Blessed Insanity in Big Bend?

The photo is actually in Canyonlands, but it’s probably as close as anything I have that looks like Big Bend National Park. I’m heading down there for three weeks in January and am eagerly awaiting roaming the Chihuahuan Desert and Chisos Mountains. It’s one of the least visited national parks because it’s hundreds of miles from any metropolis. It’ll be a lonely trip, but now with the snow at home I can ski and get fit and be able to hike all day if the solitude becomes oppressive.

As Ed Abbey said, “Someday I shall…become an ancient baldheaded troglodyte with a dirty white beard tucked in my belt, be a shaman, a wizard, a witch doctor crazy with solitude...of course a man would go mad from the beauty and the loneliness, both equally mysterious. But perhaps it would be—who can say?—a kind of blessed insanity, like the bliss of a snake in the winter sun, a buzzard on the summer air.” (Slickrock)


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Of Mice and Canoers and Rain

It was going to be an awesome trip--four nights in the Boundary Waters with my wife and dad. First week of October--the colors would rub our jaded city eyes like a rainbow massage. Dad was a lifelong Minnesotan, yet this would be his first trip--had to mean things would go well. The saying goes something like Mother Nature is a sweet seductress to newcomers, though once you commit she regularly pummels you. But this was the old feller’s first trip so surely we'd be fine.

It rained for four days--a cold sopping deluge--when it wasn’t fog or drizzle it was coming down at a rate to worry Noah.

Another thing we saw much of was mice. At our final camp I left a food bag out while cooking dinner, then stashed it my wife’s and my tent. We ate, lied about how the weather would be the next day and turned in when the rain recommenced.

Tucked in our bags we heard sounds of unseen nocturnal scamperings. Every time I turned on my light there was nothing. Burrowing back toward sleep came a noise very near. I raised my head and saw a mouse on my chest. I sat with a start and shrieked as it ran onto my shoulder, across my neck and down my other arm. My wife shot up and we managed to chase it out and settle in finally for some sleep. But as soon as our headlamps were off, the rustling was back and louder. Lights back on, there at our feet were two sets of bright glistening eyes. As we then surmised, three mice had crawled into the foodbag in its brief minutes of accessibility.

Sometime in the wee hours I tested my hand for dryness against the nylon floor. I did it again to make sure, because what I was feeling was a waterbed--three to four inches had accumulated in a pond under the tent. I woke my wife and we piled our gear into the highest corner. It was a well used campsite and all the tent pads were worn depressions in the thin soil. I donned my rain coat and began digging a trench to drain the new lake.

The rain stopped for a while in the morning, but started by the time we were on the water. Reaching the final stretch, a few mile paddle across large Brule Lake, raindrops were shooting straight into our faces. By now our gear was wet, so the prospect of hanging out for the wind to die was infinitely inferior to the hot tub and sauna waiting in Grand Marais. The headwind made the paddling a crawl and the cold rain sapped strength and soaked clothes. By the time we reached the end of a bay the waves were smashing over the bow. My wife was huddled and praying (something I’d never seen her do) in the center of the boat. Dad shouted through the blow that we should turn around and retreat to a small island recently passed. We lay hard into our paddles and spun the canoe in the trough between two waves and shot into the calm water behind the island.

We spent four hours shivering in a tiny clearing amongst dripping cedar and pine boughs. Looking toward the lake, trying to gauge whether the water was flattening, I mistrusted my eyes because I had urged us to go the first time. Finally we couldn’t wait any longer and launched. We rounded the island were cautiously excited then giddy at the much calmer water. We still paddled manically, afraid at any moment a giant sweep of water would arise to quash our hesitant relief.

My wife and dad both had to work early the next morning and I figured they’d want to begin the long drive home immediately. But (like mine) their dreams of warmth in the wet cold outdoors had vented from visions of hot sauna steam, so in town we dined on burgers and slipped into the local sweathouse for a restorative cook before the dark return.

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Where the Deer and Photographers Play

Antelope Canyon is photographed so much that a Google image search turns up almost 58,000 hits. Look at most any of those photos (or this one) and you’ll see an empty metaphysical kind of place where odds seem reasonable for spotting a benevolent fairy or levitating monk--when I was there last spring I talked to an old-timer who spoke of visiting in the seventies when aside from his guide, he saw only one other person, a woman sitting cross legged in the sand playing a flute.

No longer. The day I visited there were probably 150 other gawkers, all of us drooling at the eyes over the fluted red sandstone walls. The photos look as they do thanks to the coordinating efforts of the Navajo guides who must accompany every visitor. Study an image of an empty chamber cut by a white shaft of light and it’s as asparagus is to an oak tree that there’s a group of twelve tourists gnashing their teeth around the bend being forcibly restrained by a harried guide.

My guide, the affable Gabriel, who joked and smiled most of the two hour tour, kept his cool even when a shooter in our group refused to yield her turn (“One moe, one moe, I still shooting”). The order of photographing was like an 18th century rifle brigade in combat—first, several people in front steady their tripods and make an exposure or two and then get the heck out of the way so those behind can take a turn. She refused to move, even when Gabe gently pulled her by the elbow she wrestled free and cursed him for blurring her shot. It looked like a fight might break out when the faces on the people in back missing their turns starting twisting, sputtering saliva and protest. A disturbing anti-Chinese sentiment settled in mutters over rest of the excursion.

The most interesting thing I learned is that the trademark beams of light are another thing coordinated by the guides. I guess I never bothered to think how they formed (the sun funneling through some canyon lips vortex perhaps). What happens is the guide starts tossing the fine sand, dust really, from the floor on up. He does this until enough particles are suspended in the air to catch the afternoon sun.

There’s a lower canyon as well. It has no beams, but for $20 (compared to $40 plus $6 park fee at the upper), if you have a tripod you can spend several hours roaming untethered along the longer, narrower and shallower lower reaches. It was here in 1997 that 11 tourists drowned in a flash flood when they refused to listen to their guide’s orders to leave.

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Bring on the Frosty

Nothing like early season snow to arouse thoughts of skiing up crusty slick hills or stumbling on showshoes through delightfully cumbersome drifts, an unanticipated notion while poking around the Whitewater River valley last week. Came across some interesting new territory while fruitlessly hunting a cave I've heard is in one of the limestone abutments over the South Fork, and parked alongside the gravel road to climb a stony perch, from whose vantage the photo was made. I've been seeking the cave a couple years, and thought perhaps I'd spy it from the blufftop, but a couple more may be required for results! There are small caverns below the crag (all too constricted to be the sought-after one) and they appear to be an active den. Wet animal smell emanates from the openings and piles of largish dung attest to what must be a bobcat. Near the caves, at the rocky tip of the cliff base is a sheltered alcove where one such pile collects aside a dizzy ledge. Hard to imagine a finer scene than a bobcat on lookout at sunrise, adroitly perched with eyes toward the valley, searching for breakfast. Full Post»

Beaver

1.

Leathery flat splash

Thwwapp!

Swift wet noisy

air pocket gurgle.

Quiet now, but,

you’ll be back,

Swimming

Chewing

Slapping in the moonlight

2.

Past last glow

I walk ‘long your river’s banks.

Your tail meets water

enough to rival the rustling leaves.

By my flames

I hear you chewing.

Do you think I cannot?

Rodent fangs to alders,

soft wood squeaks.

3.

Dry dawn,

eyes shut five more, then,

hours of rain.

Bone under nylon,

listening for you.

Where have you gone?

I know you’re not afraid to get wet.

You and I might be alike—

dreaming away the morning,

then rushing, like the river you dam,

through rest of the day.

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Not a Bad Traffic Jam

Not too long back my dad and I were in Glacier Park clipping along a trail double time trying to catch a shuttle that would take us back to camp. The last bus of the day was just twenty minutes coming, and though we could see the road snaking through a yonder pass, it seemed as though it should be bigger than model set size so we begrudgingly started jogging. The hill traversed grew steep; around a bend appeared two mountain goats ambling along in the same direction as us. It was a cute baby goat and a shaggy parent, exciting indeed, but we had a ride to catch and they were walking at about the speed honey slides down a window pane. The trail sides were too precipitous to scramble around and the closer we got to them the slower they went until the adult stopped, turned around and stared. I had a vision of being butted off the mountain side so fell back. By then Dad was looking pursed lipped at the pass and nearly hopping. He reached down and picked up a rock.

“We might have to resort to this,” he said.

“I don’t think that’s a good idea.”

But suddenly the goats were stepping off the trail! He unleashed the rock and it landed on the ground near the adult’s hind legs, but instead of hastening their departure, they indignantly retook the trail and waddled on slower than ever.
Eventually they did move aside and we barreled ahead toward the pass. Beat red, breathing like locomotives and slippery in sweat we reached the bus stop with two minutes to spare!
The bus arrived and then waited forty minutes for someone who was suppose to be coming, but never did. Full Post»

Havasu Morning

Some dreamscapes exist,

earthly Edens

God forgot to hide.

One tucked in a canyon,

terraced and streaming.

Red walls from sunked away hell above.

Water color of salvation

blue peace without drowsiness

green thrill without headache.

Terraced and streaming,

please,

forever terraced and streaming.

As long as such places exist,

So can I.

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Yellow Feast

Do you like the taste of Brittlebrush?

Are the petals tender or sweet?

Must take many flowers

to climb canyon slopes,

ford the tumbling Colorado.

I followed you here

while you crossed the creek,

back and forth

back and forth,

finally stopping neck deep amongst 10,000 suns.

Yes, I would eat you,

though know you would not me.

What do you know?

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Dream River

I wish someone would have told me

you’d been here,

because I didn’t know you are.

I could have laughed down your banks

and rolled into your slow

root beer flow.

Could have dove to your clouds, and,

come out overhead.

I wish someone would have told me

because now it’s fall, and,

too cold to go in.

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Western Shore

When rain breaks and
clouds part
Sun.
Sink.
Sight.
But before,
thin molten lava across my face,
better
across the basalt
and the waves that wash over,
as though it was melting.

Don't feel the spray
or the illusion is gone. Full Post»

A Few Days a Year

Trees burn,
orange, yellow, rust, red,
then leaves fall
light and slow
drifting whispers
of secrets
we pretend to know. Full Post»

Cross River

Black rock, white water
Camp on the banks

Cedar, birch, balsam
Red and yellow maples above the falls

The day was cool,
night already cold.

Day sky blue as only in autumn--
haunting clear sea
echoes of shapes
that vanish any deeper.

Slipping light condensed,
long darkness ahead,
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Peter Mattiessen's Shadow Country

Peter Mattiessen’s trilogy about the notorious Edgar Watson has been condensed into a single volume—good news for anyone who would rather not wrestle with three separate good sized books and experience the amazing story and colorful perspectives between two covers instead of six. Watson was a cane farmer in the Florida Everglades wilderness at the turn of 20^th century. He’s blamed for several murders ranging from despicable outlaws to disgruntled employees to one’s pregnant wife. Eventually the townsfolk grew so scared of him they emptied their guns into him one stormy night in the tiny island town of Chokoloskee.

The first book is written from a patchwork of townsfolk perspectives, most of whom were involved in his death. The second is from that of Watson’s son, Luscious, a historian trying to know his father and his father’s killer. The final being of course from the main man himself, and Mattiessen’s Watson persona is the most compelling of the three excellent stories.

On an Everglades canoe trip in January of this year I spent a night at the site of the old Watson plantation. Mostly covered in mangrove, it’s hard to imagine large fields of sugar cane, a large house and other support buildings ever existing there. Remaining is a rusting cauldron presumably used for boiling cane syrup, a cistern filled with green rainwater and pieces of implement beyond recognition decaying in the bush.

The displayed photo was made on the beach of Mormon Key, an island on the Gulf of Mexico two miles downstream from the plantation site near the mouth of the Chatham River.

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West Wind's Boy

Nanabosho, son of West Wind and Winona

Nanabosho, raised by grandmother Nokomis

Nanabosho, little white rabbit, protector of his people

Legend links the mischievous guardian of the Ojibwa to at least two landforms that bear his name on the Ontario shore of Lake Superior. Sleeping Giant in the eponymously named Provincial Park is said to be Nanabosho, turned to stone by the Great Spirit for creating a storm that killed two mining harbingers who had been tipped off about a silver deposit Nanabosho had hidden in the area. The giant is a towering plateau on the Sibley Peninsula in the northeastern corner of the lake. In places the cliffs soar to 700 feet above the water.

Across the lake is dark jagged island in the surf of Superior that is said to be where Nanabosho rested (photo) after jumping from one shore to another. There are two holes in the solid rock.

My first night out hiking the Coastal Trail in Lake Superior Provincial Park was spent camped in a tiny cove that gave view of the island. For a better view I crawled along the slabby littoral, swinging on cedars and leaping rock to rock, passed a point and walked easily into an even smaller harbor. My trip was young, but already sticky thoughts were snaking like spider’s webs across the trail. I asked Nanabosho to cure me from this anxious desolation.

Then I saw several cedar waxwings flitting from driftwood to shrub to stone. In between jumps they were glancing with small bird eyes at the sun as if it were a movie screen. Our star dropped behind the island and the water rippled blue splashing yellow; the sky ached pink. When the sun passed behind the second hole in the rock an orange star flashed and I made a before returning to camp.

On trail in the morning, instead of seeing a thimbleberry leaf and worrying about soreness in my ankle I saw its verdancy and thin straight veins. When two ravens cawed back and forth from fir perches, I thought not of uncertain future, but the oily black of their feathers and the great density of boreal forest. “CAAWwww,” I sounded throatily. One of them replied. I did it again and the same one responded. Unaware of the meaning, I kept going.

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Literary Landmarks in the Michigan Upper Peninsula

The remote pine forested northeastern corner of Michigan’s Upper Peninsula has provided settings for at least a couple of well known stories. The most famous is Hemingway’s The Big Two Hearted River, detailing young Nick Adams back from World War I on a solo camping and trout fishing trip. In the story Adams takes the train to Seney, originally a rough and tumble logging town in the middle of the UP. He hops off the train to find the town completely burned. Seney had been burned, the country was burned over and changed. This never happened, but fictionally provides a metaphor for Adams, back from heavy battle, mental breakdown and a severe leg injury—burned over and changed.

He hikes into the sand hills, past the burn line, and strikes camp near the stream. He has a lovely time reacquainting himself to fishing and life without war. I hadn’t read this story before, picked up The Nick Adams Stories in a camp store at the end of a long sand road near the mouth of the Two Hearted River, just before it flows into Lake Superior. The river that Adams fishes out of Seney is actually the Fox River. The Fox is longer and runs south into Lake Michigan, but as Hemingway said, because Big Two Hearted River is poetry. It is named thus because of the similarly sized two branches by which it is formed. It’s undoubtedly a fantastic name, though there are some other good ones in the area: Tahquamenon, Yellow Dog, Manistique, Laughing Whitefish Falls, and oh yeah, Dead Sucker.

Hemingway maybe only visited the UP once, but another author who writes about the area and lived there for some time is Jim Harrison, who wrote Legends of the Fall and Revenge. I’m not a big Harrison fan, and Legends of the Fall is the only movie I can think of that is better than the book. Harrison’s characters are people with whom I rarely sympathize and have problems like having had an affair with their good friend’s, a Mexican Cartel boss’, wife (Revenge—in which the woman is tortured and killed by the cartel leader, but then two men become friends again) or being sheltered and having to get rid of too much money (The Man Who Gave up His Name). They are like bad Hemingway stories with self-serving fatalism that is not really fatalism but just the protagonist justifying himself. They are like Danielle Steel stories for men. But I still like parts of them. Harrison writes fantastically at times and his settings are awesome: By first light the wind blew hard against the yellowed aspens, the leaves skittering across the high pasture and burying themselves in a draw. When they forded their first river the leaves of the cottonwoods stripped by the wind caught in the eddies, pasting themselves against the rocks (Legends of the Fall). I’m going to read more of him. He’s still at it, over 70, just having published Returning to the Earth in 2007 (about man dying in middle age and his loved ones dealing with it, and sort of a map of the UP).

He’s settled some in old age—he doesn’t kill off any women in this book and the prevailing horniness has lessened a little. Plus it’s almost exclusively set in the UP. So when I pulled into Grand Marais, Michigan with a day to kill before four days hiking the Pictured Rocks and saw the Dunes Saloon (…with a new and peculiar itch in my brain that I figured could be dispelled only by the sight of the harbor of Lake Superior or, more likely, a cheeseburger and beer at the Dunes Saloon) of course I went in for a beer that they brew on the premises and wound up staying a few hours talking with a man getting a beer while his kids slept and a 70 year old who was hiking the North Country Trail through the UP. It is a very fine place, so fine that when I finished hiking a few days later in Munising I went looking for a similar pub at which to refuel, but found no such thing. The bartender at the Dunes said his mom used to clean house for Harrison. Shortly before reaching town while driving a maze of sand roads I passed a Harrison Trail. Although his jacket back biography says now he lives in Arizona and Montana. I guess those northern winters are probably pretty tough on an old timer from the Lower Peninsula.

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Adam G. at Large Up North

It was great seeing my old pal Adam again. Together we grew up, moved to the same town after high school and hiked a few hundred miles of the Appalachian Trail, since which I haven’t seen much of him. Him being a de-facto Luddite, I don’t have to worry about praising him online and having him ever see it. That would be strangely unbecoming in our friendship. After I decided to stay another day he said he was glad and then things were strange. He righted this with, “Rog you’re such an asshole, why won’t you leave?”

We had a fine time contemplating the bliss of a world completely under concrete and complaining about the arrogance of the wildflowers surrounding the camper to grow in such abundance, brightness and variety and as the night wore on, cursing the loons on Gitchi Gummi for their spine tingling elegies. Such grotesque liberties must only be possible with those known since before knowing one’s own self.

In the summer Mr. G. does Masonry. In winter he makes snow and runs the gondola at the local ski hill. His dad, older brother and uncle all transplanted from the Twin Cities to the North Shore as well. Papa G. mushes dogs, his bro is a carpenter and uncle manages a hotel. They are a wild bunch in pretty wild place. Full Post»

Lotsa Harrassment by Law Enforcement

The trip is off to an infuriating start because for the third in as many months I’ve been in a situation where law enforcement officers make defamatory accusations of no merit.
The one Saturday night was the worst, and could have lasting repercussions. First night of the trip, camped in a state forest campground on my way north, sleeping, after midnight, suddenly somebody tells me to come out of my tent. If they said they were cops it was the first thing out and I slept through it and don’t remember. I ask what for, and one of them repeats the command except adds, “lemme see your hands.”

Initially, I thought I was being robbed, but even without contacts and with Mag-lites pointed in my face, was able to identify them as police, Lake County Sheriff’s deputies. One of them said their bloodhound (it appeared to be a goofy little Cocker Spaniel, but I can’t see much without contacts though still enough to see it was no hound) had tracked directly to my tent from a car that had been entered and rifled through.

They kept their flashlights in my eyes and disbelieved most everything I said. Then I sat at the picnic table shivering in long underwear while the deputy ran my license and the dog handler trained his light on me. Later I moved into the squad SUV and talked with the deputy, telling him repeatedly what I’d been doing before going to bed. He still believed that stupid dog over me.

“I’ve seen him work before,” he said, and added how the dog used signals to show he was smelling me. That was the most frustrating, because there I was telling him in plain English that he was blaming the wrong dude, but to no avail. He would file the report with the county prosecutor, who may decide to summon me to court, all the way up in Two Harbors.

The first of the three happened in Arizona’s Petrified Forest National Park. My friend Barn, his girlfriend Jessica and I reached the park entrance at about 6:30 for a quick peek, the park was to close at 7. The ranger at the entrance booth said in an it’s-all-good sort of tone that we could stay past dark (sunset was around 7), just to be careful of antelope on the road while leaving. About a half hour after close I was making a photo and heard shouting. A ranger was yelling at us to get up where he was and don’t discard the rocks we were supposedly stealing.
A second ranger showed. She called me a liar when I told her what the first ranger had said about staying past dark. They searched our pockets and Barn’s car. Jessica had a bottle cap she’d picked off the ground that the fresh ranger actually confiscated. They let us go with a warning.

The second run-in was a couple of weeks ago. I went to pick up my wife Lily’s friend, Gugu, at the airport. Gugu was flying in from India to take an exam and visit. I waited while customs interrogated her for four hours. She had a proper visa and paperwork, but they accused her of planning to work illegally, of intending to marry an American for citizenship “like her friend” (we later joked the security man was proposing to her). They demanded her computer passwords and read her email and chat room transcripts. They called Lily, who was seeing a patient at the hospital, and threatened that unless she talked to them at that very moment they would send Gugu back to India and ban her from the U.S. for five years. They called me and her uncle in Virginia. At three and a half hours in I called them and a man denied she was still in custody. A half hour later she was finally out bedraggled and hurt.


As for now, I’m in Grand Marais at least through the night. I’m staying with my old friend Adam Gallagher who is living on the beach in a camper. The spot is okay with its abundant wildflowers surrounding much of the camper, the expanse of polished cobblestones leading to the lake and the morning sun burning like a red ball over an unseen Michigan every clear morning. Full Post»

A Nonlinear Frame

For the last few years I’ve been brainstorming for a good way to write about hiking the Appalachian and Pacific Crest Trails (plus 2,000 miles of the Continental Divide Trail). I want to avoid a linear recollection of the trips, and may now have a way to do that.

This spring I spent a month in the Southwest desert and was blown away that within the week I was, for the first time ever, completely homesick. In a few days I’ll be leaving for another trip, about three weeks long. This one will be a shot at recapturing some of the mind-bending introspection and quiet fun that attracted me to wilderness travel in the first place. Perhaps such things were only possible while younger, more care-free and single, but I don’t think so. Maybe it was the constricting canyon walls and blowing dust of the SW that dried my spirits, or possibly just inadequate physical conditioning. Missing my wife was a big part of it, but two loves must be able to coexist, even though they often require separation from the other. If there’s anyplace to do it, it’s the familiar rocky forests surrounding Lake Superior. Cool lake water and mossy chunks of basalt under pine, birch and cedar form the backdrop of my outdoor memory.

So, through the surprise of the desert trip, and the as-of-yet unknown outcome of the Northland, connections and comparisons can be made with the long trails, and around this frame, the story unfolds.

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Tent and a Trail

The driver’s seat of our old Grand Cherokee was a good vantage point to spot the delivery box on my doorstep holding a tent to test for Backpacker Magazine. It’ll likely only amount to a line or two of copy, at best, but, hey, it’s still exciting to receive a positive reply to one of my queries.

My original major destination of this trip was The Coastal Trail in Ontario’s Pukaskwa National Park. It looks like a real beaut on the map—hugging the Lake Superior coast for 60 kilometers in a roadless craggy boreal wonderland until it dead ends on the lonely banks of the Swallow River. From here I was going to simply turn around and walk back, in lieu of dropping money I don’t have on a boat pick-up, but after calling the park learned a footbridge has been deemed “structurally unsound,” and that they were waiting on an engineer that very day. The Canuck sounding fellow told me to call back Monday, which I did, but they are still waiting for the engineer and the trail may be closed for some time.

Here’s a link to a photo of the bridge. It’s a gnarly looking thin thing, but where else other than Canada would a whole hiking trail be shut down to keep people from treading onto a bridge that may perhaps be unsafe? I would rather have the liberty to personally assay the span myself and risk a tragic plunge into the Willow River than be told the entire walking coastline has been closed to prevent the possibility of its failure.

Oh well, Lake Superior Provincial Park has another trail by the same name and similar distance, albeit unfortunately lacking the rare remoteness of Pukaskwa.

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Twin Cities photos posted

About four miles and into the narrows of Paria Canyon early this April I ran into another hiker. It was at a time I was beginning to realize then that 1) it had been years since I’d gone backpacking alone 2) my fitness level was lacking, and I was already tired—amounting to a sort of low grade hysteria that I was going to have for the next four days--so I was glad to see another face. We ran into each other later that day and then again the next, but the interesting thing was that this fellow, Kevin Venator from St. Louis, is the creator of a website, http://www.americaswonderlands.com, that I’d used in planning that trip. He’s also working on a stock library of city images (http://www.gigastock.com), so after returning home, I contacted him and submitted a mass of Twin Cities photos, which are now posted:

Thanks, Kevin!

http://www.americaswonderlands.com/Minneapolis_pictures.htm

http://www.americaswonderlands.com/Saint_Paul_pictures_st_paul_mn.htm

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Why Filters are Nice

A few evenings ago I was running, wearing my camera backpack, to a Mississippi River bridge from which I hoped to find a sweet angle of a rainbow and some storm clouds. About halfway there I heard the sound of an opening zipper followed by the normally cool sound of shattering glass.

I’d probably left my camera pack partially unzipped, or perhaps the weight of the second body in the little outside pocket wrenched the panel open, but either way, there was my 70-200mm lying in a pile of broken glass and mud along with my D300 in a rainwater puddle.

Luckily the puddle was shallow and the camera fine and although the lens looked gruesome, the damage was limited to the filter that took the brunt of a fall like an optical hero.

A similar thing happened a couple years ago right after I bought the lens—running (to a bus that time), interrupted by CRASH! I’d cut the broken filter ring out, but the lens threads were bent so fitting a new filter on was very difficult. Actually, until the drop, for the last couple of months I’d been trying to unscrew it to clean off some smudges, but had been unable to budge the sucker.

Lo and behold after this latest disaster (after the shattered filter was cut away) I nervously picked up a new one and it fit right in—the threads were straightened by the latest fall. A case of ironic fortune I hope never to test again.

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Introduction

This little blog will, I hope, document my de-piping of a dream to do nature photography and writing for a living. I guess if the aforementioned hope bottoms out until the chassis rips off, it might be interesting all the same.

While reading about those who are doing or have done what I aspire toward, there are generally two types: 1) the ones who say the gist of, “I just started showing my work around and never had to look back,” and 2) the ones like Galen Rowell who said something to the effect that he found himself with boundless energy to send stories and photos and receive piles of rejection letters, or Tom Till who said in an interview he could have wallpapered his living room with rejections.

I like the latter for the drive and persistence it took those guys to get from doing what they wanted, to doing what they wanted for pay.

The first step was I quit my newspaper job (a chain of little weeklies) in March and hit the road. Spent a month in Arizona and Utah. Overall, 5,000 miles by car, 200 by foot, and 10,000 photos.

Here are a three of my favorites.

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