what green and brown? And what other colors with them? I wanted a simple guide that summarized the enormity of the scenery, flora, and fauna of our parks that, of course, also took into consideration how they changed over the seasons. It was a seemingly simple request, or so I thought.

Since that trip I’ve been looking for that guide. I didn’t find it in the Yosemite bookstore, or in the Lassen and Redwoods visitor centers that followed on that trip, or frankly any trip to date.

I’m looking for a source that is an evidence based, detailed, and thoughtful analysis of, yes, what we see today but also the rich history of our parks. What about the influence of cultures and creatures who have called these lands home and the infrastructure (good and bad) to preserve them for generations to come? It turns out that recipe is not something you can run through an online palette generator. Believe me, I tried.

For millennia, artists and scientists have been documenting their surroundings through many artistic mediums. Ancestors of today’s Pueblo people carved petroglyphs, powerful cultural symbols to reflect their societies and religions. Explores like Lewis and Clark or artist Thomas Moran were specifically charged with meticulously capturing what they encountered for the purposes of westward expansion, research, and preservation. Later, art became a means of encouraging people to travel domestically and visit these places of recreation set aside for everyone. From railroad marketing prints to Works Progress Administration posters, there have been no shortage of interpretations put out into the world that have become iconic in their own right.

There are books on all of these people and stories. By the looks of my library I’ve picked up many of them. Yet, as I pass through each bookstore and visitor center, eyes peeled, I’ve become more convinced that I am going to have to develop what I am looking for myself. Now with nearly a decade of research, trial, and error a set of artistic guidelines rooted in evidence and accuracy is starting to emerge.

Now I’m in pursuit of non-fiction with a little soul.

I don’t claim to be an expert on any of this, far from it, but I have learned a few things about myself and started to see some interesting patterns in color begin to emerge. I still get pissed about hiking up hills, but at least now it’s tempered with the intention of appreciating what I get to see, smell, and feel.

In general, walk 100 feet beyond where a paved path turns to gravel in a national park and the crowds dramatically subside. While finding true, untouched wilderness is damn near impossible (the last square inch of quiet space in the United States just so happens to be in Olympic National Park) it’s amazing to me how many opportunities there are to purely experience our national resources. For a kid who was more familiar with the ice cream stand at the bottom of our local waterfall than the viewpoint at the top, I’m grateful how far I’ve come in my appreciation of our natural world.

The National Parks are generally billed as the best idea “we” (the collective US) has ever had. Since 1916, the mission of the National Park Service has been to preserve unimpaired the natural and cultural resources and values for the enjoyment, education, and inspiration to this and future generations.

The purpose of The National Palettes is to demonstrate through color the people, places, geology, flora, and fauna that make each unit of the National Park Service unique.

My project is a collection of my sketches and palette tests to date. For each location I have a chart of what colors collectively dominate each park based on my initial research and later findings in person. Getting to all 423 units of the national parks may very well be a lifetime undertaking, but somehow that seems okay when documenting centuries of culture and creatures who call millennia old landforms home.

Maybe one day this project will turn into that guidebook I’ve been looking for. Until then, it’s Nate who graciously waits for me as I linger along ridges and visitor center parking lots, still squinting and swearing, and still trying to do the most wonderful places in this corner of the world a little bit of justice through colored ink.