Back on Memorial Day the Family and I decided to get up early and hit Mckelligon Canyon and the neighboring Wyler Aerial Tramway in the Franklin Mountains.

Our hike in the Mountain was a short one. We were trying to hit a small cave from the Ron Coleman trail-head and the boys got about halfway and were done!  I continued and took the above pic from atop the cave.  After leaving the canyon we headed over to the Tram to take the easy way up the mountain:

It was a nice morning with hardly any clouds in the sky.  At the top I was able to shoot a few sequenced pictures that I stitched into the following panorama:

click for a larger pic

If you zoom into the Asarco area you can really see how much work they have done in remediating the site.  I exited the the viewing platform to get a few pics of the tram as they came up the mountain:

I’ll warn you, make sure you check in with the ranger at the top if you leave the platform.  They get a little grumpy if you haven’t signed in and are wandering around the trails.  I’m always amazed that the broadcast antenna have weathered our ferocious windstorms as well as they do given their size:

After we looked around for a while it was time to head back down.  The ride is pretty smooth, no doubt in part to the large pully system in use to ferry the cable cars. That brings me to my next painting:

I’m using the pulley system as the inspiration for my next painting.  It’s another smallish painting by my standards, but I think it will serve as a nice contrast to the previous small vehicle paintings.

The full set of pics can be viewed on Flickr here: Memorial Day in the Mountains

Stop at 700 Mundy, 48″ X 36″, oil on canvas, 2012

Finished!

Old drive in’s don’t die, they get turned into flea markets

As I near the completion of the Sunset Grocery Building, I have started to kick around some other ideas for my next painting.  Some places I’ve already visited have given me lots of material like the Smelter Cemetery and the SPC Plant.  Those are pretty grand in scale and may result in some sort of a series. For my next painting I wanted to try something a little smaller in scale so I headed back downtown and scouted around.  Instead of wandering all over the place like I normally, do I focused on the Plaza Hotel and surrounding area.

There was some construction going inside, no doubt in preparation for making it usable again for some future tenants.  Personally, I would rather see the city use the Blue Flame building if they raze the current city hall to build a ballpark.  The Plaza would be better suited as a hotel given its proximity to the the Arts district.  Maybe it would force the Camino Real, that’s next door, to spruce up its aging property.

This part of downtown is my favorite. The majority of the buildings around here are older and part of the national historic registry.  There are some art deco-ish relics as well, namely the Kress Building and the American Furniture sign.

I’ve used this area before for inspiration, in the Plaza Monk and American Furniture paintings, so I guess I risk beating a dead horse.  There is something here though or I wouldn’t keep coming back. What to paint, what to paint…

Plaza Hotel on Flickr