Halloween: A Little Tour Of A Cemetery

This weekend, to take a break from grading papers, I went for a walk in a cemetery I'd never visited before.  I'd passed it numerous times, and even glancing through the fence I could tell it wasn't your usual Utah cemetery with all-flat gravemarkers that make life easier for lawnmowing crews.  No, this cemetery was filled with the less-usual.
Some markers looked rather European in style:

(Note: I have not tampered with the color on any of these; the sky really looks like this in October in Utah.)

And lots of the markers had Greek names on them, but I took far too many photos to post all of them.
A few of the markers were clearly NOT European:

There were many huge, pretentious markers, some that were decorated to the point where there appeared to be no sense of dignity left for the dead, and one that I found mystifyingly tacky:

So, some guy who really, really likes athletic lettering styles buried his two wives (this is Utah, so they might be simultaneous wives and not merely successive wives) under a four-foot granite letter?  Okaaaay, then.  Wow.  I wonder how the folks at the gravestone company kept straight faces while discussing this order.

This cemetery even had crypts!  (Not common at all in Utah.)

And while I was photographing several crypts, my eye caught a twitch of movement beyond one of them.  Yes, I was being watched.  In a graveyard.
But it wasn't anything spooky; it was a couple of mule deer.

We stood and stared at each other for a couple of minutes, and then the deer casually walked away.  But as I went up the hill, I found they had a few friends over:

(Look in the background by the fence.)
There must've been about 35 does and half-grown fawns grazing rather unconcernedly in the cemetery.  (I didn't see any antlers, so I'm assuming no bucks were present.  Maybe this was girls' night out or something.)
Anyway, it was an interesting little tour, and I took about 100 shots in all.  (Max would've taken at least 700 in the same place, I'm sure.)

Photo Non-Contest #147 -- Got The Blues

Written Inc's theme this week is "the Blues."  Now just last December we did the color blue as a theme, so I have to stay away from that.  And I had this great shot of 2 of my academic team boys looking depressed when a game wasn't going well, but I can only post kids' photos on the school blog now, so that's out.
So, cemeteries.
Yup, that's what I came up with: cemeteries.
I actually have lots of European cemetery photos taken with a film camera, but not so many with digital, so here's one great got-the-blues/death-is-sobering snap of a lonely cemetery in Orphir in the Orkney Islands north of Scotland.  The light's nice on this one, I think.

And, in contrast to this green cemetery on an island (the sea is right over the hill), here's a dry, dusty shot taken on an autumn day so hazy you can't even see the mountains across the valley.

The sandstone headstones here are unmarked because very little is known about the people they represent.  (The small ones are children; the larger ones are adults.)  In the 1980s, construction workers in downtown Salt Lake City found a small burial plot that turned out to belong to some of the earliest white settlers in the valley.  Long before DNA testing was available, it was impossible to verify more than a couple of the identities.  Originally, the plan was to put the bodies in the city cemetery, but then someone suggested that they be placed up the mountainside from Old Deseret Village, a living history museum at the mouth of Emigration Canyon, which was the entrance point to the valley before roads and trains came through.  So, the graves overlook the valley their inhabitants once traveled over a thousand miles to find.  It's a bittersweet tale, just right for the blues, I think.
(Remember to click on the photos to see them full size.)