Cresting spiny ridge of Mexican limestone in full moon light giant prickly pear silhouette, pads flailing crazed and beautiful like a flaming god that knows no weakness or pity. A three tiered sphinx with the Rio Grande ever polishing its shoes. Short cliff, medium, long, to the green water, cascade of darkness, towering pit of the earth. Chihuahuan Desert stops hiding, delicate as a cactus flower sticky with pollen.
How can the day shine so sure, but the night be bright with its falsehood?
I am a wizard who knows no spells. I want to move like an ocotillo in the wind, Swaying barbed and dead until rain comes, then springing leaves and blooms of buried life.
Full Post»
I liked the town Except for the woman Who looked older than she was With her plastic cup of beer on main street after dark A visage like the nearby sage flats
She laughed too much talked too much Because I was busy Making a photograph she thought was funny
Actually I didn’t mind her yet She told me of a murder in the building across the street How the richest woman in the world Once froze to death nearby
But when she started talking conspiracies She’d heard on the radio and thought were true I wondered why neat towns have so many idiots
I should become a dictator Then people would act a certain way
I gritted my teeth so I could bear her ugly face And said I had to go.
Full Post»
The south side route up Mount Hood is considered by braggarts and able mountaineers to be easy, yet it is both strenuous and, at times, a little scary. An early struggle is the alpine start. The summit day eve, my friend Barn and I hiked partway up the mountain and camped so we could sleep to a luxurious 4am. The climb became good old, hard working fun once our adrenaline got pumping, the breakfast Excedrin started working and pink light coated distant peaks in cotton candy, which gave my eyes a merry roust.
The most frightening bit of the climb was on the descent, and it was not due to the mountain. On the narrowest section of the steepest part, an inversely-funneling snow chute that runs to the summit ridge, I became stuck during the descent behind a young guy with nylon gym pants and soft leather boots, sans-crampons. Now, Mount Hood is a very popular climb, probably the most heavily climbed glaciated peak in all of North America. We’d seen a couple dozen other people that morning, but all had been at least marginally competent and properly equipped. Not this guy. Every step he took was a nightmare. He’d plant his ice axe into the snow and flail his boots for purchase. Most steps he slipped, using his axe to stop a long fall that would end in a lucky snow runout, an unlucky boulder runout or a tumble into a crevasse. I gently advised him a fall could be fatal, and asked him to move over so I could get around. My next few feet down, until the chute widened, were a nervy dance to the view of his slipping rubbery soles.
The photo is of Barn making his way down to the Hog’s Back, that curving ridge. Mount Jefferson is visible on the horizon. The sky was a dark blue and dreamy up there.
This spring my uncle gave me his beautiful old canoe, well, technically he gave it to his sister, my mother, though I have properly usurped it from my landlubber parents, and taken it down 250 miles of rivers this warm season. The canoe is older than me, a cherry red, 1978 Mad River Explorer with a Kevlar body and wood trim. My uncle didn’t use it much, so it was in pretty good shape. Unfortunately, I’ve put a few dings in it. Pound for pound, Kevlar is super strong, but in canoes it's used more for making lightweight crafts than battering rams that glance off any rock. The Kevlar itself is only as thick as a sturdy layer of canvas. It’s actually a fabric weave, made rigid by an epoxy coat, and in the case of the Redhorse, an additional gelcoat (the red part). I managed to chip the gelcoat away in three places and otherwise score the bottom with countless minor scratches. I went to NorthWest Canoe, a sweet shop in a warehouse in Saint Paul, and bought an epoxy repair kit. After laying on a thick coat of the goo, from a short distance Redhorse looks as good as new. Though, if you get close, the many bugs from my front yard that adhered to the epoxy while I was applying it appear in their new vocation, part of the hull. The photo shows the half-treated Redhorse.
I paddled seventy miles down the Namekagon River in northwest Wisconsin last week, and aside from a dreary six mile stretch in back of a dam, it was, I dare say, a lovely journey. The Namekagon is small and clear, and a little dreamy. One afternoon I set my paddle down across the canoe gunwales and gave up counting miles and landmarks. The water oozed along like swelling melted glass. A leaf flowed three feet below the surface and six inches above the sandy bottom. Of what had been yellow, only a neat quarter leaf remained so, the rest was dark brown, the color of a leach. The leaf’s bonds were breaking from the relentless water that permeated its soft bonds; it would crumble at first impact, whether it against a round gray stone or slimy submerged branch.
Redhorse carp darted abundantly. I named my canoe for these fish, bottom feeders with the hated name, but, like game fish, this strain of carp is susceptible to pollution, and is disappearing in rivers lacking the protection the Namekagon has.
So often the northwoods seem almost sterile—the scoured stone lakes of the Boundary Waters, the deep tight forests empty of sound other than rustling breeze—but the fecundity of the Namekagon was striking. In the depths of a pool on an outer bend, a muskie the length of my paddle’s shaft sat ominously in the shadow of a bleached and beached log, a fishy T-Rex waiting for something to blunder by. In the thicket above, a beaver chewed into a tree. The lumberjack was out of sight, but the squeaky chomping of soft wood carried strangely from dense alders.
Full Post»
The photo isn’t particularly relevant to the following topic, but heck, photos are fun to look at. The strings of headlamp glow spanning a length of this lava tube cave, though, are somewhat metaphorical to the meaning of segue, a word that until a few nights ago I had a serious issue with. Yawn, whatever, but up until then I thought "segue" was spelled “segway,” and would be perplexed when I’d type the latter and see that condescending red spell check line pop up underneath. It’s just one of these trendy new buzzwords, I’d thought, the technology hasn’t caught up yet. Segue, or segway, is used almost endlessly in class discussions I’ve experienced. I thought maybe it came from the invention of those ridiculous wheeled pogo sticks that don't even bounce. It might take my intuitional confidence a while to recover after learning from the Merriam Dictionary that segue is spelled as such and dates back to 1740.
I was reading “The Amazing Buddha Boy,” by George Saunders. This is the first nonfiction thing I’d read by the funniest and wackiest short story writer out there today. The article is about the author’s journey to Nepal to witness a 15 year old boy who was reportedly surviving after spending seven months without eating or drinking, subsisting solely on meditation. Anyway, I read “segue” in the text, was nonplussed by the context (it can’t be, it musn’t, how can “way” come from “ue”?), so I looked it up. Now I just have to somehow retract any emails I’ve typed segway in…
But back to Segway, the two wheeled goof that failed to revolutionize personal transportation. I was amused and horrified to see there is actually a Segway Adventure model that “takes you off the beaten path and turns you on to the powerful thrill of nature.” It weighs 120 pounds, goes up to 12.5 miles an hour (like mountain biking without all that terrible exercise) and can go only 12 miles, off road, before needing a charge. If I am ever hiking and see an Adventure doubling the width of a lovely 12 inch trail with its preposterous existence, I’m going to, well, really I’d probably just smile and nod at the rider and then silently fantasize about stealing their Adventure and then running them over with it.
See for yourself (photo from the Segway website, as are the quote and specs above)...
I’ve been goofing around with making star blur images for years and finally came up with one that I’m as close to satisfied with as I’m probably going to get. This is from a camp on Mount Hood, actually, it’s only a few hundred yards up from the uppermost chairlift leaving out of Timberline Lodge. Looking down I could see the massive snow machines grooming the glacier for the next morning’s crop of brightly clad skiers, quite a contrast with the other direction, home to only rock, snow and sky. I’m often surprised at the flattening effect of a wide angle lens. I shot this image at twelve millimeters, and the vertical presence of the mountain is greatly diminished because of that. It as though the mountain was soft plastic and the ends of its ridges were pulled on until it became low and wide.
It was cold up there, well below freezing,
but aside from the fantastic view of old Hood, at sunset, eastern Portland and the Columbia River could be seen as a cozy cluster of lights (they really look that way while in the snow) and dark orange ribbon of water.
Matt DeGuise and I have been hanging out since elementary school. Being a traitor, he left Minnesota for Denver a few years back, and I've only seen him a few times since. Matt may have left God's country for the thin-aired west, but he's still a taciturn Midwesterner by heart, or perhaps DNA. In fact, he'll go long stretches of time without speaking at all. Never enough will be said about the rounding capabilities of attraction, as Matt's new wife, Darcy, is one of the most gregarious souls I've ever met.
Last month the two of them put together the most fantastic wedding I've ever had the privilege of attending, and furthermore, photographing. They wrote their own vows for the pithy outdoor ceremony. The grub was highlighted with juicy bison tenderloin. The bar was open. There was even a touring bluegrass band, Hot Buttered Rum, playing the reception. Maybe best of all was the setting. Along a mountain river, at the foot of a 13,900 foot mountain, in the midst of fields of wildflowers, my good friends wed.
I've been doing a fair amount of mountain biking over the last couple weeks. The raft in the photo is along the Minnesota River Bottoms trail, and was taken last fall. While riding the same trail last weekend I rode up onto a large pile of logs, and as I began rumbling down the other side veered too far askance and tumbled over me handlebars. For an instant I thought a good deal of pain was soon to be, but I landed softly on my back. The only damage was a bent brake lever.
There are some fun trails around, one in particular has a teeter-toter (Lebanon Hills). I'd never seen such a thing for a bike, but rode up the grounded end anyway, thinking, this is easy. At the top, a few feet off the ground, I paused, beginning to grow concerned until the toter teetered and I was back on the ground.
Full Post»
I dare say that May is going to be very fine. More important than being my birthday month, which has actually been traditionally full of bad luck for me—camera wrecked in a tipped canoe, face split open after a nasty bike crash—is that it’ll be spent of paddling and roaming. Tomorrow afternoon, after class, I’m heading south of the not-so-notorious Minnesota/Iowa border to the fledgling Upper Iowa River for a 140 mile float to the Mississippi. Then, after a night at home, it’s off to the Great Smoky Mountains. After that, a trail clearing trip to the Boundary Waters.
Back to broken cameras—I was recently enjoying the website of a photographer whom paddled much of the Mississippi River (http://www.theriverinside.com/). While he readied to enter one of the river’s many locks, he capsized. His gear sunk to the bottom. More interestingly horrible, at another point in his journey, his photographic equipment was destroyed when a barge mistakenly unloaded its sewage into the photographer’s canoe! The details were scarce on how such could happen; though I can only hope that the man was not in his canoe at the time of the deluge.
Full Post»
Took my first canoe trip of the year on the St. Croix this week. It was a solo journey except for the company of my eight pound wiener dog, Floyd. He had never camped before and did surprisingly well. He spent most of the time in the boat either sprawled out on a big rubber dry bag, or, when the surface grew too hot, on the unoccupied front seat of the boat, on which I tied his fleece pad. Small dogs are strange creatures--one must watch them to make sure they do not wander off into the jaws of a coyote, but they do have certain benefits like being able to nest at the foot of one’s sleeping bag like a warm furry heating pad. The only scare was when Floyd, whose swimming abilities had never been tested, leapt from the boat as we neared shore. He came up paddling with a confident look on his face, but the current then swept him under the canoe. I had been keeping him on a string, so was able to pull and retrieve him as through he was a nice sized fish. Once on shore he repeatedly sprinted across the sand beach and rolled in the dirt with enviable pleasure.
The above photo is from the first night’s camp, between Rush City and Wild River State Park. Ominous clouds blew in before the sunset, but the following morning was clear.
Full Post»
An hour from the nearest gas station on the thorny shores of the Rio Grande is a crumbling adobe village. Out the front doors spread barren Mexico without a trace of society in sight. Behind are a red, mushroom-capped rock and then a towering hill with cliffs cut by a gaping canyon. A whitewashed house with vacant windows is there, so is a low, rectangular store with a surviving awning made from barbed ocotillo branches. But the edifice that screams of what should be seen in places like this is the derelict church with its round topped windows and roof—climbing skyward in rising undulations to where a lonely cross carves into the atmospheric blue. Though looking hard at the cracked adobes, what peeks from the veneer of mud looks strangely like plywood and chicken wire. It looks and it is. The village that is a visage of the ideal southwestern tableau is a creation of Hollywood and not history. It is El Contrabando and home to movies like The Journeyman, Streets of Laredo and Gambler V, not to forget the Brooks and Dunn music video for My Maria. Oh, and the name, that is based on history--after an old smuggling route through area canyons.
Giardia is sort of a bogeyman of outdoor trips. Park rangers, vendors of water treatment paraphernalia and their countless minions are constantly threatening, “if you don’t boil or filter your water, the giardia will get you!” Potentially lurking invisible in even the purest of streams, giardia lamblia colonizes in the lower intestine and, among other things, limits absorption of food.
There is a general consensus that water from anything other than a bottle or faucet is dangerous. A greenhorn hiker I shared a camp with once called me an idiot to my face when I said I didn’t treat my water, which I don’t and haven’t for literally hundreds of streams, springs and ponds. Imagine my surprise when a week after returning home from the Big Bend I took ill. At first I thought my sickness stemmed from a dollop of questionable sour cream that I’d put on a burrito. But then two days later, swift and nasty, it settled into my gut like an eagle getting fried on a power line. I’ll leave out the specifics, but it was moving experience. Powerful. Wow. A healthy 130 pound organism waylaid by a microscopic one. I lived on the couch off of pudding and ginger ale for several days (time during which I watched every episode of The Office, 30 Rock and two seasons of Law and Order SUV on Netflix) though after two rounds and ten days of a drug called Metronidazole I was back to form.
I don’t know where the bogeyman caught me. It could have been a desert spring tainted by the shit of burros and mountain lion, or it could have been a cup of coffee I had in Mexico. When soon the spring time comes and I put on my backpack again, this time, perhaps, I’ll be carrying a pump or chemical treatment, but probably not.
Full Post»
For years my friend Mark has been telling me about a cabin he built on a plot of family woodland in northern Wisconsin. Call it a lack of faith, but I had pictured it a pile of plywood and sticks--building a cabin from scratch seemed too ambitious to do well in one’s free time. A couple weeks ago while he and I spoke over the phone, he answered my plans of doing a winter camp in the Apostle Islands by suggesting that instead of sleeping in a snow cave and shivering in a double bag for 12 hours a night, I visit his nearby cabin. Last week I spent 3 nights in that 8 by 10 hut, a short walk from the road and sitting under a forest of birch, pine and maple. Inside is a small woodstove, the log walls behind it are protected by a layer of glazed, smooth stones. The floor is pieced from caramel boards and a bunk runs the room’s length. I spent an afternoon on the Apostle lakeshore where there is a stretch of craggy shore pocketed with ice covered caves. The lake was frozen and I skied to the caves. The next day I drove along the Bois Brule River and walked among the ice mounds at its mouth, then strapped on skis and watched the sunset from Brule Point. The last full day flakes began to fall and I didn’t leave the cabin. I cut logs, watched the snow pile up and wrote and read in front of a glowing stove. I woke at three to add wood; the wind howled icy from the north and eked through chinks that weren’t filled with moss or shims. I filled the stove high and went back to bed. But the wood didn’t catch and by first light my hard boiled eggs had exploded and my bananas were brown and hard as hammers. No matter, a new fire finally lit to warm those final hours.
Full Post»
It was about 100 years ago when J.O. Langford and his family arrived at the big hot springs on the Rio Grande. His first impression of them were from “a hole some six inches in diameter and almost perfectly round, [that] spurted the sparkling water with a force that lifted the column almost a foot above the ledge before it tumbled back in a wreath of white foam.” They built a health spa for folks to come and get healed. Langford himself was long ill, though in time regained the health he’d lost as a malaria-ridden child. A full healing course of baths, a prescription passed down from Indians, was 21 days. Supposedly it worked quite well. Langford wrote that he saw numerous complete cures of gonorrhea, eczema, malaria, stomach illnesses and kidney ailments. I asked my wife the doc if his claims have any medical credence. She said aside from sulfur helping eczema and the desert air killing bacteria, hot spring cures are a myth. I struggle to explain Langford’s eye witness curative accounts in ways not involving personal pride. Then again, 21 days relaxing in a river canyon oasis is a pretty good way to feel better. I spent about three weeks in Big Bend, and though I did not visit the springs every day, I managed half a dozen trips. The foundation of Langford’s bath house still stands (it was built by a German national who shot his family and then himself when the Kaiser called him back to the motherland to fight in World War I) and is a pocket of clear, 105 degree water jutting into the muddy green Rio Grande under the open desert sky. The river and Mexico are on one side and yellow limestone cliffs on the other. People from all over still come there to soak in the water that, even if it does little to combat disease, does wonders for the soul.
Full Post»
Mauve bonefish, Bonefish, what’s a bonefish? I don’t know, yet there it is, Cutting blue with a razorback spine.
A spirit hawk made from reeds Two disintegrating hearts, Overlapped, but spreading Dissolving. Wait, no, they’re merging, and will be two no more.
Full Post»
I like the slurping sound that sometimes happens when waves lap against a large rock. When it does it sounds like a surfacing manatee or miniature whale. I heard such a sound once while walking a shore crest of Lake Superior. I turned to the lake and for an instant thought a gray rock ten yards from shore was some sort of non-existent Superior whale. If only.
Full Post»
In Boquillas Canyon where ocotillo plants grow like dancing octopi and ochre rock slabs pile stacked like God’s dominos, I found my new Ryan Rodgers’ Photography logo.I got a webpage coming up see, and there should be some little image to stick in the corner.I spied my man from a trail that looks down on the Rio Grande, my cantankerous, stubborn, resilient son of a biscuit mascot.My Wilson.My bulldog.My Viking.
Why?Because, this stone face embodies the qualities it’ll take to successfully do, what I’m trying to do.First of all, Mr. Rock Face is around to stay.Granted, in geologic time he won’t be around forever, but it’s a pretty safe bet some human generations will quietly pass before weathering erodes this surly countenance.What better insignia for outdoor photography than a shape taken directly from the outdoors?
I could even derive a more interesting company name—Rock Face Photography, Stone Face Photography, but that’s probably stretching things.Rock Face implies climbing and Stone Face a sort of weird toughness.Besides, I’m a believer in, at least in a few things, waiting for the solution to present itself.
Back when I was starting the Appalachian Trail (people who know me are saying, oh no, not that again) I had to wait a while to get a trail name.Some less romantically inhibited hikers, chose their own.Some good and funny, others quite self-complementary—Lone Wolf, Iron Man…I wanted mine to be given, but six weeks into the hike I was still waiting.Finally I got it one day at a swimming hole in Virginia.Three other hikers and I were drying off on little sand beach when a local woman showed up with her daughter from a nearby road.She turned around and drove to a store to bring us Coke’s and cantaloupes.The daughter asked our names, and after the others rattled off their colorful monikers (Midnight Moon, Happy Feet, Appalachian Yankee), I spit out my regular name.“You should be Cantaloupe,” the little girl said, and for the next three years, I was.
So after brainstorming for months on a logo, I walked right by one, and ain’t he a beaut, straight from the land.How perfect for photography composed of just that.
There was one major disappointment on my recent trip to the Big Bend region of Texas--finding that the ChihuahuanDesert contains no wild Chihuahuas.I had naturally assumed the second largest North American desert was home to packs of small canines that lived in prairie dog-like colonies, and, centuries ago, some brave soul began capturing them for domestication.
After arriving in the national park, I hastily struck camp near a spring and set my chair in a cluster of thorny brush.I spent the next several days quietly observing, but saw only javelinas.I decided on a more aggressive course and spent three days trekking through ocotillo and prickly pear, but still, no luck.Frustrated to the verge of tears, I walked into a ranger station and inquired as to where was the best place to see wild Chihuahua, and imagine my surprise when the ranger asked me to repeat my query and carefully wrote something on a pad of paper.He gently explained that there were no wild Chihuahuas, but by the time I had reached the door, peals of raucous laughter were escaping from the back room.
Horribly embarrassed, I wandered until finding a cave in the base of a cliff.I hid there for nearly a week.Just before leaving, I overturned a stone and found beneath it a small skeleton with canine incisors.Could it be?I showed it to that haughty ranger and he was perplexed.I have sent the bones to the Smithsonian and am breathlessly awaiting results.Shutter and Scrawl readers will be the first to learn about, what will likely be, validation of my Chihuahuan dreams.
