I finally went. Yosemite is landscape photography’s most iconic location. From Ansel Adams to Carlton Watkins and tens of thousands of second-rate reflections it has been photographed-to-death. I’ve never wanted to join in; so much so that the idea of going repelled me for years. Perhaps it was the fear of being overwhelmed by all the pictures in my brain or just not wanting to add to the huge amount of derivative dreck. Perhaps I outgrew being threatened or no longer felt I had anything to lose? I decided to go. I would just see what I could see. I was nervous.

Driving west from Santa Fe, across Arizona, up the dry eastern side of the Sierra Nevada range brought me through Death Valley National Park. Not many people visit Death Valley at summer solstice. I stood alone in the hot wind at Zabriskie Point. Millions of photographs have been made there of  this view from this place. I made a few. They were not special.

At Furnace Creek I bought a hat with a big embroidered Raven (Corvus Corax).

Big Pine California had a cheap motel. The next morning I drove toward Yosemite in the dark. The road entered a steep glacial valley as the sun rose behind me. Climbing to Tioga Pass and the park entrance, the extreme change of elevation was surprising.

Olmsted Point gave me my first view into Yosemite Valley. Half Dome was in the distance. The style of a tunnel’s stonework seemed familiar. It resembled New York City’s Central Park. I realized that Olmsted Point was named for Frederick Law Olmsted, the landscape architect. I began to see that Yosemite is more “parky” than many other national parks. The roads are consciously designed to dramatically present views. I was surprised at how small the valley is. I was surprised at the city-like crowds. I was surprised to see Sequoia trees. I was surprised to find no place to get lunch. I recognized spots where famous photographs were made. It was exciting.

Bridalveil Fall

Bridalveil Fall descends from a glacial “hanging” valley. The snow pack in the high country was melting fast. Rivers were high and the wind was strong. Part of Bridalveil was being blown vertically back up the fall. The glowing water contorted in the wind like a dancing ghost. It was beautiful. I watched for a long time and then left the crowd in the valley to join the crowd on the road to Glacier View. Two hours of stop-and-go and a short walk brought me to Glacier View. It was late afternoon. I hadn’t eaten. There was a snack bar so I eagerly stood in line. While sitting on a rock eating junk food I noticed strange, rainbow-colored, iridescent lizards around me. Even if I hadn’t been so hungry those lizards would have been vaguely psychedelic. I have never seen anything like them. (I was relieved that the colors appear in the photographs.) They may be Fence Lizards or Blotch-Sided Lizards or something else. Either species has great variations and nothing in a book is a good match. I have no idea what they are. (They did speak English.)

The distant waterfalls roared across the valley. The sun was at the precise angle to produce a full rainbow in the mist at Nevada Fall.

Nevada and Vernal Falls

The prime rainbow is visible in water droplets in a circle 42 degrees off axis from the sun. I have been accused of Photoshopping this picture and making the rainbow. (Yes, I could. No, I didn’t.) Both the sun and the photographer moved a bit. The rainbow vanished.

Nevada and Vernal Falls with Boulder

Granite often exhibits spheroidal weathering making great balls of stone.

By 2 AM I was in San Francisco.

I believe I made three of my own pictures. At least, I made three that I have never seen before.

Instead of returning to Yosemite I drove south around the sierras to Joshua Tree National Monument.

The noon sun was hot and crisp. My mood was good as I walked through the rounded monzonite granite boulders. A Joshua tree cast a surreal shadow on a boulder. I raised my camera to consider a picture.

Through the viewfinder I saw a little squirrel. She wasn’t there before.
I lowered the camera.
No squirrel.

I raised the camera.

There she was again looking at me.

I lowered the camera.

No squirrel.

I raised the camera and quickly yanked it away. Just rock, no squirrel. She was gone forever, never to be seen again.

Here’s what I think happened: Yersinia (my name for the little pest) was using the eyes on the top of her skull to just barely spy over the edge of the rock and watch me. When my eyes disappeared behind the camera she thought I could not see her and popped up for a full look. The squirrel understands that eyes see!
*It is also possible that there is some kind of “Quantum Squirrel” effect where the squirrel was neither there nor not there until recorded. Schrödinger had a cat, we can have a squirrel.

Yersinia was gone. No trace. Just me, boulders and a Corvus Corax sailing overhead.
He turned my way. Twice he dived and shot between me and a granite wall flying so fast wind roared off his wings.

Raven (Speed)

Ravens don’t normally do that.
He was flying for me.
Showing off.
Or maybe looking at my hat.

admin :: Sep.14.2011 :: California, Geology, National Park Monument, New Mexico, Uncategorized :: No Comments »

Red Hill is a pyroclastic cone in southwestern New Mexico. Red Hill also gives its name to a nearby ghost town.

We visited in April driving south from Santa Fe, down the Rio Grande Valley then west at Socorro, past Pie Town and Datil. The high desert skies were a flawless blue in the mornings with only thin afternoon clouds. This meant sharp blue shadows and a warm spring sun. By late afternoon a restaurant/motel looked good from the road. The restaurant was dirty. Bad food took an hour to arrive. While we waited for our meals, we watched a grove of trees across the highway collect vultures.

By the time we were able to leave, dozens of turkey vultures had assembled. Vultures like to roost in communities and individuals often return to the same branch each night. I approached on foot. They eyeballed me from the heights. I kept a distance and photographed as the light faded.

After the restaurant, the attached motel was unattractive. We found another just over the Arizona line.

In the morning we missed Red Hill. The red hill can be seen from the highway but the extinct town is nearly invisible. Google Earth showed what looked like a maar to the south. We turned off the highway.  The pinion and juniper scrub became smooth hills with sparse dry grass. There were no fences and therefore it was easy to drive off-road on a trace. It was marvelous. The ground was rough but the larger landscape was soft and flowing, broken occasionally by small ridges.

The first depression we encountered could have been a small maar but I wasn’t sure. It was more rounded than any maar I had seen. Maar volcanoes are caused by magma vaporizing a water table. The resulting steam explosion clears the overburden of rock like a champagne cork. The explosion leaves jagged edges. This landscape looked liquid-smooth as if raindrops on a giant pond had frozen. Mounting a rise to the South, there was the maar I had seen in the aerial photographs! It too was softly rounded.

There were wonderful, wave-like contours. The ridge on the right promised a higher view. I found a drivable route to the ridge top.

From the ridge top I could see the two maar volcanoes with parallel trenches running Northeast/Southwest.

I photographed a turkey vulture miles away  in front of the smaller maar. Vultures are such excellent “glider pilots” that they almost never have to flap a wing.

I photographed with large and small cameras. Even at this distance, a panorama is needed to take it all in.

The Sun blinked dark. The vulture had cast his shadow on me. I suspect that vultures do this to “poke” us. Perhaps he saw me looking down at him and came to let me know that he was looking down at me. A year ago, two companions and I were sequentially “shadow wiped” by a turkey vulture while walking on a peak near Santa Fe. We saw 2 vultures circling below us. The birds rose and flew over us. I thought it was intentional then, now I am sure of it.

The ridge was surrounded by miles of rough lava and ash. A smooth brown cobble at my feet was different. I think that it is a sandstone xenolith (Ancient Greek: “foreign rock”). Sometimes  material from underlying rock formations is carried upwards during an eruption and becomes incorporated into the lava as a xenolith.

I had feather-footed the pickup up the ridge in 4-wheel drive. It was difficult picking a route through broken lava, small cliffs and fissures trying not to disturb the soil. Getting down involved retracing the route exactly to avoid any drops or rough patches. There was only an occasional shine where the dry grass was compressed from a passing wheel to help.

I was relieved to have found the right route back down and glad to not have marked this beautiful landscape with any tire ruts. Truly the perfect vehicle here would be a horse.

admin :: Aug.13.2011 :: Geology, New Mexico, New Mexico Landscape Photography, Volcano :: No Comments »

When the Rocky Mountains were just getting their start, when there was an ocean between the western and eastern parts of what is now North America, there were dinosaurs. The dinosaurs left their bones and footprints on the land. A small percentage of bones were covered and still remain in the earth where they fossilized, were buried further and hoisted and submerged as mountains rose and fell. Sometimes fossils are revealed by erosion. They may last at the surface for a few days or decades or centuries until they too are worn away.

Blocks of Dakota Sandstone from the rim rock rest on a bench above the Purgatoire River.

Dinosaur footprints are visible today at a number of sites around the world. One site is along the Purgatoire River in Picket Wire Canyon in southeastern Colorado. That site is part of the Comanche National Grasslands. There are individual prints there as well as trails of footsteps called trackways.  You can observe how, apparently, Brontosauruses ambled along a beach side by side 150 million years ago. The beach has hardened and compressed under younger sediments and has become the Morrison Formation. The sun warming those giant lizards on the beach very long ago is the same sun that now falls on humans standing and walking on the soft rock of the Morrison Formation.

Ann was researching the Pike and San Isabel National Forests when she learned of the Picket Wire Canyon dinosaur tracks. She was amazed that you could see actual dinosaur tracks and made reservations for the special trip 5 months in advance. When she told me about it I agreed. I was eager to step in the footprints of a dinosaur.  At Picket Wire you can measure your stride against an individual of what was the dominant life form on earth. I’ve touched dinosaur bones, held gastroliths (stones polished in a dinosaur’s gut) and coprolites (fossilized dung.) but walking the same ground, that would be a real connection. I wonder, what did they smell like? How did they sound? Did they low like cattle? Roar? Hiss like lizards? Sing like birds? Can we ever know?

The tour group was told to meet at the Forest Service office in La Junta Colorado at 8 AM with a high clearance 4wd vehicle and our lunches. We were shown a silly video in an office and then told to form a line of vehicles behind a government truck. When this was announced one other person (a rancher) and I eased out of the room and rapidly walked to our vehicles. I imagine he too realized that the dusty roads we were about to travel would be far more tolerable at the front of the caravan than the rear. The roads were dusty. I was positioned first behind the government truck but hung back about 100 yards. The rancher’s truck was visible behind us but the other travelers were invisible in the cloud. Later at the canyon, other drivers, now wise to where the good seats were, crowded to get behind the lead truck but the high-speed travel was over.

Spanish speakers called the river “El Rio de las Animas Perdidas en Purgatorio” (The river of souls lost in purgatory.)  French speakers shortened and translated it to “Purgatoire” (Anglicised to “POOR-ga-twahr”, then “Picket Wahr”–Picket Wire). As a result, the Purgatoire River flows through Picket Wire Canyon. Language erodes much faster than rocks.

Allosaurs were similar to the famous T. Rex; huge, two-legged, carnivorous monsters.

The previous winter was dry and the river was low. We were able to step across the Purgatoire on boulders without wetting our soles. The Apatosaurus tracks are revealed on a wide rock ledge south of the river. (What was a “Brontosaurus” is now called an “Apatosaurus.”) In the thin shade of a juniper we ate Ann’s garlic-lime chicken. Across the river were Allosaur footprints. Allosaurs were theropod dinosaurs. Modern birds are thought to be living descendants of the theropods. Both birds and theropods have furculas (wishbones). Above us on the rim rock of Dakota Sandstone, a Turkey Vulture spread its wings and gracefully leaned off the ledge. The bird was lofted without flapping. That vulture was the closest thing we saw to a living theropod.  (The Garlic-Lime Chicken was delicious but quite dead.) I wonder, what creature in another 150 million years might contemplate  a human trackway while noshing on a lunch of our descendants. Evolution surely has not stopped with us.

admin :: Jun.20.2011 :: Colorado, Fossils, Geology, National Park Monument :: 2 Comments »

Mount Taylor is a stratovolcano across the Rio Grande Rift Valley from Santa Fe. I noticed the upside-down mountain while packing the car. A camera was at hand.

In the photograph upper portions of Mount Taylor are obscured by a mirror image of lower parts. This type of mirage is called “looming.” The summit appears as a bump over the flat top of the mirrored image. The texture of the slopes helps define the inverted reflection. Since the mountain rises from a 7,000′ plateau and the summit is at 11,300, I can guess that about 1,000′ of the mountainside is reflected. Mount Taylor is 100 miles (528,000′) away so the angle of reflection here is +/- 0.1 degrees. If the mountain was not there, the mirage would have been invisible as the sky looks normal on either side where there is only sky to reflect. The mirage vanished in a few minutes.

Ann hung a rattling sprig of Hairy Scurf Pea on the car’s mirror. The traveling party included Ann and our two youngest (but grown) children, Perry and Livia, plus two dogs.

Last year we were in Yellowstone on New Years Day. Driving to Jackson Hole on the south side of Yellowstone was hard traveling with the winter weather.

This trip, we drove north along the front range of the Rockies and avoided the interior mountain roads. The weather favored us. There was little snow as we traveled the highways but while in the park using vehicles with tracks and skis, it snowed generously.

Devils Tower was a short side trip. We had never seen it in the winter.

The view away from the tower was interesting too.

The Belle Fourche River erodes the surrounding land as it flows around the tower. Trees on the river bottom trace it’s abandoned meanders.

The benches on the valley’s sides record the levels of the river during earlier times. In this picture two deer can be seen in the river bottom avoiding the winter wind.

We skirted the Bighorn and Bear Tooth mountains in Wyoming and Montana and turned south following the Yellowstone River up into the mountains.

We climbed through Paradise Valley.

Entering Yellowstone Park, we went first to the Lamar Valley to see the winter animals.

Traveling with companions requires compromise from each and all.

I expected to indulge my geological curiosities less, but because of the interests and enthusiasms of the others, I saw new things; wolves, coyotes, foxes, river otters, eagles, ravens, mountain goats, a porcupine and large numbers of bison, deer and elk.We were prepared for colder weather but it did not get much below -20F. The pack boots and shells stayed in the bags. Livia photographed my frost-abused camera.

At the “thermal features” water is constantly moving between gas, liquid and solid. The driving energy is a body of magma near the surface.

In many places the ground is too hot for snow even when the air is well below zero. I gained a new appreciation for the HUGE thermal output. Over millions of acres there are tens or hundreds of thousands of hot springs.

Hot streams feed the Firehole River which never freezes.

Hot springs make holes in the ice and send up steam at Yellowstone Lake.

Only 14,000 years ago a “small” maar type eruption blew out a two-mile wide crater at the lake.

Yellowstone Lake is large but sits in only a part of the supervolcano’s 40 mile-wide caldera.

Energy is constantly released into the air and water.

It has been 640,000 years since the last super-eruption and 70,000 years since the last “regular” eruption and Yellowstone is still boiling hot.

admin :: Jan.29.2011 :: Geology, Mirage, New Mexico, New Mexico Landscape Photography, Rio Grande Rift, Volcano :: No Comments »

Mount Taylor is 100 miles west of Santa Fe. The view below shows Mount Taylor as seen from Santa Fe looking across both the Rio Grande and the Rio Puerco valleys.

Mount Taylor

The Rio Puerco Valley is known for its large assembly of volcanic necks.  Like more famous individual necks such as Shiprock or Devils Tower, these necks are cores of volcanoes that penetrated relatively softer material and erupted on higher surfaces  Those volcanoes and surfaces have now eroded and the harder cores became peaks. A few necks are visible in the photograph above. (The actual prints have hugely more detail.)

Detail showing a neck 76 miles distant

There are few areas on earth where the collection of necks are as dramatic as the Rio Puerco.

We drove toward Cabezon Peak; the best known of the necks. It was a dry, sunny, winter day and the road through the arid Ojito Wilderness area was good.  The truck mounted a rise and we saw Cabazon Peak.

The Spanish dictionary tells us that Cabezón (big head) is also the term for a hole in a garment for the head. So the term also works geologically. The magma head penetrated the fabric of sediments as it rose to erupt as a volcano. The road went past the ghost town of Cabezón (now privately owned) and wound around to the other side., near enough to see columnar fracturing that is common with necks.

Cabezon Peak

It would be fun to do a panorama of the Rio Puerco valley from the summit showing dozens of necks. Although Cabezon Peak is known for recreational climbing, there should be a way to haul cameras up that isn’t too much of an expedition.

Cerro de Guadalupe was nearby, down next to the dry bed of the Rio Puerco.

Cerro de Guadalupe was wearing golden winter pastels cloaked in a perfect blue sky.

admin :: Dec.30.2010 :: New Mexico Landscape Photography :: No Comments »

Earlier we were turned back at the gate of Tent Rocks National Monument because of our canine companion.
This time, we arrived without pets.
I expected a parking lot, some nearby erosional landforms of welded tuff (tufa) but, nothing special.
I was wrong in all ways.
The cliffs are mostly out-wash deposits eroded from the Jemez Mountains.
The source material was volcanic but it is now second-generation and therefore sedimentary stone, not tufa.
There was also a hike involved to the top of the cliffs.
As the trail entered an interesting slot canyon, Ann wished for “sensible shoes” instead of her clogs.
I wished for my camera backpack that would have let me scramble with both hands.

Slot Canyon

A fallen block to scoot under

The canyon widened.
There was a round formation like a large toy top.
A ponderosa tree gives scale.

Top Formation

Elegant Ann is patient as I work the camera.

The rock weathers into unusual shapes.

Tent Rocks

A number of ponderosa pines did not make it through the recent drought. Their skeletons are still standing.

Nearing the top of the canyon, we could see the western slope the
Sangre de Cristo mountains and the mountainside with our home.

From the summit there was a view of Sandia Mountain rising above the winter haze. I love this picture; the patterning of the juniper-speckled hills that are so characteristic of the high desert.

Sandia Mountain is a fault-block mountain that tilted east as it rose.
Like the Sangre de Cristo range, it forms the eastern edge of the Rio Grande Rift Valley.
Some think that this rift is the far eastern end of the basin and range province that extends west to the Sierra Nevadas.

admin :: Dec.10.2010 :: New Mexico Landscape Photography :: 2 Comments »

Wheeler Geologic Area and the La Garita Wilderness Area are in Colorado’s San Juan Mountains. Wheeler became a National Monument in 1908. It is the first and only National Monument ever to be demoted. Apparently, almost no one visited this remote area. At almost 12,000 feet in elevation access has never been easy, even in the summer. Today you must hike 7 miles or drive 15 miles on an old jeep road which the Forest Service classifies as a “Low Standard Forest Road”. It is. Driving in took 3 hours with a high-clearance truck in 4-low and super-low. The old road marks a thin line on the map penetrating the road-less purity of the wilderness area.

"Low Standard Forest Road"

We camped alone near the end of the road which is normal even for the high season. It rained on and off as we cooked. Squirrels scolded and woodpeckers drummed in the trees. Clark’s Nutcrackers, ravens and magpies of the always-obnoxious corvidae clan squawked and screeched until dark. Being high and far from the lights of any town, the prospects for a magnificent starry night were encouraging but rain and then a full moon blasted the stars away. The night was luminous with sparkling dew and frost. The growing tips of the Blue Spruce glowed like light bulbs in the moonlight. It was magical enough without stars.

The next morning we hiked to the formations.

Approaching through the alpine forest you see cliffs of volcanic ash.

The ash weathers into strange shapes.

The slopes are soft, crumbly and abrasive.

Slipping off a cliff is a danger but even a tumble down a slope would be like sliding down a cheese grater.

As with other erosional landforms like Bryce Canyon or the Bisti Badlands, Wheeler is a curiosity. These formations are an aspect of the huge volume of volcanic material in the landscape. Many super-volcanoes created the La Garita and other overlapping calderas. There is a long history of super-volcanoes in the West. Yellowstone is the best known caldera. The Jemez Mountain caldera is the youngest and best-preserved but there are many others. Most calderas are not well known and sometimes not even apparent because of erosion, glaciation and in-fill. The largest known eruption on earth was from this place, the La Garita Caldera. The La Garita eruption is estimated to have produced 5,000 times more material than the Mt. St. Helens eruption and may have covered North America with ash all the way to the Atlantic. Incredible amounts of energy were released here. Today, it’s very peaceful.

admin :: Aug.03.2010 :: Colorado, National Park Monument, Volcano :: No Comments »

Sunday morning was gorgeous. Everyone was asleep. Ann slept because she had worked all night. Livie slept because she is a teenager. I was in my “tree house,” a windowed room where I read and write. I enjoyed looking out over the Rio Grande Rift as snow flurries and patches of sunlight moved about the landscape. Inspired, I quickly packed the big and little cameras, left a note that I was going to the Jemez Caldera and drove down the hill to Santa Fe. Crossing the Rio Grande Valley, the road goes over the river and immediately climbs into the Jemez Mountains. My first stop was the White Rock Overlook. What it overlooks is the Rio Grande cutting a canyon through the Cerros del Rio volcanic field. On the western side of this canyon, small feeder streams drain the Jemez and erode deep canyons into the soft tufa. Tufa deposits form when pumice-like material flows out in an eruption and is still so hot it fuses into solid rock when it comes to rest. The ancestral puebloan people dug homes into the bases of many of the south-facing canyon walls. Many of these caves are preserved in Bandelier National Park. Others are on pueblo land or land taken by the atomic weapons lab. The Jemez area has fine obsidian (volcanic glass) available for making stone tools with very sharp edges. Here on this eastern slope of the Jemez volcano, humans have gone from the stone age tools to inventing atomic weapons in less than 500 years. The value of this progress is debated in town and pueblo.

I have failed to get a good photograph from the overlook in the past and had hopes that a little “atmosphere” from snow flurries would help define the space in the canyon. Standing at the rim, snowflakes flew by on a stiff breeze. I made a panorama as a snow cloud moved up the canyon and then set the big camera on its tripod.

Rio Grande in Canyon

A bellows lens shade kept the snow off the lens. The camera, tripod and controller box were heavy enough to be secure in the wind. I sat on a folding canvas chair and unfurled my largest dark cloth (an opaque blanket). I draped it over myself and the computer on my lap.  A dark cloth is a tool used by photographers to shield the viewing screen of a large camera or computer from light. The cloth allows for composition and focusing. With a digital camera, it also controls camera functions and displays scans. A dark cloth can also function as a cape, a picnic blanket or a pillow. Inside this little tent in the snowstorm, it was cozy. Inside this little black tent, the computer on my lap displayed the image and controls of the scanning back.

It was noted thousands of years ago that a hole in the wall of a tent will project an upside-down image on the opposite wall. Inside a tent may have been where people first observed the image made in a “camera obsura” (Latin: “dark room”). Photo – graph (light – drawing) has been possible only since the 1830s when inventors managed to chemically “fix” the camera obscura image. I sat in my own dark “camera” using the computer on my lap to operate the spiffy electronic camera outside.

The value of this progress can be debated…, etc.

I made one scan as the storm closed on the overlook:

View south from White Rock Overlook

Still under the darkcloth, I zoomed in on the completed scan and saw that the camera vibrating in the wind had ruined the image:

Detail with fine vibrations

It was snowing harder when I raised the cloth. I covered the camera with the cloth and slipped the computer into a case. Was this a flurry that would pass?

It felt silly after a while, sitting atop a cliff, in a chair, in a snowstorm. I hadn’t eaten and was hungry. The wind kept blowing my hat off. Suspecting nothing good would come of staying, I loaded the gear into the pickup and went looking for food. The only place in White Rock with “food items” on Sunday morning was a gas station. The YooHoo soda and ice cream bar that I ate made me feel worse than hungry. The snowstorm was gaining enthusiasm, I was losing mine. The pickup could have made it over the pass to the caldera but for what? The visibility was about 50 feet. It was time to take the show off the road.  I was home by 1 PM.

Writing in the tree house Monday night, it is still snowing.

admin :: Feb.21.2010 :: Geology, National Park Monument, New Mexico, New Mexico Landscape Photography, Rio Grande Rift, Volcano :: No Comments »