He spent years watching the gap between the Colorado people imagined and the Colorado that was actually outside the windshield.

But I realized early on as a landscape architect practicing here that it was all a mirage.

It's all a mirage.

As I drove many times back and forth to see my parents, you could see the prairie.

The prairie is nothing like Washington Park in Denver, right? Nothing at all like that.

So I started to, in my career, I started to think about it and try to emulate prairie kind of designs on different things.

big projects.

But the people behind the project say its greatest impact may be helping change expectations about what a successful landscape can be.

Mm.

And one day they, they kind of underestimated the amount of snow, and they, they blew this, uh, steep slope right up at the back of the mountain, and they triggered an absolutely monstrous avalanche which swept right down the Argentiere glacier.

And I saw this thing from the terrace, and I ran down to get a decent viewpoint and fired off some pictures with my, uh, Pentax.

Probably a cheap Tamron, you know, secondhand lens on it.

And, but anyway, I managed to get this, the, the shot.

And then along with other shots, I started doing slideshows in chalets and, and, uh, earning a bit of money to pay, pay my way out there.

And, um, somebody saw this avalanche picture.

Nice.

I know obviously it's got Joshua trees in it, but John, I was thinking with you, let's kind of get into your history with the park, how you first came to go there, what made you fall in love with it and all that good stuff.

So back in 2011, I did a family holiday with my wife.

We came to stay in Palm Springs and we did a Jeep tour, as they do from Palm Springs, that takes you off road into the park and just thought this place was amazing.

I hadn't seen anything like it, you know, in my ignorance coming from the UK, Europe, we don't have deserts.

And in my naivety, I thought this was just gonna be full of sand.

I was gonna be like the Sahara, you know, just sand as far as you could see and nothing else.

You know, it's completely wrong.

So you want to dive into that a little bit more in terms of what all that entails and the opportunities you have to connect? Yeah.