Got up (again) at about 5:30, drove 40 miles in the pitch dark out to the edge of the Canyon Lands canyon.  There were already maybe 15 people gathered to see the sun crest the horizon through the Mesa Arch. This is another of the icons of this part of the country. You have probably seen the view from here in many pictures, even if you didn’t know it.

Yeah, it was pretty spectacular.  I would like to have had the entire place to myself, but I’m just being selfish when I say that, and I recognize that. But there was a lot more waiting for someone to move, kids in the way, etc. etc. than should have been necessary. I also shot what I consider to be an exceptionally sad picture.  The picture has the arch and sunrise on one side…and a teenage girl totally engrossed in her texting on the other side. She texted through the entire thing, until her family left.

We then packed it up and headed out.  We came back through New Mexico and picked up a couple of hippy-ish hitchhikers after we saw their broken down VW Beetle(not the old bug, the new one) beside the road.  “Hawk” and “Samantha”, as their names turned out to be,  had “hit a bump” and they had “broken the bung off”.  Greg and I, both reasonably mechanically inclined, took some time and additional questions to figure out that what he meant was that they had broken the drain plug out of the engine’s oil pan, and lost all the oil out.  They had continued to drive it for an estimated three miles until it “started missing”.  Further more, this was Hawk and Samantha’s honeymoon.   While we didn’t break the news to them, they have probably destroyed the motor in their car.  They also told us the car’s name was Dauffney.  We hauled them on into to Taos and dropped them off to find a wrecker.

Past Taos, on into the flat part of New Mexico we passed this scene, and couldn’t help but get out and shoot it also.

This is somewhere in Union county, off of 416.

I should be home late tomorrow. No tragedies to report. It’s been a good trip so far.

Got up at O Dark Hundred, and went out to Arches National park this morning, then hiked uphill for almost two miles to the Delicate Arch. This is the iconic symbol of all things Utah. And it is amazing. Looks like you could knock it over with a feather. But I think it would certainly shoot better just before sunset.  I think we have the time of year wrong; most days start and end with a band of thunderstorms/cloud fronts off to the east or west preventing that direct early or late light; just a flat, filtered light.  So anyway, in a perfect world the light would have been from the other direction, but here it is:

Later today Greg and I went out to “Dead Horse Point”(how’s that for bad marketing?) and checked that out. This is a high overlook of the Colorado River canyon, and the view from there is pretty good.  But we could see across the canyon and see another place that should be a better vantage point. So we drove forever and a day back around to another area, then down a winding switchback dirt road to the near-bottom of the canyon.  Then another one of the brief, but dark rainstorms blew through, so again, we didn’t get ideal lighting, but here is what the canyon looked like driving down the switchback….

If you want to find this place, this is in Canyon Lands National Park, where the Gooseneck Trail meets Potash Road.

It is now after 12, and I need to get up tomorrow at 5:30 am, so we can drive an hour to get to a place called Mesa Arch before sunrise; if there are no clouds…it should be a spectacular.

We are tired, but well and, as usual, having a good time. Until later.

We have spent all day running around Arches National Park. And we have seen….lots of arches!  Supposedly there are 2000(that’s right two thousand) of them in the park. I’ll save an arch picture for another day;

Yes; lot’s of well placed scraggly trees. Deep blue skys. And every day thunderstorms roll in. You can see them coming for miles, building, building in the west, the north, the east…

Then it rains just a little. Barely dampens the dust.

We did a little atral photography tonight.

Astral photography is easy when the sky is dark enough. Like the Utah desert at night.

But then sometimes you get weird stuff like this lightning bolt illuminated bizarro shot;

That’s about a very long exposure. It was honest-to-gosh soooooo dark we couldn’t see anything other than the faintest silloutte. It reminds me of Bedrock; you know; where Fred and Wilma used to live.

More tomorrow.

Second day out.  All is well. We spent the first night in a lodge at the Mesa Verde National Park near Durango Colorado.  Then we got up early and went out to an area where we could see from our cliff the ruins of the cliff dwellings on the opposite cliff, across the narrow deep canyon.  This place is at the end of this canyon, far, far from anywhere. It’s about 17 miles to the highway.  It’s incredibly silent. It’s spiritually silent.  Most of my life is spent among a constant background noise of cooling fans; on the A/C, the refridgerator, several on my computers, I hear the constant drone of cars, trucks, airplanes, other people, TVs, Radio, ….this place has none of that. I could hear people talking maybe half a mile away, on the other side of the canyon.  I’m not used to that.  You’ve heard people say; “it’s so noisy I can’t hear my self THINK!”  Out here; you can hear yourself think. It’s a funny noise.

Here’s a shot across the canyon. I know; none of these pictures of this place look real. It looks like you are looking at a diorama.

After spending not nearly enough time here, we drove on to Cortez, Colorado, then on into Utah.  Saw a number of pretty or otherwise interesting sites… including this one.

Your probably thinking I should have put something in the picture to give you some sense of the scale of this arch. Well, I did, an if you will look very very closely you can see two people in the lower left corner.

We haven’t even got to Arches National Park yet. More tomorrow

After about 15 hours of hard driving, passing through OKC, Amarillo, Tucumcari, Albequrque(home of Breaking Bad)we finally got to Durango, Colorado, spending the night at the lodge in the Mesa Verde National Park. Beautiful canyons, cliff dwellings, mule deer, craggy spruce on rock ledges, etc. etc.

Aug25, 2011.

A number of people have asked me to put together a photography trip to Utah, specifically Southern Utah. This is the home of Arches National Park, Bryce Canyon, Canyonlands National Park, Dead Horse Point State Park and many other iconic southwestern US photo-meccas. So that’s what we’re headed out to do. My ol’ shootin’ partner Greg Merrell is going with me. We’ll see what we can find and report back, at least some of what we find on this blog. If you know of some un-discovered site out here, let me know via email or a comment to this blog and we’ll check it out.

If you have any interest in this as a trip, start giving me some feedback as to how long you might want to be out, what you would like or dislike in such a trip, etc. Right now(subject to immediate change without notice) is to try to do something prior to Thanksgiving this year, but that may not be workable. We’ll see.

We are heading out at 5:am tomorrow(friday) going west on I-40, then heading north about Tucumcari, up to Cortez, Colorado, then over to Moab Utah.  We plan to headquarter out of Moab and branch out from there.  We’ll keep you posted.

Today is the first monday after returning from the recent Ecuador photography trip.  We got back late last wednesday and I’ve been unpacking answering 700 emails, sorting and rating about 1,000 photos and avoiding phone calls for the last four days. But now it’s back to reality and the start of a new week back in the real world of Tulsa, Ok, business as ususal.

This year I took seven people to Ecuador and brought seven back; so that’s good news. I also brought  all my cameras and all my lenses back, which is good news(and doesn’t happen every trip), and I brought several dozen Amazon chiggers hidden in my ankles and lower legs.

Photo courtesy of Stefanie Pratt; Ecuador photo tripper.

In the sense of full disclosure and honesty, we had a few negative things happen, but nothing of any real consequence.

As reported previously, Toni stepped in sheep manure on a steep trail and smacked her tail bone pretty hard.

One day, while pushing a 40′ long canoe through a low spot in the river, I, with my usual grace and aplomb, hopped back into the canoe, only to slip and fall full force on my side, on the side of the canoe; breaking a rib in the process. But no big deal; it’s not very comfortable, but it didn’t keep me from doing anything I wanted to do, including the 3 hour hike through the primary rain forest.

I don’t think, or at least, I’m unaware of anytime that anybody was in danger or felt they were in danger.

I had one near-theft but nobody had anything stolen. The near-theft happened like this. On the first day in Quito, we went to a large public square and we all dispersed to take pictures. While in Ecuador, we travel with a guide, a personal friend of mine, Jonathan Hall.  I’ve been to this public square several times before and didn’t need anymore photos of it, so I went and sat down on a tall staircase of a building where I could keep an eye on our group while they milled around. There were lots of people nearby, and several police officers, broad daylight.

I knew the next day, I would be too far out to get a cell phone signal, so I thought I would call my wife and talk to her briefly. But I found my wife was very upset; she had just discovered that one of her pets had been killed. While I was trying to sort this out, I had set my camera(a Nikon D3s) down beside me.  A couple of minutes later; I saw Jonathan walking toward me shouting and pointing; it was then that I noticed a man in a white shirt and necktie, sitting beside me, holding my camera. Jonathan had a police man there in seconds. The would-be theif had sat down beside me, picked up my camera and was starting to drape his jacket over the camera when Jonathan saw him and intervined. Had Jonathan not been around, a couple of seconds later and I would have been missing a rather pricey camera.  The policeman led the man away, the man protesting that he was only “looking” at the camera.

No loss, but I am very frustrated with myself that I let myself be that distracted. I know better than that. We have never encountered any threat on any of these trips, but we have had several instances of theft in Quito. Very frustrating.

Everybody enjoyed the trip and had lots of good, positive things to say about it. Several had never done anything like that before. In a couple of weeks, after everybody has had a chance to sort our their photos, we will get together again for an “after-trip party” and look at each others photos.

This is the fourth time I’ve been to Ecuador and I am always amazed at the beauty and scope of Ecuador. Several want me to put together a trip for next year to the Galapagos Islands and northern Ecuador, and I’m starting to work on that.

Since my last post, a lot has happened. We left the Hacienda, and worked our way down to Banos, had a good time there with one exception; there was a festival going on; The Festival of the Virgin of the Holy Waters. Now this may not mean much to you (or me) but it means so much to the people of Banos that they shoot fireworks off about every half hour all night long to celebrate (BOOM…..) and not only that; but they have a Mariachi Band that plays off and on starting at 6:00 am. I am not making that up.

But Banos was very nice other than that.

We left Banos and worked our way on down the slope of the Andes toward the Amazon Basin. Stoping at several places along the way to shoot tall, tall waterfalls. One water fall that I have shoot at previously is now, not one, but two waterfalls; it was split in two by a landslide that also wiped out several of the houses and businesses below the falls.

We rode a cable car down into a gorge. The cable car went about 90 miles an hour.

We got far away from civilization, turned of the road went down a gravel road quite some distance…then passed where they are building the new Tena international airport. It’s an 7,000′ runway and support buildings and control tower out in the middle of nowhere. Hmmmm. Tourism? Military? Porkbarrel?

We went on to where we cross the river Arajuno and pick up the canoes to go on the lodge, but the canoe wasn’t there. Hmmmm. We waited there until almost dark and then one showed up, we got to the lodge after dark. But they had dinner waiting on us, and all was good.

The following day we loaded up in the boats and went up river to a tiny village called Santa Barbara. We spent a big part of the day hanging out with them, taking their pictures and printing them out on a Epson PictureMate printer, which is battery powered and completely portable. Very cool and very special to the people there. Sunny brought 100 tubes of toothpaste and toothbrushes and “Zany Bands” which are neon rubber band braclets for the kids. Toni brought some of the wedding bubble blowing kits; little soap bubble blowing rigs which were a big hit also.

The next day we went to an animal rescue place, and the next day we went on a three hour hike in the rainforest. And the rainforest is pretty amazing, but it is not an easy place to hike. It’s all up and down, many things to trip over, etc. etc. But at least we got to see it while the planet still has one.

The rainforest is also very humid. We had several cameras stop working or become erratic. A couple “got better”, but a couple didn’t also.

After three nights at the lodge, we packed it up and headed out. We make a big loop on this trip, never going over the same ground twice. We headed out of the lodge, went back down river to the bridge, picked up our little travel bus and went to Tena, then up out of the Amazon Basin eventually reaching the town of Baezo, then higher still to the Andean crest, the continental divide of South America.  We stopped multiple times to shoot some of the tallest waterfalls, deepest gorges you have ever seen.

We eventually got into Quito about 7 pm. Tomorrow we leave for the Quito Airport about 6 am, and make our way back to Miami, Dallas and finally Tulsa.

I’ll post again, with more photos after I get back home, but I think that’s all for tonight.

Since the last post… we left Quito, travelled a long, loooong way up into the Andes to a place called Laguna Quilotoa, which is a crater lake in the top of an extinct volcano:yea, just like our Crater Lake in Oregon.  When we got there the whole place was in the clouds: nobody could even see the lake, let alone take a photo of it. But then, just as if on cue. the clouds began to lift and our view opened up of the whole lake, this is a very strange, beautiful, silent place, we took hundreds of pictures.

We hiked down the steep, narrow trail used by the sheep to get down to the water, for a better view, when tragedy struck: Toni slipped in sheep s___t, and fell smack on her bottom. Thank goodness no cameras were damaged, but her pride and dignity were a total loss and completely unsalvagable.

We left the crater and came about a thousand feet down to a hacienda, a working farm that is over a hundred years old and is now used a sort of bed and breakfast, the Posada de Tigua. I´ve stayed there several times over the past three years and it´s still pretty amazing.

While we were there, some of us milked real cows. We walked all over the farm shooting all sorts of animals(with a camera). Several of the crew watched a sheep give birth. Which, as muddy, bloody and slimy as that is…is still a thing of awe. Its always strange to see how fragile those first few moments are. The lamb is trembling in the cold morning air, it´s legs are almost unusable, it takes forever to stand up, then it doesnt know what to do. It roots around on it´s mother, but she isn´t much help. After more than an hour of false starts and missed opportunities… lamb and tit connect, and you know things are going to be okay, at least for while.

I know this is nothing new: it goes on in every species, every day, just like it has for millions of years. But it´s still remarkable.

We stayed longer at the Posada than we originally intended, but there was just too many good things to see and shoot.

We finally left about 11 and got back on the road.

We stopped at a high land farms house and visited them briefly. This is a hut dug into the hill side with a thatched roof. It´s maybe 15 feet long and 10 feet deep. Dirt walls, dirt floor. No bathroom. A propane burner is the kitchen.  A baby sleeps on blankets on the floor. Chickens, dogs, cats run in and out.  In one corner about a dozen Guine Pigs nest. They´re not pets. A grandmother, father, mother and four children live here.

We came down hill, from 12,000 feet in altitude, to about 6,000 in half a day. We´ll drop another 4,000 feet in altitude tomorrow as we come enter the the Amazon basin.  We are spending the night in Banos, (Spanish for the bath, not the toilet).

We should reach the ArajunoJungle Lodge tomorrow night and I´ll get to see my friends Tom and Charo…and their monkey, Mona.

Other than Toní¨s bruised rear end and a little sunburn, we¨re all doing well and having a good time.

We made it into Quito, the capital city of Ecuador, tuesday night about 9 pm. Quito sits in a valley between two ridges of mountains. The alltitude in the valley in 9,000 ft. the mountains, about 11,000. The hight altitude, short runway and mountains makes for some interesting, but brief landings.

Checked into a little hotel I have used before, the Villa Nancy and then went to sleep. We got up the next morning, got back on our little bus and went north of Quito to a monument that marks the equator, as defined by french mathimaticians and mapmakers in the 1700s. Not bad: according to my GPS, they only missed it by about 80 yards. Considering the planet is 24,000 miles in circumference, that aint half bad.

Went to colonial Quito and shot the indenpendence square, the presidential palace, some cathederals, then went to the National Cathederal of Ecuador: the Basilica del Vota. It is one of the most photographer-friendly cathederals on the planet:tripods allowed!  And we went up in the bell towers, the clock towers and into the crypt beneath the church: $585. rents you a spot for 5 years: and if you don´t re’up they do evict.

Then went up on a ridge overlooking the city about dust and shot the city down in the vally as the light faded…

Tomorrow we get up at pre=dawn and hike over a hill to see if we can get a decent sunrise shot. We will see how that goes. By 7 we need to load up and head out. We have about a three hour drive down to a town by the name of Saquisilli, and it is market day. We plan on shooting the market then heading on to a crater lake in the top of an extinct(hopefully)volcano.  Then onto a 120 year old hacienda up in the mountains. And then we will shoot the stars from the dark dark Andean night. Yeah, its good.

I probably wont be able to update tomorrow, we will just be too remote, but maybe the next day when we reach Banos. The volcano near(very near) Banos has been active lately and we have at least a chance of getting so night lava shots. And the place is called Banos for the mineral baths near there: not because its a bathroom town.

We are all well, and in good spirits. No problems of any consequence so far.