Angier+Fox, Celebrating Rural America & beyond

Look close enough while traveling America's highways and back roads and you'll find many treasures including signs, vernacular architecture, roadside attractions, kitsch, and real Americana. Among the sites are many jewels found only by getting off the freeways and into the rural landscape.

Roads, highways, country roads, transportation, connections, lines, signs

Western United States outback, flyover country, rural landscapes and rural cultural landscapes.

Rural California, USA

Rural Nebraska, USA

Rural Wyoming, USA

Rural Oregon USA

Rural Utah, USA

Rural Colorado, USA

Rural areas in the state of Idaho

Rural Kansas, USA

Across from the east and into Western Montana including Butte, Anaconda, the Big Hole Valley and the ghost town of Bannack, former capital city of the territory of Montana during its early days.

The copper mining towns of Butte and Anaconda, Montana including Holy Trinity Serbian Orthodox Church and its beautiful frescoes.

Rural New Mexico, USA

Rural Oklahoma, USA

Rural North Dakota & South Dakota, USA

Rural Texas, USA

Rural Washington State, USA

Middle America-America's Midwest--Missouri, Illinois, Indiana, Ohio, Michigan, Iowa

Barns from farms and ranches from throughout the U.S. and western Canada--California and the west, Midwest, South and Northwest, including interiors, and other farm buildings and some other agricultural architecture.

Landscape photographs of the western U.S. including California, Nevada, Utah, Arizona, New Mexico, Texas, and Wyoming. Grand and intimate landscapes included. For custom printing and gallery wraps, please inquire.

Where to go while in rural America? To the outhouse, of course! They come in one-holer and more, metal, wood, stone, behind the house, next to the bar, all over. Some are ready to tumble and collapse, other are leaning so much you wonder why it still stands. In the 1930s, the WPA designed a "modern" sanitary structure nick named the "Eleanor" in honor of the first lady. They are still around even though the WPA built the last of more than 187,000 in 1943.

Roadside mailboxes are an important part of communications in the U.S. and seem to be slowly disappearing in favor of the Postal Service's "Cluster Boxes". However, there are literally millions still in use and many of these have much individual character. They are a fixture of Rural Free Delivery that's been offered by the USPS since the late 1800s.

Traffic signs, artful signs, hand-made signs, vandalized signs, humorous and funny, information and sometimes contradictory.

Historic wooden and metal windmills, wind power, wind energy, power generation--America's original green power.

Cemeteries and mausoleums remembering our dead and our ancestors. Headsones, grave markers, epitaphs, statues, angels, stone, steel, iron. Rural U.S. and Serbia. Iconography. Bishops and Priest and veneration of our pioneers and their spirit.

Bodie, California is one of the best preserved, though there's only 10% left, the rest burned years ago. But there are more in Nevada, Arizona, Colorado, Montana, Idaho, Oregon, all through the west. The ones that survive are in parks or folks still live there.

Found throughout the west and even the world, Rock Art, pictographs and petroglyphs are a link to the past. What do they mean? We may never know...

Rock are and ruins are the major things they left behind a thousand or more years ago, the Ancestral Puebloans, Fremont Culture and the Anasazi. Included are a few sites from the Four Corners and the Southwest U.S. including Canyons of the Ancients, San Rafael Swell, Hovenweep National Monument, Mesa Verde National park, Canyonlonads National Park and the Holy Ghost panel of Horseshoe Canyon, Navajo National Monument and Chaco Culture National Historic SIte with its Fajada Butte, Chetro Ketl, the Great Kiva and Puelblo Bonito.

America's own sport, Rodeo, not by elite athletes who can't shovel manure, but from every day cowboys and ranch hands who actually work the land and livestock in rural Oregon, Idaho and Nevada.

The Sguache Crescent is a weekly newspaper in the San Juan Valley of Colorado. Its distinction is that it is the last (or one of the last) letterset newspapers in the U.S. and each character of text published is composed and produced on vintage Linotype machines, which ruled the publishing world for much of the 20th century until they were replaced by photo composed typesetting and computers. Dean Coombs, its owner and publisher, is a third generation newspaperman since his family purchased the newspaper about 1917.

Waterfalls, seasonal and permanent, cascades, moving water, flowing.

Other places in the United States that I just don't have enough to make a nice collection, yet.

Jackasses, burros, donkeys photographed through the years from California and the Mojave Desert all the way to South Carolina. Jackasses are the comics of the horse family, their long ears are expressive and their braying and yawning funny faces make most horses seem boring.

Away from the city lights, especially in the Great Basin and West Texas are great skies where one can easily see the Milky Way with little nighttime light pollution.

For 24 years, auto demolition derbies (destruction derbies), have been for wimps as evidenced by the folks in Lind, Washington who create mayhem with no less than 10-ton, 25 year old and older harvest combines. This is small town, rural America at play. This year's event brought in combines and drivers from Washington, Oregon, Idaho and drivers from as far away as Canberra, Australia. Some combines arrive by truck, however, we were lucky to find them self-propelled driving from Kulotus to Lind as we got near town. The combine demolition derby weekend starts on Friday with the arrival of combines from far and wide, a local version of auto demolition derby in a small arena where cars race anti-clockwise around large tractor tires. On Saturday is when the fun starts with a parade down Main Street in Lind featuring the combines, grain trucks, derby cars, kids, floats and horses followed by a hearty barbecue and in the afternoon, the real action begins. This year's event featured 3 heats of 6-7 combines in each followed by racing grain trucks and pickups at intermission. The top two wining combines in each heat advanced to the final, championship round. All others that can still move make it to the consolation round before the main event. As the grain trucks and pickups race around the small track, combine teams frantically weld and repair their beat-up machines to prepare for the main event. The stands are packed as ten-ton machines battle one-another for bragging rights as the top driver and machine. This year's winner? I don't know with so much action as these machines crash head-on at a break-neck 8-10 miles per hour. When the headers collide, their backsides lift off their wheels, provided they haven't broken or have been sheared off during the mayhem! Next year's derby will be Lind's 25th and will happen on the 2nd weekend of June, 2012 featuring several of this year and last combines that have survived.

Historic American Railroads of the West including the Cumbres & Toltec Scenic Railroad in New Mexico and Colorado, The Durango & Silverton Narrow Guage Railroad in the San Juan Mountains of Colorado, Golden Spike National Historic Site in Utah, San Luis and Rio Grande Scenic Railroad based in Alamosa, Colorado, which includes both steam, diesel, passenger service and even a mixed train daily, just like the golden days of rail. Also included are some speeders running the Amador Central Railroad in Amador County, California.

Speeders, gang cars, inspection cars, highrail and street cars at the first Folsom Rail Fest on the old Placerville Branch of the Southern Pacific.

Sunflowers as crops, in gardens and to brighten one's life.

Branch 158 of the Early Day Gas Engine and Tractor Association's spring Harvest and Threshing Bee in Woodland. Besides the threshing, there was a demonstration of wheat harvesting using a 60 year old threshing machine, lots of old gas engines, crawler and wheeled tractors, some nearly 100 years old.

Old iron, farm fresh, fully-restored, all historic tractors from EDGE & TA Branch 13 at the Amador County Fair July 2010 and the fall McFarland Ranch gas-up, October 2010. Tractor parades, tractor displays, tractor pulls, rare tractors, crawler tractors, track layer tractors, john deere, case, farmall, ferguson, power horse, caterpillar, eagle, Oliver.

EDGE & TA Branch 158's fall plow day at the Silmer Scheidel Farm near Pleasant Grove, November 13, 2010 featuring antique and historic tractors including Farmall, Allis-Chalmers, John Deere, Minneapolis-Moline, J.I. Case, Caterpillar, Eagle, Ford, and Oliver tractors pulling vintage 1-, 2-, 3- and 4-bottom plows, disc harrows and more in this historic fall event.

Trucking, semi-trucks,truck and trailer, transportation,roads,highways,interstates,freeways,freight,cargo, travel.

Shrines and country churches and cemeteries, found roadside throughout much of America's flyover country, its small towns, and along the highways and byways away from the Interstate Highway system.

Wildflowers of California, many from the SIerra Nevada foothills, mostly identified to the Genus-species. These flowers are seen from the Gold Country and Sierra Nevada to the Mojave and Colorado Deserts.

Farming, crops, farms, harvest, vegetables, fruit and more in California and the West.

Antique tractors, aka, old iron, classic tractors and more, from "farm fresh" to showroom new.

Tractors at farms and ranches in the United States, including John Deere, Case Farmall, others. This collection includes both modern and antique iron, farm-fresh, and historic tractors.

Rural schools, one room schools, school houses, many now community centers throughout the U.S.

Grain Elevators, the ship of the prairie, their towers built in concrete, metal, or historically of wood. Most are found in the Great Plains of the U.S. and Canada.

Weather & skyscapes, clouds, fog, haze, lightning, rainbows, severe weather, and lightning, astronomical events, such as eclipses and comets.

The is America's Flyover County, the land and communities between the coasts. Taken from a window seat while flying from California to Texas to Pennsylvania then return via Phoenix back to California.

Yes. Gasoline once was $.25 per gallons (two bits, a quarter) Now in California its $4 per gallon gas and in some places $5 per gallon and other parts of the United States. Who knows...maybe some day we'll look at these $4 and $5 gas prices fondly in the good old days...