Ephemeroptera

In the early summer clouds of mayflies swirl above shiny bright surfaces driven by one impulse.  Sex before death!  They have a short life span after adulthood, hence the name "Mayfly"... they might not be around in June!  Talk about the need to make haste, gather your rosebuds and all that stuff.
Ephemeroptera, a beautiful name for their order.  Sigmulla minuta as it rests, interrupted from the Mayfly Prom.  Alighted on my best friends fingertip, it poses defensively for the camera.  Cerci and fore-legs spread as long as possible that I may be confused for an instant and decided this is too big for my mouth.  I'll look away, little fly, time for your escape, maybe you'll impress the others at the dance.  I'm not hungry anyway.

The Upper Canyon

In the upper canyon of the Cache la Poudre River is a narrow rock cut and subsequent rapids where the river yields 68 feet of elevation to 300 yards of distance.  Not really a destination to itself, you need to know it's there in order to find it, but it is worth the effort and brief pause in the struggle of driving the entire canyon road.

On this afternoon, I had been nearly exsanguint while hiking in the near-by mountains and stopped here to have a break and listen to the river churn along the stone.   Cautious and clamorous on the loose embankment, I sat below the road intent and content to stare at the water, eventually lulled into a trance by the sound and the motion.  After a time, I began feeling better, blame the air, blame the ions, it's true nonetheless.

At the end of a hot day battling droves of snow-pool mosquitos for little pay-off and sore feet, I found respite in a place where nature's sounds are hemmed to their highest.  Drawn toward the water unwelcoming, yet soothing in it's way.  Gushing down canyon it drowns the logging truck noise and camper traffic.  Drifting into the granite my thoughts pause at the certainty of sight.

Tormented until now by my incurious counselors, the immobile & the impermanent, I grapple to my feet, wobbling away, homeward.  The moment lost in the hour, the lesson lost to lecture.  An aging man climbs a hill.  Wildness exists in temperance of itself.

Verdiqueduct

I'm a sucker for mysterious toxic looking green glowing light in tunnels.  It's pretty easy to know what's causing this particular patch, but my imagination reels with all the other possible stories!  Kinda wanna get my shoes wet and explore a few scenarios.

The Secret Behind the Wall

This is another one of those places that requires a bit of curiosity to find.  For the most part it's right out in plain sight, but you have to duck under the canopy which is only about three feet off the ground.  So while I was shooting this my head was in the branches of these trees.  That's a lot different than the clouds I usually walk around in.

The Sycamore at the Gilpin House

See that tree?  That tree is older than the house.  There's a dedication plaque suggesting this sycamore was living when our constitution was signed, 224 years ago.  The person at the visitors center said it is 312 years old, which means it was a seedling in the year 1699.  Such defiance!  It has it's own lightning rod, too.  The house is it's own affair.  It was a tavern and a hostile and there was a history book stolen when the British sacked the Brandywine frontline.
As a naturalist (of my own order, naturally), I tend not to go for all that historical stuff.  It's interesting, sure, it fills the space between nature's secrets.  Of whatever happened here so long ago, only the words remain. The battlefields and battalions have been overrun by buttercups and wild strawberries.  The great sycamore has come through unmoved.  Is that not a great lesson, too?
The Brandywine Battlefield Park, which used to be a State Park, is an unassuming place.  I like that you have the option of a guided tour or that you may roam freely.  You don't get that option in many historic places.  Here you can, and I will suggest, that you park your car and walk over the hills.  Staying open to the stories whispered while you sweep at the grasses.  Whatever your destination, you will have traipsed part of the path leading to our nation's independence.   As singular as the sycamore, you may stand aware and perhaps find your shoes stained not by blood, by buttercup pollen.

Sometimes I am a middle aged man presented with the reality of time and sometimes I am a five year old child lost in the bewilderment of a wonderful moment.

Swirling Uncertanty

The Pawnee Buttes.  Over the coming years, this open landscape and vital ecosystem will be destroyed.

Deciduous Shelter

Layers and layers and layers and layers and layers and layers of places to have a picnic and a nap!

Peeking Back

Seems like there should be a song playing in the background.  Perhaps on a calliope, or one of those small keyboard whistles we used to call "hooters" several generations ago.  I don't know what those instruments are called, but they are like a mini-calliope. Seeing moments like this, it seems only fitting that the carnival is in town.

Botanical Layers

Let's start the week off nice and light.  This verdant tangle was photographed in a friend's backyard.  I have a difficult time sitting and talking with people if I have a camera handy.  So, I was very glad when he needed to go inside to check on something as I could start clicking away!

Geoleometry

I have a love-hate relationship with Arches, NP.  In 2007, I made the photo on the right.  It was hotter that Georgia asphalt all over the plateau and we were chasing shade on the way out of camp.  Not sure what spurred us into the park, but when I was standing under this formation, in it's shade, a connection was made and a story started to emerge.  The most difficult aspect of photographing in this park are the tourists.  There are throngs of people and you'll just have to deal with them if you want a particular photo.  In 2007, I got lucky, the story was above us so all I had to do was point skyward and wait.  Big blue air, massive red stone, a sun that will eat you.  But the crucial element of this story and the area is a sense of wonder.  For me that wonder is connected with whimsy and the two are like seven year old boys.  One of my favourite photographs.
Five years later, almost to the day.  I have been making this spring trip to the greater Moab area for more than a decade.  Not for photography or art making purposes, those have their own schedule which I cannot dictate, but at the end of winter, I am hunting the sun and the stone, the wonder and whimsy.  Something struck me about the photograph I made in 2007, and on this trip I had the urge to try a reshoot.  So, no shit, there I was, again... this time, however, I was shivering in the shade.  The same tourists moving stiffly around me, making the same gestures they made five years ago.  Many of them pointing their own cameras skyward, clicking in mimicry and moving on.  It's not a judgment, please don't think that of me, the fact that I will sit for as long as it takes to get a photo provides me with a lot of time to watch and think.  I can't sit and watch ten people do the same thing without wondering about the behavioural instinct.  They'd stop, look at me, look up, snap a picture, look at the LCD, and shoot me a quizzical look, then go back toward the parking lot.  And I continued to sit and shiver and wait for the kids in the window to leave and maybe that large cloud would break up a little more.  After forty minutes, this happened:

Just enough similarity in the clouds to mimic the gestures of the stone, enough sun to reflect from the ground into the shadowed arch and give colour play with the sky.  A whimsical expression of the wonder that has connected me, and hopefully, you to the natural world.
This year's trip met with much colder temps and interesting weather patterns, that have been the persistent trend for the last few years.  Seems like the seasons are offsetting by a month.  This and the upswing in popularity may cause us to consider offsetting our annual trip, as well.
Fourteen years is a long time to get to know a place.  Watching the effects of time and ignorance destroy once pristine tracts of land has given me some understanding of the rationale behind regulations places like Arches have enacted.  But regulations are only as defined as the boundaries of the park and have created a casual "protect this, destroy that" attitude outside the boundary.  In the real wonderland, where the raw desert sits open and welcoming to the eco-tourists & photographers, the well-outfitted yet ill-prepared travelers who have begun creeping into the landscape like storm clouds.  Stoically sweeping skyward my greatest teacher remains silent in the face of my questions.  "How should we act?  Are you sheltering us, or saving yourself?  Am I hear to learn or to play?"


-Have a pleasant weekend.

Wallflower

Is this a study of colour and texture or a lesson from nature concerning the value of finding one's own place?  Of course, it could be both, but not at the same time.

Granary Camp

Let's see a show of hands... Who among you wants to be sitting in front of this view from a remote camp on the Colorado Plateau?

I've got good news... You are!

It's such good news, that I feel like sharing it twice.  Remember?  This is what it looked like yesterday evening.

Colour Shift at the National Memorial Arch

Still culling works out of the Valley Forge trip.  It was an amazing day!  We only spent about five hours there, but I walked away with a huge library of images. Of course, when you're out shooting with someone who isn't another photographer, you should at least choose someone with patients.

This is the National Memorial Arch at Valley Forge Park.  It was erected to commemorate the founding of the park.  The park itself is dedicated to the commemoration of the efforts and suffering of anyone who has had to fight to stay alive in Philadelphia. Well, OK, the park does mention a very specific group of people who used this area as a camping spot and had a miserable time.  Camping is now prohibited and most folks seem to have a pleasant enough visit.  Anyway, this arch occupies a prominent spot at the top of a hill.  There isn't much of a view, as I might define it, so getting a clean background and composing a solid story is problematic.  Luckily, there isn't any shortage of historic material covering the events that took place here, so I could go about making pretty pictures.

Great Green Wetland Preserve

It is very difficult for me to stay on a path.  The easier the path is to walk on the sooner I'm likely to veer in another direction.  This is probably some very telling detail into my personality, but it's also a plainly stated truth.  By contrast, the more difficult the path, the more likely I am to watch my footing and not look around at everything else.  The "undeveloped trail" I was ambling along here was better than most forest roads in my current state of residence.  When I spotted this submerged area, it was a flash of yellow/green light way off the trail and through a bunch of weeds.  It was also deep in the cover, where there wasn't a breath of wind to disturb the surface of the water.  The sun was going in & out of cloud cover, so, I just had to wait and swat mosquitos until it came back out and gave this great highlight again.  If you're wondering about the title, there were little flags around this area denoting "wetland preserve" status.  It's already inside a National Park, so I guess now it's double protected.

What Happens Above Moab

Oops... had the post ready to go, but the publish time was incorrect!  Stupid AM/PM setting... 

After thirty six hours of incredibly strong wind, everything calmed down and cleared out for our last night at camp.  I happily set up to shoot some stars and drain a battery.  In this photograph you're looking due East toward the LaSal Mountains from our camp high above the Moab Fault.  In the foreground is the city of Moab, UT glowing white on the left and the thin yellow glow on the right is from the potash mining operation.  The heavy concentration of star trails from the middle to the top is an arm of the Milky Way.  There was still a lot of dust hanging in the air (see the red sky in yesterday's post) and the light pollution was just enough to give the sky a slight orange colour cast.  During my test shots, I kept adjusting the white balance until the city lights went white (Tungsten A6) and that's why the sky appears green instead of blue.  Before the colour correction, the horizon was an indiscernible scribble along the base of the photo, but afterward you can now clearly see the snow line on the distant peaks and a little separation in the foreground hills.
That's enough geeking out for a Friday.  Here's hoping you can find a neat spot this weekend to stare through the troposphere.  Cheers!

Ominous Decoder

A tremendous wind started during the night and by dawn everyone had scattered from camp auspiciously seeking refuge.  Without any hope my party loaded the Jeep and descended the rim toward the fault, committed to check any turn, as every promise is often better than the truth.  As is the case with truth, so it is with the wind; pervasive, invasive & tenacious.

Here is a place easy to find, along a path long stolen from the wild.  Travelled by a removed and indolent population buzzing along seemingly content to remain unaware.  Some will linger here to mark a box on a list, some to claim connection, others, like myself, are knowingly lost.  Back into the storm we drove, past the tenement camps and diorama shelters of a people who believe they understand nature because they have stood near a marquee exclaiming it's power and beauty.  My own people, whose language, I have struggled to learn that we may speak as friends.

I suppose there is a story to be read on this rock.  If you are imaginative and slightly literate in a visual way the rock is no more than a billboard.  Mostly, that is, except for this detail.  Here I feel as though I am a stranger, invasive, this was not meant for me and the spirits on the wind have turned the sky red that I may not feel welcome.
My own language tells of a truth that glows in the stone, screams with the wind.  The spirits of the land demand that we learn to understand now in the face of an uncertain future.

Another sort of Twinpod

These twinpods were everywhere at one of our recent camps on the Colorado Plateau.  We arrived at the end of the seasonal bloom so most of the plants only had the seedpods.  This one, however, has both flowers and pods!  It was growing very close to the access road I was using and I nearly parked right on top of it.  Sometimes you just get lucky.  Normally, I try to give the full common name and the Latin name, but I have to use a guide to identify this sort of stuff and it wasn't very helpful.  Botany wasn't an elective at my art school, either, so I'm kind of stuck.  Chime in with a comment if you have any ideas.

The Banks of the Poudre

This lovely photograph was taken a couple of weeks ago on an early morning and early spring stroll at Sterling Natural Area in Fort Collins.  The Poudre River forms the Western Boundary of the Natural Area, more or less, and to get this shot I stood ankle deep in the gloppy river sediment.  On top of the embankment in the right of the photo I found the remains of a mature fox, obviously eaten, several days later there were reports of a mountain lion in the area.  Better the fox than the school kids, I guess.  Well, none of that is depicted here, you get to enjoy the calm reflective beauty of a river as it flows into spring.

Storming Through Valley Forge

Out for a walk in Valley Forge NP with my mom, we didn't get twenty steps from the car before this squall opened on us.  You can see from the lighting on the grass throughout the photo how the rain came in heavy waves.  The areas of lighter grass are also areas of lighter rain activity!  How cool is that?  Thankfully, my mom carries a huge umbrella and was able to shelter us both while I made this photo.  If she had a standard or compact umbrella she would have gotten totally soaked.  I'm willing to bet everyone is tired of the rain photos on this blog, but hang in there everybody, the sun will probably come out tomorrow.
It's the first Monday of the month and that means it's also wallpaper day! The above photograph can be downloaded here, sized 2530x1600 so it'll fit anything you want it to, enjoy.  I'm willing to bet everyone is tired of the rain photos on this blog, but hang in there everybody, the sun will probably come out tomorrow.