It’s a year in review, the best of 2023. For this week’s Lens-Artists Photo Challenge, we were asked to show no more than 12 of our favorite images from the past year. Wow, that’s a hard choice.
It wouldn’t be a Rambling Ranger Best of post without at least one wildflower! Easter Sunday in the Cathedral Hills, Grants Pass, Oregon
I couldn’t do it. Too many favorites. So I tried to narrow it down from the 112 I’d picked out of my files to just the ones I had never published. I still had far too many.
My favorite B&W image of 2023.
That’s probably because I’m STILL processing 2023 images and I find new favorites every day. I finally narrowed it down to 15. Culling those last 3 was especially painful, but those were the rules this week. So finally, here it is, my best 12. Unpublished, that is.
Sunwapta Falls, Jasper National Park, Canada
The feature image was obviously taken in Grand Teton National Park, under the most amazing lighting. The first big winter storm of the season was due to hit in less than 8 hours. You could see the front coming in. I had to keep moving so I wouldn’t be caught by it, but I got some amazing shots as I was passing through.
The day before, though, the light was horrible in Yellowstone. Yet that harsh, in-your-face glare made this photograph possible. I never would have seen it if I’d had good lighting on the bigger landscape.
A small piece of a grand landscape in Yellowstone National Park.
I took the Icefields Parkway through Jasper and Banff on my way south from Alaska this year. I’ve included an image from each park. I wish I could have included more. These were the hardest images to narrow down.
Bow Lake, Banff National Park, Canada
My best photo session of the year, though, was Bandon, Oregon. Scenic views, tidal pools… A third of the images in this post are from Bandon, not to mention the photos included in the last two posts. It was a magic couple of days.
This is my favorite image from my time in Bandon.
The next two images seem like a matched set to me, even though one was from Bandon and the other from Cape Perpetua. I just see them hanging on a wall together.
This one is from Bandon.
I was just SO happy to finally visit tide pools and see sea stars!
This one is from Cape Perpetua.
The landscape at Bandon is so varied, so many views. This next image looked like an alien planet to me, with the grey lighting and minimalist composition. Hard to believe it’s the same beach, and the same day, as the other landscape.
Alien landscape
Another great photography day was winter solstice. I’ve included a couple of images from that day. From the base of the Sandia Mountains, I could see the ice blown onto one side of the trees lining the cliff, so I was excited for, and anticipating, this shot all the way up on the tram. I was not disappointed.
Frosty Day
This last shot illustrates just how rugged and wild Albuquerque’s backyard wilderness really is.
Albuquerque’s back door wilderness
What will 2024 bring? Ten days in and I’ve already got zen cranes and raptors hunting. I’m so excited to see what’s next! How about you?
Well, it’s almost Christmas and Winter Solstice is only a few days away. Kind of reminds me of a Dar Williams song, “Christians and the Pagans”. (Give it a listen) There’s a line in that song, “And you find magic from your God, and we find magic everywhere, ”
I’m a pagan at heart, it’s nearly Winter Solstice, and I do find magic everywhere, especially in the natural world. So here are a few of the places and things I find magical.
Mountains
A magical alpine landscape
I’ve always been a mountain girl, and it’s not only the big peaks that are magical. I’m in love with the alpine, the land above treeline. Not just the big views, either, but every little detail. Especially the little details. There’s another Lilliputian world there if you look closely, and it’s a magical place.
There’s a whole other world beneath your feet!
.I used to play a game with my visitors when I did Discovery Hikes as a ranger in Denali. I would give them circles of string, about six inches in diameter, and have them enclose a patch of alpine tundra. I would ask them to count all the living species they could find in their circle. Then I would hand out magnifying glasses and have them count again. They always found more the second time around, with that closer look!
Water
Waterfalls are magical. Do you see the face in the rocks to the right of the falls?
Water is life. Literally. Without water, there is no life. It’s a magical substance. And there’s this weird thing that happens occasionally when I photograph waterfalls. Although I don’t see it when I’m making the shot, I will sometimes find a face in the photo (the spirit of the waterfall?) when I open it up to process. That’s what happened in this image. Can you see the face? It’s magical.
Trees
Redwoods are amazing trees.
There are a lot of magical trees out there. Have you ever meditated with a redwood? Or wandered through the fairyland of a temperate rainforest, like you might find in the Pacific Northwest?
Olympic National Park has some magical forests.
One of the most magical kinds of forests I’ve ever seen are the Madrone/Manzanita woodlands of Oregon’s Siskiyou Mountains, with trees that look like women, decorated with delicate lichens and moss. Magical.
Manzanita in the Cathedral Hills in Grants Pass, Oregon.
Tidepools
Tide pools on Bandon Beach
Tide pools are magical places. Especially to me. I’ve been on a mission to find good tide pools, and I’m not always successful. Timing is everything. If you don’t have a real low tide, forget it. But I got lucky last spring, twice; once at Bandon, my favorite spot on the whole Oregon Coast, and then at Cape Perpetua. I scored an awesome campsite with great wildflowers at Cape Perpetua, too.
Sea Stars are making a comeback!
One of the most miraculous discoveries in my successful tidepooling this spring was that sea stars are coming back! Decimated by sea star wasting disease, it’s been years since there was a healthy starfish population anywhere on the Pacific Coast, but there were a lot of them in Oregon this spring. Brings joy to my heart
Desert
Arches are ephemeral.
Arches and natural bridges are pretty magical, too. I listed them under desert to go with my photo, but you can also find them on the coast, products of erosion, sculpted by the waves. In the desert it’s the wind doing the carving for an arch, and water for the natural bridges.
These nature sculptures are ephemeral. beings. You never know how long they will last. The arch in this photo, Shakespeare Arch, is already gone, collapsing a couple of years ago. I’m glad I saw it when I did because it was a beauty, now gone forever.
Mosaic Canyon in Death Valley
Another magical product of erosion are slot canyons. All canyons are magical, never knowing but eagerly anticipating what’s around the next bend as you hike up one. Slots just bring the excitement up a notch, with the beauty of their polished walls and the way they have of drawing you in, deeper and deeper.
Flowers in the desert can be magical.
A good wildflower season in the desert is definitely magical. To see a landscape that is pretty bleak most of the time, nothing but dirt and rocks, transform into a veritable garden of delight, completely drenched with flowers – well, it’s got to be seen to be believed. Maybe we’ll get lucky this year. Fingers crossed.
It’s not only the quantity of flowers that blows me away, it’s the incredible variety.
Home
Last, but not least, I live in a magical place. When I first came to McCarthy, I felt like I’d discovered Never Never Land. It was a place where you never had to grow up, unique, like nowhere else in the world. That was before social media, before McCarthy was discovered by the rest of the world.
Perhaps it’s not quite so magical now, now that it is on the map. With Instagram, there are no longer any best kept secret magical places. But I’ll bet it’s still pretty magic to people who have never been there before, who are freshly discovering it. And after all, it’s the people who play the largest part in making any place magical, and McCarthy is still filled with amazing, kind, beautiful people, people who keep the magic alive.
McCarthy is a magical place.
Thanks to Ann-Christine of Leya for this week’s Lens-Artist’s Photography Challenge, Magical.
For this week’s Lens-Artists Photography Challenge, Patti invites us to explore empty spaces in our photography. Empty spaces can draw more attention to our subject, as it does in this wildflower photo.
Empty spaces draw attention to your subject.
In wildlife photography, leaving a lot of empty space in front of your subject gives them room to move.
Empty space gives this meadowlark plenty of room to strut his stuff.
Or empty spaces can be used in landscape photography to evoke a mood or illustrate the vastness or wildness of a place. Possibly my favorite place to capture emptiness in landscape photography is Death Valley National Park.
There’s a lot of empty in Death Valley’s landscapes.
Empty spaces can accentuate the vastness of a landscape.
The empty space in this image highlights the vastness of the landscape
Including a lonely road can evoke a mood of solitude and remoteness.
A lonely road can evoke a feeling of solitude and adventure.
Since many of the most exciting nameless canyons in Death Valley are reached by hiking up an open wash, these wide open spaces create a sense of adventure and exploration in me.
A canyon in the Grapevine Mountains
But by far my favorite empty spaces to photograph in Death Valley are the sand dunes.
Mesquite Sand Dunes
With five major dune fields contained within the park, there are a lot to choose from.
Panamint Dunes
Emptiness can not only emphasize distance, it can also highlight the sheer massiveness of certain landforms.
Shock and awe – Empty landscapes can take your breath away.
Empty spaces don’t need to bring attention to a particular subject. They can also be used to bring attention to something more ephemeral, like color, as shown in the sunset colors of the feature image, captured in White Sands National Park. Empty spaces also make great palettes for abstract photography. Here is my favorite meditation image, a celebration of emptiness.
All is Illusion
Death Valley has been on my mind a lot lately. A huge storm in late August dropped over a year’s worth of precipitation in one day. When the park finally reopened 2 months later, the basin was still filled with water,
There’s water still in the Badwater Salt Flats.
If there are enough little rain events in the upcoming weeks to keep seedlings moist, that big storm could lead to great things for 2024. It IS an El Nino year. Dare I hope? Could we actually have a superbloom? It’s possible. Stay tuned. I’ll be watching the weather closely. I’m keeping my dance card open, not committing to any housesits for 2024 yet. I’m hoping that instead, maybe this year, I can once again follow the flowers.
Can you imagine this wide open empty space filled with flowers? I can.
North meets South annually in my life. I migrate. As beautiful as Alaska is in the winter, like the birds and the whales, I prefer to head for warmer climes when the days get shorter.
In the following pairs of flowers, can you tell which is North and which is South?
For years I worked in Death Valley National Park in the winter. People used to tell me, “Wow, you go from one extreme to the other! But I didn’t see it that way.
Death Valley or Denali?
Sure, there are big differences. In some years I was moving from a park that contained the highest point in North America, Denali, to a park that held the lowest point, the Badwater Basin. But I was actually avoiding the extremes through my travels- escaping the cold of winter in Alaska and dodging the heat of summer in Death Valley.
Plants in both places use many of the same strategies to survive.
The predominant colors were different, it’s true – shades of green in Denali and shades of brown in the desert. But the landscapes were surprisingly similar.
That’s why they look so similar.
In fact, there were far more similarities than there were differences. North meets South, sharing many of the same attributes. When I first applied for a job in Death Valley, an Alaskan friend told me that I’d find it more like home than anywhere else in the lower 48. He was right.
The landscapes aren’t all that different.
Immense, open panoramas abound in both. The vastness cannot be described, it needs to be experienced. They are landscapes that make you aware of your own insignificance. Death Valley is the largest park in the contiguous United States. Denali is even bigger. In most places, these landscapes seem endless because there are few to no trees. When I worked in Denali, I lived at the Toklat Road Camp, 50 miles into the park. I was surrounded by alpine tundra, not trees.
They’re both vast.
There are parallels in many of the geological features. Both contain rugged mountain ranges divided by wide valleys. Alluvial fans and glacial outwash plains look surprisingly similar. The raw, naked geology is exciting. The stories that the rocks tell are so much easier to understand in barren landscapes like these.
A nameless canyon in the Black Mountains
One aspect that delights me is that both parks are filled with countless nameless canyons to explore. These landscapes invite you to wander.
A nameless canyon on Polychrome Mountain
Sometimes you find similar treasures as you explore these canyons. Did these horns come from Death Valley or Denali?
Denali or Death Valley?
One way North meets South is through the commonalities of their wildflowers. Both Denali and Death Valley can have phenomenal flower seasons. And plants in both parks use similar adaptations to survive in their harsh environments.
Both parks host an incredible variety of wildflower species.
Both Denali and Death Valley pose extremely difficult challenges for the plants and animals that live there. Although one place is scorching hot and the other bitterly cold, they share an element that amplifies the effects of both extremes – wind.
They’re not all belly flowers!
In both places, the growing season is short but intense. In both, you’ll also find that a lot of flowers grow low to the ground. Belly flowers. They often grow closely in mounds or in mats covering the ground, working together to avoid the drying effects of the relentless wind.
Growing low to the ground in a mound can protect the flowers from wind and conserve water.
Many plants in both places are covered with fine hairs, which keep Denali’s flowers a little warmer and protect Death Valley’s from the harsh sun.
Denali or Death Valley?
The biggest draw for me personally is that both Denali and Death Valley are incredibly wild, something I’m aching for on tame, benevolent Orcas Island this winter. There is something about the harshness of those landscapes that speaks to my soul. And of course, they’re also both awe-inspiringly beautiful.
My approach to photography has generally been pretty traditional. My photos are usually realistic, no frills or special effects except perhaps a little color saturation, which I’ve loved since the old-school film days when I used Velvia slide film and underexposed half a stop to get that rich kind of color.
Reflections on the McCarthy Road
But for this week’s Lens-Artists Photo Challenge, Patti asks us to share monochrome images with reflections or interesting shadows. I have a few monochrome images in my files, and found some that work well with this theme. But I’ve had a bit of fun re-imagining some of my polychrome images, too.
Seagull sunset at Beard’s Hollow, Cape Disappointment State Park
Here are a shadow (silhouette) and a reflection shot from Washington’s Long Beach Peninsula. They’re all about the birds.
Sanderling in black & white
You might have noticed that the seagull scenic wasn’t quite black & white, more of a blue. Monochrome means one color, not greyscale. Here are a couple of colorful monochrome images. Continuing on the bird theme…
a natural living sculptureChristmas morning, 2021Bandon Beach
I think the beach may be my favorite place to make monochrome images.
Secret Beach reflections
But there are so many nice reflections on the McCarthy Road, too.
One from the road, the McCarthy Road in Wrangell-St. Elias National Park & Preserve.
Here are a couple of pond lily reflections from the McCarthy Road, one in infrared, one in standard greyscale, under different lighting, portraying very different moods.
Infrared in late afternoon lightStandard grey scale at midday
I transformed a pink dawn moonset at New Mexico’s Bosque del Apache National Wildlife Refuge into a nighttime moonrise by going monochrome in this image.
B&W moonset on the Bosque looks like a moonrise.
As I look over my catalog, I see a lot of reflections and a lot of interesting silhouettes, but not that many interesting shadows. Shadows can accentuate texture and be quite dramatic in their own right, but I guess I don’t readily “see” their potential when out shooting. Too much of that polychrome mindset, instead of exploring the possibilities of monochrome. Something I’ll have to work on, now that I’m aware of it. But here is an image where strong shadows help to create an impression. In this phot of Jug Handle Arch near Moab, the shadows accentuate the texture and power of the rock as well as the harshness of the desert sun.
Jughandle Arch
My last image is a bit strange. I was exploring the ghost town of Goldfield, Nevada, which has an infamously haunted hotel. I peered into the window of the derelict building and spied an upright piano sitting amongst the rubble. I really wanted to capture a photo of the piano, but the glare from the midday sun and reflections from the brick wall obscured the view. The image I ended up with, though, looks uncannily like the piano is a reflection or even a mirage, oddly appropriate and haunting for a ghost town.
For this week’s Lens-Artists Photo Challenge, we’ve been invited to share our favorite images of 2022. I’ve been sharing this year’s favorite images in my last two posts, so I won’t be revisiting those images here. You can go back and look at those posts if you missed them!
The God rays are still one of my favorites!
But I would love to share some other favorites. A few of them I’ve published in earlier posts, but most are brand new. It seems my favorite images change weekly! Because of the scarcity of electricity and internet access during my summer months in Alaska, I have still not caught up with my image processing for the past year, and I discover new favorites every day.
This is becoming my favorite abstract image for 2022.
There are so many photos I haven’t even really looked at yet, including winter in Arches and most of my fall shots from Alaska and Washington State. It’s like Christmas every day for me as I continually find new favorite images.
I saw some amazing places in 2022. One that has been on my mind continually this week is the California Coast. Most winters I spend either January or February on the California Coast. I’m not there this year, which may be a blessing. My heart goes out to all the folks struggling with too much of a good thing, with the atmospheric river and torrential flooding.
Amethyst Tide
I spent the month of February 2022 housesitting in Pacific Grove on Monterey Bay. I was 4 blocks from the coast and made a point of doing photography nearly every day while I was there. That is also the batch of work I am currently processing, so a lot of my favorite images in this post are from that visit.
Pacific Grove
Another fantastic roadtrip was driving the Cottonwood Canyon Road in Grand Staircase – Escalante National Monument. It was on my bucket list for years, but usually this is a road that requires 4-wheel drive. I called the ranger station to see if it would be safe to drive in just a couple of miles to do some dispersed camping and the ranger told me the road was in great shape and my little Toyota truck would make it end-to-end just fine! Quick change of plans for me, I could not miss that opportunity. The highlight was visiting Grosvenor Arch, and it was every bit as beautiful as I had imagined it would be.
Grosvenor Arch
I’ve also spent a lot of time in Olympic National Park this year. I haven’t processed the fall images yet, but I’ve included a spring sunset in this collection.
Rainbow sunset
My last post included a lot of my favorites from the time I spent at home in Alaska, but I am revisiting my favorite flower photo from this summer.
I love the pattern displayed by the flowers and their shadows in this image.
My best sunset/sunrise of the year was traveling south down Canada’s Cassiar Highway. Every image in the series is so rich and so different. That sunset went through every shade a sunset could possibly have. Intense. I did a series on Instagram last week with a few of these images, 7 Shades of Sunset.
This image looks like I tweaked the color in LightRoom, but honest, it was really that red. I did not saturate the color, I even used Adobe Neutral as my color profile. I published a different swatch from that evening’s palette of hues in last week’s post, ‘cuz this one looked too over the top to me. But now I think it is my favorite.
Cassiar Highway Sunset
I traveled the Mt. Baker Highway for the first time this fall. Although the conditions were less than ideal due to wildfire smoke, I was amazed at the astounding views and the easy access to hiking in the alpine. I can only imagine how stunning it must be when there’s no smoke. A new favorite place, I will definitely be checking that road out again!
Mt. Shuksan
And of course now, I’m on Orcas Island for the winter, where there are some lovely waterfalls. This image is a favorite.
Rustic Falls
I look forward to seeing what favorite images 2023 will bring. If you have been following my travels on Facebook, though, it seems that Facebook has not been circulating my posts much lately. I urge you to subscribe to my blog instead, so that you won’t miss a post.
