The Time I Inadvertently Took a Photo One of My Grandparents Had Already Taken

I’ve been slowly going through the photographic effects of my grandparents’ estate—slides, negatives and prints from a lifetime of travels and working in the oil industry.  Earlier this evening, I was flipping through some preliminary scans of prints and slides I did a few months back and found this one:

One of the drawbacks of this collection of random photographs is that most are unlabeled.  Some are easy to figure out, such as these:

(Paris, obviously)

(Luckily I was aware that my grandparents had traveled to Alaska in the 1970s, so it was easy to deduce this was pipe segments stored for inclusion in the Trans-Alaskan Pipeline)

But the photo above was in a box without any clues to its origins.  I had scanned it and forgotten about it, but when I was going over them again this evening, it caught my eye.  It could be anywhere in the Southwest of the US, but it seemed familiar.  Then it hit me, I have a photo (several, really) of this exact spot.  Or at least I was certain I was.  Digging through my Lightroom catalog, I found it:

Incredibly, I’d taken this almost-exact photo at Palo Duro Canyon, Texas, back in 2010.  And while I don’t know when their photo was taken (nor, for that matter, which grandparent took it), I was pleased to find a small, photographic connection to my grandparents, who’ve been deceased for 12 years.