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.
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.
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.
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 Unpublished, that is.
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.
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.
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.
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.
I was just SO happy to finally visit tide pools and see sea stars!
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.
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.
This last shot illustrates just how rugged and wild Albuquerque’s backyard wilderness really is.
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?
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.
When I saw that this week’s Lens-Artist’s Photography Challenge was geometry, I was at a bit of a loss at first. After all, I do primarily nature photography and although Mother Nature loves a circle or a sphere, she isn’t much into squares and cubes.
Then I happened to notice a similarity in the rock art of many of the ancestral peoples of the desert southwest. These folks were really into geometry! Even their sheep were made up of squares and rectangles.
Stylized, geometric depictions of people and animals can be found in rock art from the Fremont culture of northern Colorado and Utah to the Ancestral Puebloans of the Four Corners region to the Mogollon culture of southern New Mexico and Arizona.
Most of the ruins and rock art date back 700 to 1100 years. There are thousands of sites throughout the canyons of the desert southwest, some in quite remote locations. It is so thrilling to walk around a bend in a canyon and discover these traces left behind by people who lived there a thousand years ago!
My first backpacking trip into the desert was in Grand Gulch, Utah. Back then it was just BLM land, in the middle of nowhere. Now it is part of the disputed Bear’s Ears National Monument. After walking around many bends in the canyon and discovering rock art and ruins here, there and everywhere, I was hooked for life. Searching out Ancestral Puebloan sites on the Colorado Plateau became a hobby and a passion of mine every spring.
By the end of the 1800s, many ruins were damaged and destroyed by pothunters, who would tear up the dwellings in their search for the buried treasure of the artifacts left behind. In 1906 the Antiquities Act was passed by Congress to protect these national treasures.
Since then, only 5 presidents have not used the Antiquities Act to protect additional lands (Nixon, Ford, Reagan, Bush Sr. and Trump). Trump is the only president who has attempted to remove lands from Monument status.
Theft and vandalism are still major problems faced by those trying to preserve both ruins and rock art. When I worked at Death Valley, we were not allowed to publish any pictures of rock art in the park or disclose locations to visitors because people would literally chip the panels right off the cliffs!
Graffiti and target practice deface many rock art panels. This damage is difficult and often impossible to repair. I can’t help but wonder why some people feel this need to destroy the work left behind by others. I just don’t understand it.
Since enforcement is so difficult, the key may be education. If we can convince others of the value of these ancient artifacts, and how that value is enhanced by being left in place for future generations, perhaps we, and our grandchildren’s grandchildren, may enjoy the geometry of ages past for many more years to come.
Thank you to Patti of pilotfishblog for this week’s Challenge, Geometry.
Morning is the challenge Ann-Christine of To See a World In a Grain of Sand has offered us this week; either what our mornings are looking like now or a special morning we won’t forget.
I’m not a morning person. I have often said that I am actually, truly, allergic to morning. Getting up early can be painful for me. In my home in Alaska, sunrise can be anywhere from 2AM to 10AM, depending on the season, so waking at the crack of dawn to watch the sun rise has never been one of my morning rituals.
I tend to get up and hit the computer first thing, business first, and focus on the fun later in the day. And my current mornings, sorry, are frankly not worth writing about. But there have been times when getting up early has rewarded me with priceless treasures and magical experiences.
As I look over the last 6 months or so, I remember a lot of very special mornings. Watching the sun rise over the desert. Seeing the mists dance through the redwood forest. Photographing early morning light on a Pacific Coast lighthouse.
But the mornings that stand out most in my memory are the ones spent in Bosque del Apache National Wildlife Preserve this past winter.
The Bosque is a birder’s paradise. I play at being a birder sometimes. But if I was a real birder, I’d get up early in the morning! Well, for the Bosque I made an exception and did just that.
Watching the sun rise and the snow geese take off from the ponds on the Bosque is quite an experience. It’s a ritual, like watching the sunset in Key West. It takes dedication. Not only do you have to get up at the crack of dawn, it is freakin’ COLD out there!!
You need patience. Sometimes it seems like not much is happening, and it gets colder and colder because you are standing still. But wait for it.
There will likely be a few geese already in the ponds when you arrive. The cranes have spent the night there, roosting in the shallow water as protection against predators like the coyote.
Then you hear it. A cacophony of honking, braying geese. You might see them in the distance as they fly from one pond to another. Or you might be suddenly overwhelmed, as hundreds of birds appear from seemingly nowhere, surrounding you as they join their kin in the waters before you. The din is terrific. One flock after another arrives.
A flush of pink begins to fill the sky. Although the cranes and snow geese are the stars of the show, you may begin to notice other birds – ducks, Shovelers and Pintails, swimming around in the foreground, and perhaps a gaggle of Canadian Geese behind those cranes.
If you look closer at the vast flocks of Snow Geese, you begin to discern a few differences. That one is much smaller – it must be a Ross’ Goose. See the dark one over there? It’s a White-Fronted Goose. The sun rises behind you, lighting up the sky. But it hasn’t reached the ponds yet. They are still in deep shade.
With the additional light, the cranes begin to get restless. They start walking, in groups. In shallow, frozen places, they slip and slide with a graceful gait. You might notice a group – peering, watching, intent, looking for a signal perhaps. They begin to take off randomly, two or three at a time. I found it hard to anticipate – which cranes will take flight next? But most of the birds are not ready to leave just yet.
They’re waiting for the sun. When the sunlight reaches the birds, they know it’s time to move to the fields for the day. On some mornings birds continue to leave in small groups, a crane here, a crane there, a dozen geese at a time.
But other mornings are magic. If you’re lucky, you may see one of those rare spectacles of nature that people travel thousands of miles to observe, that National Geographic moment.
The anticipation builds. The constant background chatter of thousands of squabbling geese crescendoes. Then every goose on the pond takes off at once, exploding into the air. This is a sight you will remember forever.
