At this time in the late 1970’s I was working in Illinois and spent a year exploring the raku firing process.  I was a fan of Paul Soldner’s pots and had earlier done a week-long workshop at his Colorado studio.  After a lot of failures (blowing things up), I was able to come up with my own forms that excited me.  These forms were an effort to capture the grandeur of a dramatic landscape, the Rocky Mountains, where, some years earlier, I had spent a year at the Anderson Ranch Arts Center in Snowmass, CO.  The slab-built vessel forms became a surface to exploit the unusually large craze pattern from a glaze I discovered called Hal Reiger’s Silver White.  The textured and blackened hand-built rims were meant to represent rocky peaks and ridge tops that I hiked once near Aspen, on the way to Conundrum Falls.