I see to be in a bit of a monochrome mood lately, and I worked on three images I haven’t presented before: one from a year ago a few miles from home, one from five Mays ago in Saqánma (a.k.a. Hells Canyon), and a third from a surprisingly cold Memorial Day ten years back in Eureka Valley, California. Rounding out the set is a color image from an early May morning fifteen years ago in the Utah west desert.
A bit more play with Canadian lake images: I’m coming to love these really large Inland Northwest water bodies for the sense of distance and floating mountains they evoke.
From April, a couple views of some beautiful country we enjoyed for a couple days in British Columbia’s West Kootenay region. This trip was really just to get the lay of the land and I didn’t put a ton of effort into photography. But we certainly hope to venture up soon to start exploring more deeply.
The flash of a sail across the immense lake lent a beautiful hint of scale to the scene.
I was rather spoiled for choice in looking back on Aprils of 10 and 15 years ago, so I hope you’ll indulge me in a couple extra images: Utah’s west desert; Oregon’s Illinois River; a beautiful spring storm in Inyo County, California; the Great Salt Lake. Five years ago I was keeping closer to home, but close to home is very nice around here, especially in April. The Great Salt Lake and Eastern Sierra images are fresh from the archive, never before shared, and I don’t recall whether I’ve ever posted this particular shot of Notch Peak before.
Birders have a saying: “When the book and the bird disagree, always believe the bird.” This phrase came to mind last week when a friend and I watched perplexedly as a smooth brown mammal back kept emerging and diving in an isolated lake in Washington’s /Channeled Scablands. What was it? Muskrat? Too large. Beaver? Gotta be a beaver, that works… but the tail, the tail seems wrong. One thought kept getting pushed away: otter, because what the hell is an otter doing at a basalt-bound pond in the scabland desert?
But after enough observation, it was undeniable: beaver is not a match, it was certainly an otter. And what it was doing was, reasonably enough, fishing. We watched it catch and bolt down several fish over the course of 40 minutes or so. It then spent a while gliding about the lake amidst the smooth ripples and warm reflection before climbing out for a good roll and rest on the shoreline reeds.
For those less acquainted with Washington geomorphology, the Channeled Scablands are a region where enormous Ice Age floods stripped the landscape down to its basalt bedrock, leaving behind mazes of mostly dry cliffs, canyons, buttes, pinnacles and pits. Some of these features do hold streams and lakes, but the region is mostly desert. This particular lake is over a mile as the crow flies from the nearest flowing water. We walked away from our critter show wondering if this otter lives here full-time, if it has a mate, how it ended up here. Or if it’s a temporary visitor, what inspires an otter to leave an honest creek and scamper miles through cliffs, stone outcrops, dry grass and cows to find an isolated fishing hole? I may never know, but it’s always a joy to be surprised by an animal.
Selections from 5, 10 and 15 years ago… Nothing too dramatic, just a twist of lichen in the Washington scablands, a young hawk in Deep Springs Valley and a morning view in the foothills of New Mexico’s San Mateo Range (the Socorro County San Mateos, not the other San Mateos with Mt. Taylor, for the NM geography pedants in the house).
Nevada often feels like endless blank space, and that’s part of its appeal. But equally appealing is the knowledge that there are secrets to be found in that emptiness: for instance, this small wonderland of ashflow tuff domes laced with aspens.
Eli and I visited here as a short overnight backpack when he was six, and it’s one of my favorite memories with him. It wasn’t easy. The hike in wasn’t long, but it was mostly trailless through brush, with a detour to avoid a group of wild horses who didn’t seem pleased to see us. As expected, there was no surface water, and though it was spring and aspen leaves were green, it froze hard at night and shady spots held snow. And it was unmistakably the middle of nowhere.
The Great Basin often feels too gritty and hardscrabble to call graceful, but this place was full of grace in the smooth curves of eroded stone, relict ponderosas, exuberant aspen thickets alive with fresh growth.
It would have been a joy to stay beyond one cold evening and golden morning, but we needed water. Turning our steps away felt like leaving an enchanted oasis, a secret paradise not meant for human lingering.
I’m still working through older material that has fallen through the cracks, e.g. these more intimate images from Saqánma (a.k.a. Hells Canyon) in 2021. Has it really been that long?
This edge of Idaho holds interesting geology where a series of island arcs smashed into ancient North America and stuck. Clean exposures are pretty rare, though.
A curious drainage/erosion pattern happening here. I didn’t actually get to walk up to it and check it out on the ground, couldn’t really figure it out from a distance and still can’t. Maybe some very small-scale stream capture?
A lonely pictograph…
A bit of a wider view…
And a final frame… I did include this one in my 2021 favorites collection and I’ve remained very fond of it with its ambiguous scale, its two lonesome trees with their almost California foothill vibes, its breath of desert spring:
Here are two oldies from the Eastern Sierra that I’d never quite got around to working with (perhaps apropos for Ansel Adams’ birthday today). Part of the reason is that they have so much atmospheric haze in the mix that I’ve always felt uneasy about their sharpness, particularly the second. But a photo’s virtue does not always lie in its sharpness, and I think even the second would print nicely on a more impressionistic medium, as long as one didn’t try to go huge.
Selections from 5, 10 and 15 years ago… I think February is our most consistently snowy month here on the Palouse, and February ’21 was this first time I managed to embrace our winter minimalism that can be so starkly magical. In February 2016, I managed to catch this image of a Salt Creek pupfish, that remarkable aquatic creature that thrives where no fish should live in the heart of Death Valley. This one’s always been a favorite – you’ll probably need to enlarge it to play find-the-fish. February 2011 saw me wandering in dry but very cold temperatures in the central New Mexico desert.
