Arborglyphs

A Small Aspen Grove Many years ago I trekked to the top of a mountain well-known to the people who live in Reno, although few ever venture to its summit. Peavine Mountain, it's called. I encountered a delicate grove of aspen trees, many of them inscribed with arborglyphs by Basque shepherds from the early 1900s. A few years prior, while I was a student at the University of Nevada, I spent a semester in the Spanish Basque Country. I saw similar drawings there in the Pyrenees Mountains, so encountering them in Nevada seemed so unlikely that I thought about it and told the story many times over many years. I did a little sketching on that one day, and eventually the sketches became part of the huge collection of such things in my studio. Some twenty-seven years later I encountered those amateurish sketches, experienced an emotional moment, and realized the time had come to develop something with them. This came at a time when one of my closest friends, a Basque in Bilbao, Spain, who I met