Jack Kerouac - Desolation Angels (A Photographic Interlude)

I've recently returned from a short hiking holiday in the Welsh mountains of Snowdonia, a holiday on which I brought Desolation Angels along with me to read. Call me an idealist, but part of me was looking for some kind of beat Kerouackian journey of experience in the wilderness - not that we were that far from people most of the time - and indeed, part of the time it was like this. These photographs (presented in chronological order) were taken on a beautiful cloudless day, on a 15k ridge walk to the peaks of Glyder Fach and Glyder Fawr (some way to the northwest of Mt. Snowdon, Yr Wddfa). I used a Fuji FinePix S7000 digital SLR, and converted the pictures afterwards (mostly with a red filter... as all b/w photographers know, it is great for bringing up atmospheric skyscapes).

Desolation Angels isn't much of a mountain book - in spite of its beginning with Kerouac in situ on a mountaintop like the crazy ascetic monk he always wanted to be - and I think The Dharma Bums, with its vivid account of Ray, Japhy and Morley's hike up the Matterhorn, better fits that description. Nevertheless, the solitude and inescapable vastness of the mountain landscape is a key emotional and philosophical theme of the novel. Mt. Desolation, and the rest of the Cascades for that matter, are probably incomparably vaster and emptier than the rocky enclave of Snowdonia, but I'm going to go ahead and draw the comparison anyway.

I'm no poet, and I'm not really all that much of a writer - definitely more of a reader! - so here's my own artistic response to Kerouac's "Desolation Blues" in Twelve Choruses: "Desolation Black & Whites" in Twelve Portraits.