Celebrate Lamoille Canyon with Art
A Call to All Artists of Elko County to Paint or Create Multi-media Artwork in Lamoille Canyon – a Scenic & Historic Elko County Treasure
October 7, 2023
Sponsored by the Elko County Art Club and Friends of the Ruby Mountains
Submitted by Susanne & Gary Reese
“A gathering of artists inspired by the beauty of Lamoille Canyon while enjoying the company of other artists doing the same.”
On October 7, the Elko County Art Club is partnering with the Friends of the Ruby Mountains to challenge artists to communicate their artistic vision of a local environment. The scenic and historic Lamoille Canyon of the Ruby Mountains will serve as their plein air studio. The artist gathering takes place within the Thomas Canyon Campground and is scheduled to run from 8am to 1pm, including a luncheon for participants.
Lamoille Canyon has long been a destination for artists and writers. Art is an especially important form of communication when depicting a complex subject which may be difficult to encompass or to disseminate. In such cases, art has the potential to do a better job using visual communications than can an oral or written approach. Such will be the challenge of the participants in this artist gathering.
In collaborating with the Elko County Art Club for this event, the Friends of the Ruby Mountains hope to reach out to the Elko County community to share personalized artistic interpretations of Lamoille Canyon. The Friends have previously sponsored Cool Canyon Evenings, which provide oral presentations on the biology, history and culture of the canyon. By inviting artists to the canyon, a collection of artwork will result that can further our understanding of this dynamic environment. Lamoille Canyon represents the resiliency of nature, in so far as it has been so hard hit with fire, flood, mud slides, and avalanches in the past several years. Thus is the opportunity to look beyond the superficial and depict the dynamic nature of its natural environment.
The heart of Lamoille Canyon is it’s wildlife, including mountain goats, bighorn sheep, beaver, marmots, pika, chickadees, golden eagles, mountain lions, bobcats, and the Himalayan snowcock, as well as a variety of birds, fish, small game, bugs and butterflies. The canyon is considered a local treasure by residents of Lamoille, Spring Creek, and Elko, to be shared with the many visitors from around America and the world.
The Thomas Campground locale for this event was surrounded in 2018 by a catastrophic wildfire, providing artists an opportunity to show how natural regeneration was hastened by “the hand of man.” Having been awestruck at the impact of the fire can have an influence on the way we depict the canyon. That sense of loss and hope for recovery drove rehabilitation efforts of the Humboldt- Toyabe National Forest, Northeastern Nevada Stewardship, Nevada Department of Wildlife, Nevada Division of Forestry, Humboldt Watershed Cooperative Weed Management Area and their hundreds of volunteers who devoted over a thousand hours to restoration and replanting projects in the canyon. Experiencing both the loss and gradual recovery of the canyon can lend a sensibility to the artistic interpretations of local artists.
This chapter in Lamoille Canyon’s history is now five years old, but seems like yesterday to locals who watched the fire and visited the canyon in its aftermath. The Range 2 Fire started on Sunday, Sept 30, 2018 and swept through nine thousand two hundred mountainous acres. After the smoke cleared, entire mountainsides were burned and blackened, leaving ghost trees on the landscape. It is useful to know that there was a highly successful volunteer restoration event that Fall of 2018. A smaller volunteer restoration event was held in the fall 2019. Both were sponsored, in part, by the Friends of the Ruby Mountains. Both had artist volunteers who were members of the Elko County Art Club. It also represented a high watermark in inter-agency cooperation.
Thus, this “Celebrate Lamoille Canyon with Art” event represents an opportunity to celebrate the recovery of Lamoille Canyon. The community leaders who formed a Restoration Working Group worked with a $10K donation from High Desert Imaging, and matching donations to hand seed burned areas along Lamoille Creek, remove trash newly revealed amongst the landscape, and plant big and low sagebrush. And like the 2018-19 events, this one will feature a luncheon that we hope spurs nostalgia for a notable time when the community provided volunteer labor and financial support for the common good.
For more information, visit https://www.elkocountyarts.org/events/celebrate-lamoille-canyon/
About the Elko Art Club
The Elko County Art Club (ECAC) has represented generations of local artists. It has long been home for art education outreach projects in Elko County and is known for its art classes community scholarships, annual Art in the Park, rural art education, and an art appreciation series on Facebook.
By participating in this event, you are adding another chapter to this dramatic story. You are creating a visual record that will last far into the future.