Well, I couldn’t do it. This week’s Lens-Artists Photo Challenge is Last Chance, when we’re invited to show off some of our favorite 2022 images that have not been published in a post yet this year. Since I took such a long hiatus from my blog this year, I have plenty! Too many, in fact. I can’t narrow my unpublished favorites down to one post.
Oregon beach sunset
I’ve been trying, but I have lots of sweet images I’d love to share. Because I have too many, and since the Lens-Artists are taking a week off for the holidays and won’t be putting out a prompt next week, I’ve decided to divide my favorites into 2 parts. This week will be my favorites from below the 49th parallel, and next week will be my Northland favorites.
Tallest trees in the world
Last Winter’s Travels
One suggestion was to include images that would probably never be included in one of our typical posts. I pet sit in the winter but I very, very seldom include photos of my charges in my posts. Here is a favorite shot of a kitty I took care of last January.
This kitty used to chew holes in my clothes!
I spent the month of February on a housesit in Pacific Grove, California. I envisioned this shot and was so excited, especially in post-processing when I realized I’d captured exactly what I’d envisioned!
I love the layers in this sunset silhouette.
I love visiting the redwood forest, and I love capturing abstracts. This is my favorite abstract shot for 2022. Charred bark from a previous fire and living green moss and lichens contributed to hues as bright as a peacock’s tail when looked at closely in this image.
Rainbow Redwood
Check out this cool tree. It’s in Olympic National Park’s coastal forest, and with a burly head, fungus features, and a crown of fern leaves, it’s a people tree! I stop by and say Hello! and give it a hug every time I pass that way.
Tree Person
(Yawn) Another sublime Olympic sunset… The Feature is one, too. I captured this image on Rialto Beach. I love the dreamy feel of this image. The Feature shot is from First Beach. I had so many great shots from First Beach it was hard to pick just one.
Rialto Beach
This Winter’s Travels
My final image from Olympic is fall colors, maples along the Sol Duc Hot Springs Road. Olympic had by far the best fall colors I found in Washington this year.
Maples on the Sol Duc Hot Springs Road
Now I’m on Orcas Island, and I have especially enjoyed the waterfalls here. This one is called Rustic Falls.
Rustic Falls
For my final image, while hiking a local trail I saw this Big Leaf Maple leaf standing, still attached, on a tree branch – perfectly upright and all by itself, beautifully backlit. It’s getting a bit ragged, but mostly green, even though it’s December. It hasn’t let go, just keeps hanging on. This is a great inspiration for those times when I’m feeling a little raggedy! I underexposed the background because it was a bit busy and distracting. Doing this helped me to capture the way this leaf looked to me and made me feel.
Getting a little raggedy, but still hanging in there!
Hope you, too, are still hanging in there and I wish you all a Happy Holiday season!
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? ”
First snow in the Colorado mountains
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.
Petrified Forest National Park
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.
Grosvenor Arch in Grand Staircase-Escalante
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.
Bosque del Apache National Wildlife Refuge
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.
I love to hike the sand dunes in the moonlight.
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.
Love those desert wildflowers!
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.
Sex on the Beach
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.
The beaches in Mendo are wild and uncrowded.
Speaking of big trees, I’ve really fallen in love with the tallest trees in the world, the redwoods, over the last few years.
Tall Trees
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.
Oregon has some incredible trees!
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!
Sea stacks at Bandon
The Olympic Peninsula is my next favorite place. The old-growth forests redefine green and the wild beaches are phenomenal.
Ferns and feathers
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.
I love Denali!
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.
My daily commute to work
I hope you’ve enjoyed some of my favorite places. As Jim Morrison of the Doors said, the West is the best!
I love curves. They’re far more interesting than straight lines. Nature abhors a square, after all. Think about it. A path through the woods or canyon is so much more intriguing when you can’t see what is coming around the next bend. It’s tantalizing. The anticipation and curiosity build, drawing you irresistibly onwards, like iron to a magnet.
Don’t you wonder what’s around the next bend?
There’s something feminine about curves. They exemplify cooperation, going with the flow instead of forging straight ahead. They teach us that compromise is not losing, that sharing space and allowing for a little give and take can help everything thrive and grow.
Curves are strong. There’s strength in flexibility. That’s another lesson they teach us, how to bend and not to break.
Arches National Park
Cultivate your curves – they may be dangerous but they won’t be avoided.
Often life throws us curves. If we’re not ready for them, they can be dangerous. We can’t see what’s coming for us around the next bend and we approach it way too quickly. The curves of life can send us spinning out of control, sometimes sending us crashing and burning.
But if we’ve learned those lessons, about flexibility and cooperation, about going with the flow and being open about what we might find around the next bend, the curves life throws us can be opportunities, chances for us to grow. Embrace your curves! Bend, don’t break.
Have you ever taken a photograph and when you looked at it later, you couldn’t figure out what attracted you to the scene? If that ever happens to you, the answer might be to move in closer. This week’s Lens-Artists Photo Challenge is Close and Closer. For this week’s challenge, I decided to use some examples from Death Valley.
Golden Canyon is beautiful. But what is it that makes it so special?
In the feature shot, I moved in a little closer to the rock layers in the walls of Golden Canyon, creating a much more satisfying photograph of what really attracted me to the scene, the sculpted shapes and pastel colors of the canyon walls.
In the above gallery, I have a few images of Mosaic Canyon. I moved in closer on the upper center image by cropping. The left and right images were made by moving closer and zooming in. I was intrigued by the colors and textures of the rock layers that made up Mosaic Canyon. In this selection though, I don’t necessarily think closer is better, it’s just different perspectives and I like them all.
When it comes to flowers, though, closer is usually better.
With flowers, though, in my experience, closer is usually better unless you are going for the image of the whole field of flowers. The above gallery is a good example of that.
I kept putting off my visit. Why should I seek out a place that would only depress me? The last time I was there I only saw 3 or 4, and I had to use binoculars even to find the dismal few. I heard a rumor that they were coming back. But I also heard that last year none returned at all.
Since it was my last week in Pacific Grove, and the sanctuary was close by, I decided to bite the bullet and check it out. I’m glad I did.
I had only taken a few steps into the refuge when the passion and the drama took place right before my eyes, practically at my feet. They were fluttering by, flirting, chasing each other when things suddenly got serious. He slammed her to the ground. They wrestled. They danced. Then he brought their lovemaking to an entirely new level. He clasped her close. She went limp in his arms. He carried her high into the sky, up to the very tops of the trees.
Butterfly Porn
When it comes to sexual endurance, the Monarch Butterflies put humans to shame. A pair of Monarchs will mate for up to 15 hours! They start mid-afternoon and finish shortly after sunrise. Afterwards, the female flies off to find a milkweed plant to lay her eggs on. In the two weeks or so that she has left to live, the female Monarch will repeat that act again and again.
In a week when the world situation is looking especially grim, it sure is nice to be able to share some good news. The Monarch Butterflies seem to be making a bit of a comeback.
Monarchs mating
I’ve written before about the demise of the Monarchs. The last time I visited the Pacific Grove Sanctuary, California’s Monarchs had plummeted to less than 1% of their former population. Numbers had dropped from 4.5 MILLION in the 1980s to 28,429 as of January 2019.
Last year there were no butterflies at all found in the Pacific Grove Sanctuary, and less than 2,000 counted in all of California.
Bring your binoculars
This year there were about 14,000 in Pacific Grove alone and just over 247,000 in the total count for the California coast. Good news!
Perhaps some of our actions have helped the Monarch. Pacific Grove is a town that takes safeguarding the butterflies seriously. In this town, messing with a Monarch carries a $1,000 fine! The city has planted butterfly-friendly plants in its parks and along the Coastal Trail. Many residents have also planted butterfly-friendly plants, avoided RoundUp, and eaten more organic food since hearing about the Monarch’s plight.
Monarch cluster
Action is even beginning to take place on the federal level. There were two bills for butterfly conservation included in the $1 trillion infrastructure package that passed in November. These Acts, the Monarch and Pollinator Highway Act and the Monarch Action, Recovery, and Conservation of Habitat Act, will provide grants for replacing invasive species with native pollinator-friendly plants on highway roadsides and medians. They will also charge highway crews with being mindful about when they mow, avoiding mowing during key times in the Monarch migration.
The resurgence of butterfly numbers this year is wonderful news. But it’s not really a comeback, it’s more of a reprieve. We dodged a bullet this time, but 250,000 is a drop in the bucket compared to the 4.5 million found in earlier years. Monarch Butterflies still face the looming threats of pesticides, habitat destruction and climate change. They still need our help to grow back into a healthy, thriving population.
Help the Monarchs. Eat organic. Don’t use pesticides. Please do what you can to provide sanctuary, and help the Monarch butterflies survive.
Thank you, Karina of Murtagh’s Meadow, for providing this week’s Lens-Artists Photography Challenge, A Special Place.
It’s a good year to miss winter in Alaska. The snow started early, on the last day of summer. I wasn’t lucky enough to miss that storm. It complicated my travel plans. It took me a couple of extra days to close everything up on the homestead and get out of town.
Then the snow took a brief hiatus, making way for the extreme cold. It was 40 below for weeks at a time in McCarthy, even dipping down to -60. The coldest I had ever seen was 53 below. Glad I missed the cold spell.
Pacific Coast sunset
See what I mean about a good winter to miss? It was just getting started.
It’s been snowing back home. And snowing, and snowing….. more snow than anyone can remember ever falling in McCarthy. Buildings are buried. And it’s still February. March is usually the snowiest month. Yikes!
Sunset in Pacific Grove
Which makes me super grateful for where I am spending the winter, further south on the Pacific Coast. I have really been enjoying those Pacific Coast sunsets.
I spent January at a housesit in Anacortes, Washington. The weather was generally dark, drab and dreary, with snow, rain or fog practically every day. My SAD syndrome kicked in, but I kept reminding myself about what the weather was like back home and felt pretty thankful to be someplace safe and warm where I could avoid driving on those occasions when the streets were icy.
Sunset at Rosario Beach near Anacortes, Washington
The day before I left, I did have one nice sunset.
Then my luck changed. I had clear weather for 3 days in Olympic National Park! What a rare and wonderful occurrence! The skies continued to stay mostly clear as I traveled down the coast to my February housesit, in Pacific Grove, California.
Rialto Beach, Olympic National park
Mostly clear, except every night as I passed through Oregon there was a thin band of fog on the western horizon in otherwise cloudless skies, effectively extinguishing any hints of color from the setting sun. I’ve included a photo from an Oregon sunset I took on another trip, so you can see the potential and understand my disappointment when things looked so hopeful each evening but didn’t pan out.
Bandon Beach, Oregon
Skies have been clear almost every night here in California. There has only been one day with any precipitation at all. It was just a sprinkle, but I was able to capture some fabulous God rays between storms. Check out the feature shot and you’ll see what I mean.
I feel a little like Goldilocks and the three bears. Although I am grateful for all these beautiful sunsets, we could use some rain. Although there’s too much snow in McCarthy, the drought in the West is severe. According to dendrochronology, the science of interpreting past climate through tree rings, in some places it’s the worst drought in over 1500 years. So I pray for rain, and hope that if it comes, it also brings big waves, god rays and rainbows.
