About the Cranes

About five years ago a friend gave me a few cranes and his email address. He asked me to take their photos in cool places, send those to him, and then pass the cranes along to someone new with the same request.

Shortly after this I left for 3 months of backpacking in the Western US and I brought my cranes with me to pass along. I later learned that one of them flew away on the side of El Capitan during a climbing trip...

Learning to climb

Wind River Mountains

Rafting the Green River

Shortly afterwards, my friend passed away. This idea of his, however, has stuck with me for a long time. I loved everything about it: folding the cranes, seeing where they traveled, creating a link between people and places. The last few years when I folded cranes I tended to leave them in windowsills or to write "return to ____" and fill in someone's dorm number (I never heard any reports of whether this worked) or to turn them into birthday cards. I can't bring myself to throw them away. So finally, a few months ago, I decided to restart my friend's project as I traveled. I made cranes (usually out of old guidebook pages), labeled them with the email address, and passed them out to people I met. But instead of only me seeing the photos, I've decided to share them on this blog so other people can see how far these cranes fly!