Nature photography and outdoor destination marketing
– Jo Walton
Good advice.
Thanks to Ann-Christine of the Leya blog for this week’s Lens-Artists Photo Challenge, Illustrate a Favorite Quote or Poem.
This week I’d like to share with you all some of my favorite places, ones I will miss this winter as I practice The Middle Way on Orcas Island. This week’s Lens-Artist’s Photo Challenge is Home Sweet Home. Tina Schell of Travels and Trifles asks us, ” If a foreigner were to spend a week or a month traveling your home country with you, where would you take them? What sights would you tell them to be sure to see? Where have you found some of your own favorite images? What is it you truly love about where you live, or places you’ve seen in your home country? ”
Well, they would need at LEAST a month for all MY favorite places. Although I grew up in Colorado and now live in Alaska, I feel at home throughout the West. I’ll start with Colorado. I was raised in Colorado, and lived there for many, many years after I went out on my own. It’s probably where I’ll end up when I get too old to live deep in the wilderness in Alaska. My family is there. Colorado is always close to my heart.
Although I’m at home throughout the West, I do have a few favorite places that I try to visit whenever I have the chance. One is the Colorado Plateau. This region covers big chunks of 4 different states: Colorado, New Mexico, Utah and Arizona. I can’t narrow my favorite down to just one or two places in this area, it’s all so amazing. My advice to a foreign visitor might be to check out a few places that are not as well-known as iconic parks like Arches and Zion. Although I love them, too, they ARE getting loved to death and it might be good to try to spread that impact out a little. Lesser-known places such as Grand Staircase-Escalante National Monument and Petrified Forest National Park contain wonders, too.
Another favorite place is Bosque del Apache National Wildlife Refuge in central New Mexico. This is the best place I’ve ever been for birds. It is the winter home for vast flocks of Snow Geese and Sandhill Cranes. Over 340 different species of birds live there. It is an incredible place to observe wildlife.
I spent 8 winters working as a ranger in Death Valley National Park. It is another desert that has captured my heart. The great thing about Death Valley is that because the altitude on the valley floor is so low (the lowest elevation in North America), the nights are seldom cold, even during the deepest darkest months of winter. Makes for great camping, and the rattlesnakes sleep in the winter! It’s an incredibly diverse park, with elevations ranging from below sea level to over 11,000 feet.
I did a little playing with LightRoom on this image. It was a daytime image and the background of bare dirt desert ground was a bit meh so I darkened it until it resembled the night sky, and tried to give a nighttime feel to the dunes, too. Since Death Valley is famed as a night sky park, and since one of my favorite things to do is to walk through the sand dunes under the full moon, I wanted to capture the feel of that experience in this image.
And then there’s the bloom. If there is rain in the desert, and if it is timed right, the wildflowers will rock your world. If it seems like it might be a good year for the flowers, I try to make a circuit that starts near the Mexican border in Anza-Borrego State Park, moving through Joshua Tree and Mojave National Preserve until I end up in Death Valley.
Further west on the California coast you will find another great wildlife phenomenon, the elephant seals at Piedras Blancas near San Simeon. Although you can find a few seals there at any time of year, December through February are the best months. Thousands of seals converge on the beaches, with the big strange-looking bulls battling it out for the right to own a piece of the beach, and all the females on it. The cows are birthing and raising their babies then, too. It’s an extraordinary spot to witness wildlife drama, so close you don’t even need binoculars to see it.
From the campground at San Simeon I can walk to the beach and see some fantastic bird action on the sea stack that looms just offshore there. It’s an awesome place to catch the sunset.
Farther north along the California coast is Mendocino County. It’s my favorite part of the California Coast. I think the scenery is even more dramatic than Big Sur, and without the crowds. It’s got big trees, too.
Speaking of big trees, I’ve really fallen in love with the tallest trees in the world, the redwoods, over the last few years.
Sometimes I go straight up the coast into Oregon. Other times I head for the Siskiyou country near Grants Pass and Williams. The trees there are incredibly graceful and beautiful and it’s my last chance to see wildflowers as I head north.
But no matter which way I go, I try to hit the coast at Bandon. It is so much fun to shoot the sea stacks there!
The Olympic Peninsula is my next favorite place. The old-growth forests redefine green and the wild beaches are phenomenal.
And then there’s Alaska. It’s where my heart is, my community, my job, my life. My first love in Alaska was Denali National Park and I try to go there whenever I get a chance.
But home is McCarthy, in Wrangell-St. Elias National Park. I truly believe it’s the most spectacular place in North America. Case in point – check out my daily commute! And the feature image was taken while I was standing on my front porch! It doesn’t get much better than this.
I hope you’ve enjoyed some of my favorite places. As Jim Morrison of the Doors said, the West is the best!
It’s a long way between towns in the desert, and sometimes the road seems endless and lonely. I love those far lonely drives, so I wouldn’t call it monotonous, but I do have to admit that there are big stretches where nothing especially stands out.
It seems that when there is a lack of natural landmarks, people feel compelled to fill in the blanks. Occasionally strange, off-the-wall objects spark up the view in those empty miles. I decided to write about a few of them for this week’s Lens-Artists Photo Challenge: Interesting Objects.
Highway 60 in New Mexico is one of those highways. Towns are 20, 30, 40 miles apart. And when you do reach a town, don’t blink or you’ll miss it. But there are a few things out there that can shake you out of your highway trance.
One is the Very Large Array, a couple of miles east of Datil. It’s a radio telescope facility. Astronomers use radio waves to capture light in other spectrums and waves besides visible light, giving them a much more complete picture of what’s out there in the Universe than we could see if we just used visual information. The landscape is littered with humongous dish antennas, set out in a long, long line as far as you can see on either side of the highway.
A little farther west I came upon this interesting collection of windmills. There were a couple of mannequins included in the display, I guess to give a sense of scale.
Catron County is popular with hunters. In the town of Quemado, I found a Christmas tree made out of deer antlers.
When I drove through Arizona this year, it felt more like the Wild West than it ever had before. I’ve driven through the state many times, but never before have I seen so many signs and storefronts offering guns for sale. I live in Alaska, a state where most households own firearms, so I understand folks exercising their right to bear arms, but this year in Arizona it was over the top. It seemed a bit hysterical. I believe those folks are convinced Armageddon is coming. Or they want to help bring it on. In Wikieup, I guess maybe guns are not enough. They’ve got rockets!
One of the loneliest stretches of highway out there is California Highway 62, between Joshua Tree and the Arizona border. Suddenly, in the loneliest bleakest part of the road, you come to a few burnt-out foundations and crumbling walls surrounded by a broken-down barbwire fence. The fenceposts are decorated with sneakers, thousands of them. They’re mostly sneakers, but there are a few other shoes and gloves included in this bizarre display. Why did this site become the West’s athletic shoe graveyard? I have no idea.
These are only a few of the many strange and interesting objects to be found along those lonely desert highways. Maybe you have a favorite that I haven’t mentioned. Share it with us in the comments.
Thank you, Patti, for hosting this week’s photo challenge.
Opening shot: Solitude at Sunset by the Seaside
For this week’s Lens-Artists Photo Challenge, Patti @ Pilotfishblog asks, “What images can you find that feature a subject that begins with the letter S? For an added challenge, capture an image that illustrates a concept with the letter S, such as serene, sharp, spooky, or silent.” So, see if I have succeeded!
Sayonara!
For this week’s Lens-Artists Photo Challenge, I’ll showcase a few reflections of places I love.
I love the way the clouds are reflected in the wet sand at low tide on the Long Beach Peninsula in Washington.
The Colorado River near Moab, Utah, is one of my favorite places to catch those mirror images.
On my last visit to Rocky Mountain National Park, I caught this buck thinking about crossing the road through my side rear view mirror.
Bird reflections are always a favorite. I caught this one at Moss Landing Beach in California.
Rear view mirrors aren’t the only place I might see my surroundings reflected on my little truck.
A post of my favorite places wouldn’t be complete without something closer to home.
I recently left a wonderful stay on the Mendocino Coast,
and now I’m road-tripping, Mendo to the Mojave. Today I’ll be in Death Valley. It rained hard last night. Maybe I’ll see a scene like this…
As I look back over 2019, I feel fortunate. I had some incredible opportunities to spend time in a few of our country’s most amazing photography destinations. Some were popular places, in danger of being loved to death. Others were just as special, but not as well known, the kinds of places that creep up on you and get under your skin. Forever.
I thought I’d make a Top Ten list, it being close to the New Year and all. But I found I couldn’t narrow it down to just ten places. So I came up with a baker’s dozen. Then my post was too long. So I broke it into parts 1 and 2, the Rambling Ranger’s favorite photography destinations of 2019. Here is Part 1.
This spot is one of those best-kept secrets. It’s a location that skates by under the radar on a coastline filled with destinations that are a bit TOO popular (Big Sur, Point Lobos, Monterey). Although Elkhorn Slough doesn’t have the flashy scenery of those more fashionable destinations, the wildlife watching here is fabulous. Look for a plethora of shorebirds. The main draw, however, is the sea otters. This just may be the best place on the Pacific coast to observe those cute little critters.
I spent most of March in Death Valley. I had committed myself months earlier to leading a few hikes there, before I could predict where the best desert wildflowers would be. The flowers were very late in Death Valley, with only a few blooming in March. It drove me a little crazy to be stuck there, as I knew that both Anza-Borrego and Joshua Tree were experiencing exceptional blooms.
But the great thing about Death Valley is that it is an amazing photography destination even if there are no flowers blooming. The austere beauty and diversity of landscapes offer endless opportunities for inspiration and creativity. I saw a few new places and revisited a lot of old favorites, too.
I had a short housesit in Durango over Thanksgiving this year. It’s always a blessing to spend time in southern Colorado. I love that edge environment, where the mountains meet the desert, giving you the best of both worlds. From the Great Sand Dunes to the many hot springs, from the jagged ragged peaks of the Rockies to the mesas and canyons of the Colorado Plateau, there were so many choices, all within a day’s drive of my base in Durango. The southern Colorado Rockies are another place I find myself returning to, again and again.
This is one of my favorite places to see the fall colors in Alaska. And Alaska often has some OUTRAGEOUS fall colors! The blueberries are pretty incredible on the Denali Highway, too! Late August to early September is the time frame to aim for if you want to see the tundra put on its fancy dancin’ clothes. Special bonus: You might get lucky and see that visual symphony, the Aurora, too!
Rocky has a special place in my heart because I lived in both Estes Park and Grand Lake long ago in my younger days. I was fortunate to land a housesit in Allenspark, at the southwest corner of Rocky Mountain National Park, in October. It was a blast from the past, revisiting the environment that first instilled in me my deep love of the mountains.
Rocky is one of the best places in the country to catch the elk rut. It is also home to superb alpine scenery, wonderful hikes, and brilliant aspens. One thing to keep in mind – like Arches and Zion, this park is in the process of being loved to death. Be aware of your impact. Choose the trail less traveled. Give the animals their space and leave no trace so that we can all continue to enjoy Rocky for generations to come.
Storm watching. Big waves. That’s why Point Pinos, in Pacific Grove, California, made my list. This is the first place I’ve ever been at all successful at capturing the essence of the power of the ocean. The surf here is awesome, in the original sense of that word.
Pacific Grove was also a place of great sadness for me, where I witnessed the crash of ecosystems, both terrestrial and maritime. The near-extinction of the Monarch Butterfly and the exponential effects of sea star wasting and a warming ocean were only too apparent during my stay here. Although it was heartbreaking, I felt it was important to be a witness.
There’s a reason why Arizona sunsets are famous. I swear they’re the most lurid sunsets I’ve ever seen! I love the cacti, too, stately saguaro and crazy cholla. I spent a few weeks in Tucson on a housesit last February and was surprised at how much I liked it since I’m not much of a city girl. But national and state parks abound, as well as other great open spaces.
These were just a few of my favorite photo destinations for 2019. I’ll let you in on the rest by New Year’s Eve. What were some of yours? Let me know in the comments!