Monthly Archives: June 2013

The Narrows

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There are places you go to that are so beautiful that they etch themselves onto your brain so deeply that you can never forget them. The Narrows of the Virgin River in Zion National Park is one of those places. Hiking up the bank of the river you are treated at every turn to one stunning image after another.

The day was quiet, the river barely making any sound except for a soft murmuring as it ran over the rocky shoals, a Pinyon Jay was calling far up the river, the sound echoing back and forth along the cliff face, and you swore you could almost hear the sunlight hitting the stone above as it found its way into the canyon. Bright almost iridescent colors next to softly muted ones created a contrast that was dramatic yet right, with all the pieces fitting together exactly as they should. I could go on and on about how blue the sky was or how absolutely gorgeous the cliff face glowed in the sunlight but what I really remember was the sense of peace and serenity I felt standing there. At the risk of sounding way too New Age and Cosmic, which if you were to ask any of my friends I am definitely not, there was a sense of becoming one with nature that was unmistakable. This is how you’re supposed to feel when you experience nature on this level and this is what I miss when I’m homebound. If you’re not doing anything you should go there.

Connoisseur

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Life is pretty easy for these guys right now, we’ve had the spring rains, the grass is high, the newest leaves are just hanging on the aspen waiting to be chosen and all he has to do is walk around and pick the greenest ones. The elk herd in Rocky Mountain National Park is in great shape after a fairly mild winter and he’s still got a couple of months before he has to go back to work, so now is the time to eat as much as he can, grow those antlers out and get in his best fighting form. Fighting is the last thing on his mind right now however, that will come soon enough. Today its finding the nicest green leaves, the sweetest grass, lying around in the shade with his buddies swapping lies, talking dirty and spitting. He isn’t even checking out the cows yet. This is guy time and one of the few times in the year where he can take it easy and he is going to take full advantage of it. Unlike his brothers up in Yellowstone he doesn’t have to worry about wolves or grizzlies ruining his day so for him right now every day’s a Sunday. Since we know what’s in store for him in September I say we give him a pass and let him enjoy the brief summer.

Purple Haze

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Can light really do this? Produce color like this? The camera says it can. This was taken after the sun went down and it was nearly dark on December 5th around 6:30pm.The magic hour is over and it is rapidly getting very dark. Dark enough that it makes you happy that the guard rails next to the edge are there. Although it looks light enough in the picture that is misleading because the sensor in the camera, that little square wafer of wisdom we photographers like to call the Wowser place, sees light differently than our eyes do. To attempt to explain the difference I spoke to our resident eye-guy, Kanye Seeme, an opticians assistant from Nigeria who is doing field work here at the Institute while he is hiding out from his government, I mean on sabbatical. In a nutshell, here is the gist of his explanation. “Well the eye you know, is in the front part of your head, entitling you to see forward and blah, blah, blah, blah, don’t bang into,  blah, blah, blah, massive rupture, blah, blah, look out, blah, can’t put back in, blah, blah, blah, so that is why we see very good.”

I don’t know about you but I for one, think we’re all good with that explanation. I believe that what we can take from all this, is, that eyes are good, seeing is good, color is good, the Grand Canyon is good, and unfortunately Nigerian optician’s assistants are bad. So then, four goods, one bad. Good trumps bad. Let’s go to the Grand Canyon then and see what all the colors about.

RiverDance

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All of the rivers in Yellowstone National Park have personalities of their own but the Firehole river is hands down the coolest. While the Yellowstone river is majestic and the Gibbon is chaotic and the Madison is grand, it is the Firehole that has the hippest personality of all. It is due to the supporting characters along it’s banks as much as anything. From the dive-bombing Osprey that slice into the crystal clear water, to the occasional coyote that swims across it and even the buffalo that will walk along it’s banks in the water just for the fun of it, the Firehole is more like a refined circus than a carnival.

 Here we have a Mallard duck preparing for the season premiere of Yellowstone’s version of RiverDance. Each year one of the animal groups is chosen to be the featured performers in this season’s extravaganza, and this year it is the duck family, much to their delight. Rehearsing tirelessly the ducks are perfecting each and every move. Carefully choosing the perfect location to show off their classic performances, this rock overhang is the absolute best choice for the climax of his routine.

The show also features the high diving Osprey showcasing their dangerous and heart stopping “Dive of Death” where they plunge headlong into the river and reappear with glistening Cutthroat trout in their talons, plus the zany and carefree Common Mergansers, the mop-tops of the duck world, performing their perfectly choreographed skit “Skipping Across the River Top”. The featured performance though, will be the dancing talents of the Mallard backed up by that Bevy of Bountiful Beauties, the Duckettes, performing a dance routine “Rollin’ On The River” set to the music of Ike and Tina’s “Proud Mary”. It will be a showstopper.

So, don’t miss it. Performances daily at locations up and down the Firehole River. Be there or be square.

Rhythms

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Rhythms. They are the heartbeat of life. Whether it is the roaring of the Yellowstone river through the LeHardy rapids or the slow steady waving of tall grass in the Gibbon meadows the rhythm is there. I remember as a kid being incredibly tuned in to the rhythm of my world. The noise your feet made in new tennis shoes as you walked down a hot blacktopped road, the echoes of a crow calling way back in the woods, the sounds of tires on the highway coming into your room late at night, faint in the beginning, then louder, then fading away again as you lay on top of the covers, too hot to be covered up.

I don’t know if we hear those rhythms as much any more, or pay attention to them if we do, and if we do hear them they’re usually all fast and furious and mostly discordant. When everyone lived a more agrarian lifestyle, rhythms were huge. When to plant, when to harvest. Get up when it’s light, go to bed when it’s dark. We don’t farm any more or least the majority of us don’t so there’s not much opportunity to experience the natural cycles around us. The nearest I came to being aware of and working within the natural rhythms was when I was building landscape ponds for gardens. If you’ve ever had one you know that they have a mind of their own and they run the show, not you. If you fight them they will never cooperate but if you learn their rhythm they will do exactly what they’re supposed to at exactly the right time and you become a caretaker rather than a opponent. Nature tells the pond what to do and when to do it and it is always right. Once you learn that life gets easy.

Summer has it’s own set of rhythms and they are usually longer, a deep cycle with a low strong beat. It makes for long, slow, lazy afternoons and provides time to lay in the grass and let the warm sun wash over you, thinking of nothing, just being. The rewards of being a photographer, especially one that concentrates on the natural world, is you get to hear and see the rhythms of life once more even if it is only reliving them through your images.

Out of Frame

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When you start getting close to animals, close enough that they begin to ignore you, things become apparent that you don’t notice unless you’re in a blind or watching them from a distance through glasses. Little mannerisms appear, like how they cock their heads before they pounce, or the way their ears can droop when they realize they may be in trouble but don’t know where that trouble may be coming from. The personal characteristics that make that animal unique, a coyote acts like a coyote because of the very characteristics that make him one. If that sounds like a simple statement it is, some of this stuff isn’t that hard.

Sometimes those characteristics aren’t seen because you haven’t gotten close enough to them yet. Not close as in distance, close as in understanding. You have to put your time in and absorb everything he’s showing you. I had spent several hours or so with this guy as he wandered around near a campground in Yellowstone, sniffing the ground around the tables, watching for scraps, half-heartedly trying to catch a vole in the high grass and slowly using up the afternoon. The setting sun began turning everything gold and shimmery, the air got still and the shadows darkened preparing for twilight when something off in the distance made him suddenly aware. The easy-going behavior was suddenly gone. It could have been a grizzly, or worse, wolves, because wolves kill coyotes just because they’re coyotes, or perhaps just another coyote checking out his territory. Whatever it was it changed things.  He wasn’t just hanging out spending an afternoon anymore. Now things became different, more dangerous, as they do when night approaches and that brought out the serious side of being a coyote. It’s all about staying alive and getting to tomorrow so you can hunt again, feed the kids, spend time with the mate, the usual stuff.

This is one of those stories that doesn’t have an end, I never found out what was out of frame, or what the rest of the story was. But that happens a lot in life, you don’t always know the answers. I was just happy to be a small part of his day and I wasn’t really concerned with what was out there. Coyotes have been around for a long time and when things go wrong they have a habit of nearly always landing jam side up. It would be cool if we could mind-read though, wouldn’t it? I might have been a little untruthful there a moment ago when I said I didn’t care what was out there, I do, I would really, really like to know the rest of the story.

Flower Day

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Yesterday was Flower Day here at the Institute and as such it meant everyone dropped whatever they were doing and went forth to find flowers. It seems a simple task, look for anything that wasn’t green, brown or black and if it had a top that was a different color and was pretty that would be a flower. Some of our staffers couldn’t quite grasp the concept so we had a lot of pictures of things that fit that definition but were not flowers. One of our brighter staffers brought in a picture of a plastic grocery bag snagged on a bush that had colorful writing on it thinking that he had found a flower. Imagine his chagrin when he found out what it really was, the big stupid. Another had caught a shot of a Western Tanager on a branch and was sure that he had the perfect flower picture. Man, I do not know where I find these dummies. I almost gave him a point for being original though, almost.

Then as often happens here at the Institute, our butts were saved by the rarest of events, success. One of our new people, I must learn her name, came in with this. This is what we wanted, a picture that said flowers. Displaying this image on our four story screen, I looked around the massive studio here at the Institute and saw row after row of staffers, dozens of them, sitting up to the highest reaches of our bleachers, who had failed miserably at their task, actually see what a flower truly was, and it brought a small tear to my eye. Not because of their new found enlightenment but because I was saddled with such a bunch of rummies, misfits and dull-normals. No amount of enlightenment is going to make up for these clowns, and to make matters worse, Friday is our quarterly payday. I have to pay them. Fortunately by the time their food, clothing and liquor bills are settled, plus what ever else they bought from the Institute store, I’m only out about 80 bucks cash. The bright spot here is it’s spring. And we have flowers of course.