I went out into the wheat fields north of Bowman this morning and felt the sun beating down on them and me. It was almost 100 degrees today, and a day to remember when the frost and ice of winter become too hard to take.

Wheat Field with Solarizing Filter

Grasshopper in the Wheat

Sunlight on the Wheat

Here are some shots of a ripening wheat field taken last Sunday. It won’t be long now before all these golden stalks of grain will be harvested.

On Sunday afternoon I drove north of Bowman again to see how the fields were looking. They had pretty much turned from the green of July to a rich, golden yellow of August. It was a fairly calm day, with lots of interesting clouds floating over the country. This is really a peak time of the year out here on the prairies and plains of southwestern North Dakota. The ripening fields, cerulean blue sky, marvelous clouds, and gentle breeze seemed to create a perfect, almost surreal landscape. I feel so fortunate to live out here.

My photograph, Sunflowers in a Field, is featured in this month’s North Dakota Horizons calendar. It was taken south of Black Butte in Slope County.

August is a month of golden and yellow flowers and fields. Here is my journal entry from an August day, ten years ago.

I haven’t been out to take pictures for over a month. It has been way too hot, and I’ve been too busy with museum projects.

This was one of the most enjoyable days I’ve spent out photographing. It was a beautiful, clear day with a deep blue sky. A slight breeze made it comfortable, and also allowed for some long exposure shots of grass, sunflowers, and wheat blowing in the wind.

The whole scene was one of rich ripeness. The heat which preceded today gave everything a burnished tone. The hills still had vestiges of green, but were for the most part covered with the shades of autumn. Brilliant patches of sunflowers, goldenrod, rabbitbrush, and curlycup gumweed seemed to hold all the sun of summer.

A couple of mornings ago there wasn’t a breeze stirring, so I went back over to the wheat field just south of here to photograph the wheat a little closer and a little calmer.

As a town girl, I don’t really know that much about crops. I learned recently that newer varieties of wheat have been developed to be shorter, so more energy can be concentrated in the grain itself, rather than the stalk. When I was small, I remember standing in wheat fields with my grandfather and sister, and the crop seemed so very high. Perhaps it really was quite a bit higher back then.

One thing about a wheat field is its immense size. It’s kind of hard to know just where to look, and how to select the few stalks out of thousands and thousands to concentrate on and to photograph.

We had some very gusty winds a couple of days ago, and I wanted to watch the wheat swirling around.

It’s a rather hypnotic, mesmerizing experience to observe the stalks of wheat dipping and swaying with the summer breeze. First they lean in one direction, then suddenly they’re bending in another one, in a never ending rhythm that is such a pleasure to see.

This is a good time to photograph wheat fields, as some grain is still green, which makes for a nice contrast with the more mature golden color surrounding it. Patterns of light and dark were being created with every new gust of wind.

 Many explorers and early settlers thought the prairie was very similar to the sea, and when it billows and tosses on a windy day, you can see why they got that impression. Now we are more likely to see it in a field of grain, which grows where the tall prairie grasses used to thrive. I’ve heard that the original prairie grass out here was much taller than it is today.

Well, guess that’s enough to give you a good impression of wheat on a very windy day in North Dakota.