Field Notes: Grand Prismatic, Held in Your Hands

There are colors in Wyoming that seem as though they shouldn't quite exist together.

Turquoise beside rust. Deep blue meeting gold. Green appearing for a moment between them.

At Grand Prismatic Spring, they don't sit neatly beside one another. Steam moves across the water, light changes, and the edges seem to shift while you're looking at them. You can take photographs, and you can remember the colors afterward, but neither quite holds the experience still.

Maybe that's part of what makes the place stay with you.

I have known the Grand Prismatic colorway for a while now. It was one of the first colors Shelly at Wicked Tint and I talked about, and it has always carried that particular piece of Yellowstone with it—not as a copy of the spring, but as a memory of seeing all those improbable colors together.

Then I saw it on the bulky base.

The colors were familiar, but something about them felt different.

Perhaps it was simply their scale. Those runs of turquoise, copper, mossy green, and blue had more room to show themselves against the substantial three-ply merino. The color I already knew suddenly had weight and texture.

It made me want to pick it up.

There is something wonderfully immediate about bulky yarn anyway. The stitches are generous. You can see the structure of them. A project begins becoming itself before you've had much time to wonder how long it will take.

And Grand Prismatic seems especially at home there.

A landscape remembered in color, translated into wool, waiting beside a pair of needles.

Sometimes bringing a little piece of Wyoming home is as simple as that.

Crow Note

Some colors stay with you long after you've left the place where you found them.