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 Unpublished, that is.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 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.
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.
It got to -40 in McCarthy last week, and almost 20 below in Palmer. It’s been C-O-L-D in Alaska.
Thankfully, I’m not there. I decided to make like a bird and migrate. I’ve spent enough winters in cold places. For me, Warmth = Bliss. I’m following my bliss this winter.
TrustedHousesitters has been quite helpful to me when it comes to following my bliss. They hook up people looking for a petsitter with folks like me. I can check out what life is like in other beautiful places for a week or a month, and the homeowners can rest easy knowing that their home and pets will be well taken care of during their absence. It’s a wonderful trade, a real win-win situation.
Magdalena
I spent the end of October taking care of a sweet dog and kitty in Magdalena, New Mexico. Magdalena is the kind of town that brings those old Western movies to life. Established in 1885, it was a cowtown and railhead, the end of the line for cattle drives from as far away as Arizona.
The cattle drives are over, but Magdalena is proud of its rich history and happy to share it with visitors. This sleepy little town is chock full of art galleries and coffee shops. It’s a fun place to spend a Saturday afternoon, strolling along the sidewalks and checking out all the wonderful creations on display.
Not much left of Kelly
I love ghost towns. One way I follow my bliss is by exploring these glimpses of the past whenever I get the chance. Magdalena is surrounded by ghost towns and near-ghost towns. That old Western movie vibe you feel here? The ghost towns are a big part of that. You get a taste of the Old West as you walk their dusty streets.
Just a few miles from Magdalena is Kelly. It was once a thriving mining community, with a population of over 3,000 people. All that’s left now are foundations, a few walls, and a headframe at the mine. There is only one building left standing in town, the Catholic church.
…except the church
Another ghost town near Magdalena is Riley. Originally known as Santa Rita, the town changed its name to get a post office, since there was already another Santa Rita in the Territory. Riley was a farming community and died during the Dust Bowl in the 1930s when its water table dropped precipitously. The church is still standing here, too. New Mexico is like that.
Lack of water is what killed Riley.
Water is key in the New Mexico desert. I spent most of my time in Magdalena sitting on the porch enjoying the birdlife attracted by a tiny pool on the property.
While in New Mexico, I pursued another passion, following my bliss by birdwatching at Bosque del Apache National Wildlife Refuge. Due to the ongoing drought, things were a little different at the Bosque this fall. The shallow ponds that are usually the big draw for photographers who want those images of thousands of Snow Geese and Sandhill Cranes were dry. The Refuge was only flooding those fields that were planted with food for the birds. But there were still many incredible opportunities to observe and photograph dozens of different species. Sunrise at the Bosque is a magical, holy experience and I am thankful that I was able to visit this year.
A whirlwind of sparrows
I’m on another housesit now, a farm in southern Oregon. There’s a lot of birdlife here, too. I found it rather serendipitous that I am here for Thanksgiving, and a flock of 23 wild turkeys has been hanging out on the property off and on all week. Guess they know I have no intention of shooting them for Turkey Day!
Down on the Farm
Watching them though, I can totally understand why the Founding Fathers did not take Ben Franklin’s advice and make this bird our national symbol. Turkeys are really homely birds. Bald heads covered with red bumps, wrinkly and scrawny necks, not necessarily a good look for a national symbol!
This is NOT a sexy bird.
However, I’m enjoying the peace and serenity of country living this Thanksgiving. I’m thankful to be warm and counting my blessings. It’s a good life. That’s my advice for this Thanksgiving weekend – Count your blessings. And remember to follow your bliss – whenever you can and wherever it leads you!
Not all birds leave Alaska in the winter. Some birds are tough and hardy and stick it out. Some just endure the winter, others adapt. Their very physiology changes to help them contend with the cold a little better.
Some birds stick it out all year long.
I wanted to be like them and adapt when I stayed up here this year. I wanted to adapt but I found that I just endured. I’m more like most birds.
I’m more like most birds.
Most birds have decided that the best way to deal with winter is to avoid it. They migrate. I like that lifestyle. I can relate. So I am delighted that it is finally migration time.
Migrating Canada Geese
It’s migration time in Alaska, and we’re all very excited to see our old friends coming back. Swans are everywhere, with reports coming in from friends in Anchorage, Fairbanks and McCarthy. Sandhill cranes are in Fairbanks, although our local Palmer flock hasn’t shown up quite yet. Any day now, though. Maybe when I go out to shoot the sunset this evening they will have arrived. One can hope!
Maybe they’ll show up today!
Here in Palmer a huge mixed flock of Snow Geese and Canadian Geese was spotted in a farmer’s field, flushed by a passing eagle. The birds are flying north, more every day. Ducks are landing in ponds the minute the ice melts. It’s a birdwatcher’s dream all over Alaska, but there is one place in particular that will surely transport you to birder nirvana.
The geese are in Palmer!
That place is Cordova. The fishing village of Cordova is the gateway to the vast and pristine Copper River Delta, one of the greatest wetland ecosystems in North America. Ninety percent of the birds migrating along the Pacific Flyway stop here, in the largest wetlands on the entire route. It’s a staging area, spring break for the birds traveling to their summer homes in Alaska from their winter abodes in places as far away as the tip of South America.
Spring break for migrating birds!
Nearly 5 million shorebirds depend on the Delta to rest and recharge. At high tide on the mudflats at Hartney Bay, endless flocks of sandpipers and dunlins perform an intricate aerial ballet. Look closer and you’ll find dozens of other species. Thirty-six different shorebird species, including the entire North American population of Western Sandpipers, inhabit the shoreline, in terrain varying from silty mudflats to rocky beaches.
And that’s just the beach. The marshes in the Delta are as fertile as the shoreline. Standing on the boardwalk at Alaganik Slough, an overwhelming cacophony of sound will greet you, the mating songs of a thousand birds reverberating through the twilight. The only thing louder than the trumpeting of the swans is the crazy braying of Dusky Canadian Geese. But the strange and eerie sound of a snipe performing its’ corkscrew skydive mating dance is the command performance in this incredible bird opera.
Cordova has lots of eagles, too!
I was lucky enough to catch that show not once, but twice. But it’s been twenty years. I was hoping to make it back this spring, but Cordova is a bit off the beaten path.
Whimbrel
Budget cuts to the Alaska Marine Highway have eliminated ferry service to Cordova outside of peak tourist season, so the only way in now is to fly. Cordova won’t be happening for me this year after all.
Shorebird convention
But I still want to take a birding trip to celebrate the transition from winter to summer. I need a spring break. I’m thinking about spending a few days at the end of another road, in the little town of Homer.
Flock of Seagulls
Homer doesn’t have as many birds as Cordova. Cordova is in a class by itself. But Homer has some great migrations passing through, too. And some of the birds are different. Homer is a lot farther west. I might even see a bird I’ve never seen before.
Ruddy Turnstone
After that spring break, it will probably be time for me to take flight too, moving from the Matanuska Valley to the Wrangell Mountains and my home in McCarthy. I’ll wait for the snow and ice to melt, then follow those migrating birds, and greet them in the ponds along the way.
I’ll greet old friends at the ponds along the way.
It will be great to see all my old friends, both human and avian, both the tough hardy ones that stick it out through the long cold and the ones who migrate.
One of my tough hardy friends, who gets by with a little help from his friends my neighbors
