In motion, there are no seasons. What looks like a regularity to someone spending a year in one place — gets all over the map when moving all over the map. It muddies the definitions. A mountain summit can be a perpetual blizzard — but it’s not “winter”.

When on High is a series about elevation — or rather, on how the world continuously conceives of itself, in a perpetual creation and erosion of difference. It focuses on local ecological niches that exist on the descent from glacier peaks through alpine tundra down to the flood basins and, eventually, the sea.

As such it is also about the creation myths, and how the ordering of the world is often described as a victory over chaos — leading, eventually, to von Humboldt’s Naturgemälde, the consception of nature as an ecological system — or a picture of one, at least.

It was captured in North America from the Continental divide to the Pacific coast.