For me Bosque del Apache has always been a very special place. I love the water and the mountains, the concentration of wildlife, the feeling of community among staff, the Friends of Bosque group, and the large group of full and part time volunteers. I like the small college town feel of Sucorro, which overlays the essential Hispanic cowboy and farming culture.

I like the fact that, year after year, the spectacle of the geese and cranes at dawn and sunset continues to attract crowds of people…not so much birders…as regular folk who make the drive down from Albuquerque and Santa Fe, or who include the Bosque in their vacation plans, just to stand to the edge of the road, the edge of a pond, or on the Flight Deck as the sun rises or sets and watch and listen. It is often cold, and people are bundled up, with hats and scarves and gloves…cold even in heavy winter coats…but they are there, waiting for the cranes to come in or the geese to rise.

And when it happens there is an energy that sweeps the crowd…a kind of glee…an obvious and overflowing delight. I love to watch the people coming off the Flight Deck…the uniformity and yet the vast variety of grins! You see the grin in the eyes of even those most muffled in scarves.

And that is just the spectacle of the birds. If you are at Bosque for a week in November (or almost any month) you are just about guaranteed one spectacular dawn and one spectacular sunset: the kind that touch the very deepest places of awe in us. The sun rises and the sun sets everyday…but there are sunrises and sunsets that are simply something to see! And you hear it in the crowd. “Now that is really something!” That is about as close as we can get to describing what such a sunrise or sunset does to us. Something. Something universal and powerful. Something that makes us glad to be alive. Something that fills us with thanksgiving. Something very close to the root of awe in us.

I finished at the vendor’s tent (I am, after all, at Bosque to work) just in time on Friday to get out to the Flight Deck for the sunset fly in of the geese. The Deck itself was already packed shoulder to shoulder with people and I had no intention of attempting to worm my way to a spot on the rail. I parked further down and planned to shoot the incoming geese and cranes from the edge of the pond. But then the sky happened, and the sunset bloomed. I took several shots from the road, out over the cars, but it really needed the reflecting water of the pond, and the only way to get that was get out on the Flight Deck. I found a spot at the rail on the boardwalk leading out to the deck that worked…that gave me the expanse of water and sky I had seen in my mind’s eye.

The Canon SX50HS has a hand-held night scene mode which I am experimenting with for sunrises and sunsets, and I used it here. It takes three very rapid shots and combines them in-camera. There is just enough exposure blending to extend the range of the image…to capture a realistic foreground as well as the drama of the sky. Just my normal processing in Lightroom produces among the most natural sunrise and sunset shots I have yet managed. Of course I had to try it here.

I took a lot of shots and worked hard to keep the Flight Deck itself out of the images, but actually, it this one where I intentionally included the end of the deck and the people on it as part of the composition that really captures the experience best for me.

And for the Sunday thought: for me awe is an essential element of faith…I don’t believe I could believe in, or put my faith in, a Creator who was not awesome in every way…who did not inspire a feeling of root awe in me in every encounter…in every aspect of the Creator’s person, presence and works…and in relationship to me. Wonder is required, and wonder is my most basic emotion. Followed closely by thankfulness. “I have seen the face of God and yet I live!” The most wonderful thing about the awe of God is that we can experience it, more that than, we can participate in it, in its full awesome glory and yet live to tell about it. The most wonderful thing is that we are made to tell about it…that telling about it is, at least in part, what we are created to do.

Wonder and thanksgiving are the compounded elements of love…and ultimately it is love I feel in a sunset like this one…and it is the Creator’s love I am inspired to tell about. I have been overwhelmed by beauty and splendor, and yet I live! That is love in its most essential form. Or that’s what I think.