Rider in the Aspens

Aspen bark is soft and pale, and anything cut into it heals as a black scar that lasts as long as the tree.

Across the high country of the West, Basque sheepherders who spent whole summers alone with their flocks made use of that. From the late 1800s into the mid-1900s they carved names, dates, hometowns, verses and drawings into aspen trunks. Researchers call the carvings arborglyphs, and thousands survive in the groves of Nevada, Oregon and California, though aspens rarely live much past a century and the oldest carvings are disappearing with their trees.

For ranchers in the Rockies, yellow on the aspen slopes meant the season was turning. Cattle that had summered on high forest pasture had to be gathered and brought down before the snow, and riders spent the fall combing draws and timber for strays.

In the painting a lone rider on a dark bay walks a leaf-covered trail through the grove, away from us, toward a valley of dark evergreens and a range of snow-covered peaks. The trunks are painted chalk-white with black knots and scars, and the light comes through the leaves in a warm yellow wash.