Western Swing Photo Adventure 2011 - Memories and Moments in Time

Well, folks, it's been nearly 3 years since I was last on an extended photo adventure, this adventure is back to Colorado to do some shooting with an old friend, Weldon Lee of weldon@weldonlee.com, and then on to some National Parks and Monuments that I have never been to.

This adventure started out much like my last outing with Weldon back in 08 to photograph Maine Moose, in that, I was invited to accompany him and his good friend and partner Lori Huff to shoot the White Mountain goats up on Mt. Evans near Idaho Springs, Co. Once again when I checked airfare and car rental for a nice short shooting vacation I was overwhelmed at the cost... and, as in my last adventure with Weldon, my thoughts quickly turned to the fact that I could drive and camp out and extend my time from 11 days to 2 months for about the same money. Well...I'm not sure if that last statement is all that true, as it turned out to be a lot more expensive than I had anticipated.

My initial thought to save some money on this trip was to buy a small pop-up tent that would fit in the bed of my new pickup truck for sleeping. Since some of the places that I had anticipated to go to would involve backwoods camping...and during the time of year that the black bears are seriously eating their hearts out getting ready to hibernate for the winter, my thoughts of being a soft taco for a hungry bear had me re-thinking this tent-in-the-truck deal. The second obstacle was that this tent-in-truck thing would not work out since one of my favorite camping locations when on the road going from point ”A” to point “B” is the Wal-Mart Residence Inns. The store managers would have frowned upon my setting up a tent in the back of my truck to camp out in their parking lot... I do believe.

So now my thoughts were to just take my 26ft camper/trailer...but this is a really long trip. Yeah, there is great solace in the added comfort of a home on wheels so to speak, but then I thought about the gas mileage...or lack thereof. This would make the fuel cost factor a Woser!. So I said to myself...Self? how about looking for a fiberglass camper shell to fit the truck. That would solve the bear, the Wal-Mart, and gas problems ... all in three. What a genius I thought. Well, I couldn't find a used camper topper for sale that would fit my truck. So I ended up buying a new one. That in and of itself would have more than offset the additional fuel cost of pulling my camper, but then hauling that camper back into the wilderness places I went would have never worked out very well. Besides, I make sudden U-turns frequently when I spot something of photographic interest. That kind of turns you do not do suddenly.

Well having added up all the gas receipts and food costs over and above the original trip just to photograph white goats, I nearly fainted. I'm sure my blood pressure went up a couple of points, but... let me say this about that...it was one hell-of-an enjoyable trip and well worth every dollar I spent.

I went to places in southern Colorado and saw absolutely beautiful scenery that I didn't get to see when I lived out there back in 2000. Places like the Colorado National Monument, the Black Canyons of Gunnison National Park, the Great Sand Dunes National Park and Preserve were absolutely outstanding.

I also spent a few days camping in the Rocky Mountain National Park, but this time I was appalled at the high fences that were put up in some of the best landscape areas of this park. This was an effort to keep the elk out of their favorite feeding grounds to let these areas recover from heavy grazing. Many of my favorite places, as well as a few hundred thousand other photographers, for beautiful fall landscapes, are now no more. I'm sure the residences of Estes Park are real thrilled as well because these elk are now probably eating aunt Martha's favorite garden plants, not to mention uncle Fred's lawn.

Another site that really took me back a bit was the great huge numbers of pine trees that were cut down and stacked ready to burn as a result of the pine boring beetle. This little bugger, no pun intended, is attacking pine trees all across the northern reaches of the continental US. Our National Parks are very hard hit by this little bugger...there I go again. The parent beetle attacks the pine trees just under the outer bark area and deposits the eggs, where then the larva eat their way into the center of the tree from top to bottom. At this point, I'm not really sure just how well our boys of botany can come up with a permanent cure for this outbreak. 

                                                                           

                                                                                                                                   

The Park service current mindset is to only cut the dead and dying trees that immediately adjoin public hiking trails within the boundaries of the parks. The remainder of effective areas will be left up to Mother Nature. In some fairness to the park service personnel, there is a somewhat limited herbicide being applied to some trees that are once again adjacent to public roadways and hiking trails, all in an effort to preserve the limited visual beauty as you drive around the park's roads. These efforts might be a bit too late in the areas of heavy infestation and perhaps these same efforts might have been somewhat more effective had they been put into action when the pine boring beetles were first noticed.   

Back to the substance of my photo adventure...

The Colorado National Monument was very much like I had remembered how eastern Utah looked back when I was there in 2002. It had many of the same geological formations and sand coloration. But this place was absolutely stunning...with the vertical spires and their shapes and colors. I was standing at one of the overlooks one afternoon looking back towards the north and notice the juxtaposition of the Colorado National Monuments's terrane features and that of the open valley. This valley extended, quite a distance mind you, all the way back to the Colorado Mountains and their main features of a solid granite mountain with no spire features and eroding of the sandstone.

 

You can see these distinctive differences in the photo to the left. One of my photographing habits is to use my telephoto lenses to get in close to features that are much smaller in stature, isolating away what I call "The Big Picture". There are endless compositions available throughout the day that are available to you once you train your eyes to see them. You begin to see a variety of shapes, some sloping freely along a ridge or oftentimes they may be jagged-edged compositions that mimic a well-known object. Every mountainous area has them...they are all there waiting for you to find them. They may require you to move left or right and up and down just as any other photographic composition and they require the correct lighting to make them stand out.

This park was established in 1911 and has 23 miles of rim drive roadways that offer some of the most breathtaking views of this park. There are two park entrances, one from the west side at Fruita and Grand Junction on the east side. The Colorado National Monument attracts many animals to live, nest, or hunt within its boundaries. The mule deer are the largest, however, coyotes, mountain lions,  and Desert Big Horn Sheep are also occasionally seen. Smaller mammals, like grey foxes, desert cottontails, rock squirrels, and Hopi chipmunks, are often seen scampering off the sides of the Rim Rock Drive or hiking trails. Golden eagles, red-tailed hawks, and turkey vultures often soar aloft on the air currents; Gambel's quail and their clutch scurry across the trails, and the calls of the morning dove and the canyon wren echo in the canyons.

The various overlooks are excellent places to watch the acrobatics of the white-throated swift and violet-green swallow just below the rim. Bright blue pinyon jays are a common and colorful sight throughout the monument. However, what really blew me away on this trip was the Black Canyons of Gunnison National Park. That was really some deep hole carved out by a stream of water, much like the Grand Canyon further west. It's mind-boggling to think that water can do that...but of course, it only took a couple of billion years or so to accomplish what we see today. The Black Canyon of the Gunnison National Park is in western Colorado. It surrounds part of a deep, steep-walled gorge carved through Precambrian Rock by the Gunnison River. Roads and trails along the North and South have views of the Black Canyon's dramatic drops and the striated Painted Wall cliff were stunning. 

The winding East Portal Road descends to the river. Wildlife includes mule deer, elk, and golden eagles. The Park was founded, first as a National Monument in 1933, and later became a National park in 1999. It encompasses 47 square miles. The Black Canyons of the Gunnison provides opportunities to see spectacular and important geologic features, including some of the steepest cliffs in North America, and is home to the fastest bird in the world, the Peregrine falcon.

Of course, it’s now a raging river, but it is also controlled by a damn at Blue Mesa Lake.  In some of the canyon's rim locations, you could stack a couple of Empire State buildings on top of one another with room to spare and still not reach from top to the bottom of the rim in many of these canyons. I was standing behind the metal railing thank you, peering over the edge straight down into the bottom of the canyon observing some rapids in the Gunnison River and thinking... if you fell over, no one would ever find you, only the pile of crap you left on the ground as you left the rim of mother earth. If the Grand Canyons can really top this...then I should go. 

The Canons here are so numerous, overlaying one another, twisting and turning such that you often only need to move, in some cases, a matter of a few feet at the same overlook and you have a completely different view. I have talked to some photographers that have said that this is a very difficult place to shoot, because of the extreme range of tonality (the areas of dark vs light). You definitely need a camera with a good sensor with a lot of dynamic range,  (the ability to capture good detail in both the shadows and highlights). Otherwise, you need to bracket your same composition's exposure by one stop on either side of the main exposure. This can realistically only be accomplished with accuracy by having your camera on a good sturdy tripod to make sure of the alignment of each frame and setting the camera's exposure system to manual and not automatic. You need to be in complete control at this place.

There were two campgrounds, one on each side of the North and South canyon rims. I camped about 6 nights/days at each campground photographing along both canyon rims and various overlooks. However, I did find some interesting photo opportunities outside the park when I did some side trips and going into town for supplies. One morning I found some mule deer, a large buck, and a doe with her fawn. There were numerous old barns, a beautiful stand of aspen trees, and a nice pair of Western Kingbirds willing to pose for me.

I could have easily spent another couple of weeks exploring the surrounding area as well as taking the East road down to the Gunnison River within the park. This would have been a very different perspective of looking up at the massive canyon walls from the ground/river level. The Gunnison area has a lot of old rich history and beautiful scenery to explore. I found that just about all of the parking areas located around both canyon rims to not be crowded and the hiking out to the rims from the parking areas to be quite short and easily hiked.

If you are uncomfortable with heights then I would not suggest that you go out to the rim of the canyon's overlooks as only a few of them have any kind of safety railings. However, this park has much more to offer, that is well worth adding it to your bucket list for sure. If you are a rock climber, then this is the place for you as I noticed several groups of climbers staging at the south rim campground. I never did see any of them while photographing. Perhaps this is where I should back up a bit to mention something about the main reason for this photo adventure out west...remember my mentioning those white goats? This entire trip was centered around the White Goats of MT. Evens near Idaho Springs, Colorado, as this place had been on my bucket list for years when I lived in Longmont, Colorado back in 2000-2002. 

You could spend half life-time there and have more images than time to process them. The Blue Mesa Lake area was beautiful. It was on the one morning to go photography Blue Mesa Lake that I found the mule deer doe and her fawn. The cute little guy was bouncing all over that field.

Mt. Evens was my major destination, but not the only destination as I had planned this trip to cover five National Parks and Monuments, for photography. My itinerary for this trip went something like: Georgia/cousin's, Idaho Springs, CO. /  Mt. Evens for 10 days, then onto my friend's place, Weldon Lee for a few days and side trips into the Rocky Mountain National Park. I then did some camping in this park for a few days before driving over the Continental Divide and to Grand Junction, Co. The next morning it was to the Colorado National Monument for about a week of camping there. The next stop was the Black Canyons of the Gunnison National Park. Then it was a drive south to The Great Sand Dunes National Park and Preserve for another 4 or 5 days of camping and a few side trips. The next destination was the White Sand Dunes National Monument in New Mexico.

My only regret was the timing of this trip. I had to be at Mt. Evans before they closed the road up to the summit for repairs and before the major snows. I found that this was just a tad bit early for finding fall colors as they had not peaked yet. I supposed I could have overstayed my welcome at my friend's place in Allenspark, Colorado so to be more into the peak of the falls colors wherever I went from that point on. However, I had to rely on my IR Color camera to try to find something that would be different, which BTW I somehow managed not to use as much as I th\ught that I would. I only came away with 2 color IR images that really caught my eye. One is the 6th image in this story made late in the afternoon. Normally you shoot in IR at the brightest part of the day and that is true of B&W IR, however, when shooting in color IR I found late in the afternoon gave more surreal images. 

I should have stayed at White Sands for a few more days there but there was no camping there. I found this place a bit challenging because of the harsh lighting bouncing off the brilliant white sand, which meant early morning or late afternoon shooting. This was where my schedule now had a wrinkle in it. All of these places that I went to had no timeline associated with them. However, at the near end of this trip, I needed to be in Rockport Texas on a certain day as I was meeting up with another cousin that we grew up together in Miami. We had made plans for some flyfishing on his boat and he had a schedule which made it my schedule of sort of.

So the first 3 days at the very beginning of this trip, I stayed at my cousin's place in Northern Georgia, I almost always make his place my first stop when going on one of these photo adventures. On day 2 in Georgia, I went to a waterfall named Desoto Falls. There is an upper and a lower falls, however, at this time of the year the summer storms are much fewer and the waterfalls are flowing but just a fraction of the summer flows, but still interesting. Both of these falls had a small creek flowing away from them and I make it point to walk along the edges of them using my telephoto lens to isolate on the smaller picture. I called them my "Picture within a Picture". Even at a slow walking pace, frequently stopping to make another photo here and there, this is hard on my poor ole broken up body, and, therefore stopping to rest at park benches the way I have to go.

When the hiking trails have very much of a steep grade to them, I'm in deep trouble...it just takes me longer to get where I'm going and a lot of pain when I finally get there and then get back to my truck. I try to break up long hikes with frequent detail study shooting along the trail or next to a stream if available. 

When I did get back to my truck I noticed a large dent at the top of the tailgate and where the glass lift door of my new fiberglass topper. The frame of the glass was bent a bit and the major part of the tailgate was damaged above the locking key. But everything worked, and I could still lock myself in. She was just dinged up a bit. When I got back home I had the tailgate replaced.

                  

So now let's get bact to the heart of this trip, MT. Evens and the White Mountain Goats that live there. Now, this was exciting...not the goats so much, although they were and were beautiful to see as well. I meant the drive up the side of Mt. Evens to where they hung out. There were 11, and I counted each and every one of them, many times up and down day by day...11 one hundred and eighty-degree plus switchback turns to get to the top of the White Goat’s world at over 14,000 ft. Actually, this is the highest location in the continental US that you can drive your car...14,272 ft.+ This is a rather narrow road with quite a bit of roadway giving way to gravity. Those stupid rubber orange cones out at the edge of No-Where-Ville don't mean very much to the guy on the inside of the driving lane right up next to the side of the mountain, but the poor schmuck on the outside lane?????...what can I say. 

There were no barriers of any kind to keep you on the roadway and not going over the side, just that dumb orange traffic cone to remind you that the ground was giving way to erosion.  But,  the goats were there, and in good numbers at times. There were some ewe mountain sheep, mule deer and lots of Yellow-Bellied Marmots and those cute little guys, the Picas. The little Picas were so friendly that they would even come right up to you for portrait images. I even had one come up and bite my boot just to test my patients. A few Ptarmigans to round out the mountain wildlife...other than that poor dude that couldn't manage to make the curve on his mountain bike...never did hear if he made it or not.

This is a road that you really need to pay great attention to where not only your driving but also the other guy…no place for rubbernecking…but I did…otherwise you would miss finding the smaller animals. As for the goats, well they stand out quite well, especially when you negotiate one of those 180-degree switchbacks turns and they are standing in the middle of the road right in front of you…hard to miss...but you have to because it’s a long way down to the next road.

At the highest point of MT. Evans, which is 14,264 Ft. at the summit and about 50 ft at the parking lot, where the weather can change hour by hour. I was taking a break about midday when the clouds began to move in making for very flat lit images. Since my truck was set up for camping and I had brought along my lunch for the day... I didn't want to drive all of those switchbacks and 30 minutes back to town just to get a sandwich and a drink. So I backed in close to the edge of the rocky slope so that people could not walk behind my truck, opened up the back tailgate and window, had my lunch, and laid down for a rest. I woke up to raindrops on the roof, then it began to sleet, followed by snowflakes all over a period of 30 minutes.

I decided to drive down to a lower elevation to look for goats and when I came around one of those switchbacks the wall of snow was near blizzard conditions. A mile or so further and the skies cleared and presented a beautiful rainbow over top of some feeding goats. The one thing I learned while living in Colorado was if the weather was nasty, wait an hour and it will change.

One place that was very high on my bucket list on this trip was the old mill at the ghost town of Crystal on the Crystal River. It's been said that just about every well know photographer has made his image of this mill. If this is true, then the guy with the old falling apart jeep in the nearby town of Marble, CO. has got to be a millionaire by now, as he runs a wilderness tour in that area. This mill is not only a longgggggggggggg way back and well off the beaten track, but it's really difficult to get to... or at least the route that I tried as I know all too well. However, it is strange that some people still live there and have to commute, probably by some secrete route. It seems as though my GPS unit, even though I had plotted really tight grid coordinates for this mill before I left on this trip, decided to take me to what would have been a near-suicide mission. It seems another well know Flickr photographer went the wrong way as well. All I cans ay is that it was a good thing that a truck was coming out the same road as I was going in, and the driver told me to definitely not go the way I was headed. He said he would show me where to turn off. So I turned around in a small rocky-river bed and followed him out to the correct turn. As you may have noticed, there are no images made during this part of the trip, and for a good reason. I was very busy driving and trying to not drive off the side of this damn mountain.

The return trip back out was not as hair raising as the ride in. You see, there was this deep/steep (not many adjectives could adequately describe this) drop off on the passenger side of my truck. My visibility on the passenger side of my truck was almost non-existent as I could not see where the edge of the road was, only the steep slope going downhill... oh probably about 500 feet straight down. This one-lane/one-way trail was much too narrow to call it a real road by my definition... hell, it was a mountainside of marble rubble. Then there was this wet muddy stretch of an area about 20 feet long that was still wet from the recent rains. As soon as I had seen it, I quickly put the truck in 4WD high just in case I needed the extra traction, and I did. The left side of the vehicle's tires was riding up on the side of the mountain, which actually gave me a better view of the steep drop-off on the passenger side. This was the very view that made me very nervous. I somewhat reluctantly negotiated the first mud hole. Then the right rear tire entered the second mud hole, and the rear of the truck suddenly started to slide sideways and dangerously close to the edge of the “DROP-OFF”.  Having had extensive experience driving 4WD off-road in the Florida swamps, I stepped hard on the gas, letting the front tires pull the truck back straight back up onto the muddy road. 

Well, we got back to the "Y" in the road. This was where I should have turned in the first place, but instead, I was watching my GPS which indicated turn left, which I did. I thanked the 2 men and made the correct turn. Now it’s getting very dark thirty. As I passed a couple of old mutant cabin dwellings, for a lack of a better term, and these guys staring at me as I drove by. They looked as if they had stepped out of the 1800s complete with bib overalls and hound dogs lying out front barking at me as I drove by. I made a choice to not wave or even acknowledge that I saw them. I wanted them to think that I knew where I was going. I was waiting for a guy with a shotgun to come out. I went quite a way down this road, trying to put some distance between these people and myself. It was now very dark and going any further was not a good option. So I decided to back into a slot of a side road. I backed up around a corner about 50 feet to hide my truck as best as I could. I got into the back of the truck, locked it up real good, and loaded my 9mm weapon. I tried as best I could not remember what I had seen driving in. All I would have needed to hear that night was the sound of dueling banjos...and I was outta there. 

The next morning I made another attempt at reaching this old mill site but the road...hell, it was the side of a mountain again and not a friggin road by any means. I was in 4WD Low just to keep the vehicle slowed down to crawl up and over the marble rock rubble, some of which was quite large. I finally gave up after about a mile or so and after several times of hitting the undercarriage of the truck really hard. I still had no idea how much further the old mill was located and so I decided to turn around and head back out. All I would have needed was to hit a transmission line and get stranded back in nowhere land. 

I finally get turned around and headed back to civilization when I see this ole guy in an old 4WD jeep bouncing around as he headed my way. He stopped and said ya given up?... I said I'm-frade-so. He said it was about another 4 or 5 miles back to that old mill site and that this was the good part of the road. That was pretty much all I needed to hear at that point. Scratch that mill off the bucket list. I don't know what that tour guide in his old jeep charges to take people back to that old mill but at this point, I would have given him twice that amount if he had come by earlier. You'll notice that there are no images made or shown here trying to get to this old mill as I hand my hands full with the steering wheel.

So backing up a bit here, after dinner with Weldon and his people that he had on a photo tour that week in Idaho Springs for the White Mountain Goats, we headed back west to Allenspark, Co. where he lived with his wife Lori, who was also on this trip. I stayed with them for about 4 or 5 days, and we spent a couple of days photographing in the Rocky Mountain National Park before I left for another 3 days or so camping and photographing in the Park. 

Jumping ahead again...after photographing at the Colorado National Monument and the Black Canyons of Gunnison and a few one-day side trips here and there, I then headed southeast towards my next destination, The Great Sand Dunes National park and Preserve.

The Great Sand Dunes National Park and Preserve is located in the SE corner of Colorado. This park was pretty good but for me, but a bit limiting as I could not hike the dunes, and not quite what I had expected. I couldn't hike the soft sand and there was really not that much to drive to, that is unless you wanted to 4-wheel up the side of a mountain in a $34,000 truck...not me, not again...I stayed pretty much on level ground for the rest of this trip, being a solo event with no ride- along help. You always have to wonder what could have been in store going up there on that 4WD drive... But Nawwww, not this time.

 

So while looking at the massive sand dunes in the early morning light I broke out my long lens and began just picking out interesting sand dune compositions. The interesting shapes of the flowing sands were just too irresistible not to photograph. The weather was going to be turning crappy and cold. I did another side trip to a waterfall that really was not all that great, only to find out I was at the wrong waterfall...go figure.  While driving and on the hunt for photo opts I came to the Rio Grande River at a bend in the roadway for a nice clear view of the river. Oh well, what the heck, and making a u-turn I went back to take a few more images. 

On my last morning there, I was making morning coffee on the tailgate of my truck which became my tabletop for cooking and eating. Then ominous dark clouds began to move in quickly. As I looked out, I could see small flakes of snow falling down in between the light rain. My of my gear had been put up and stowed away knowing that I was going to be leaving that morning. So I downed my normal 2 cups of coffee and my fried sausage and egg biscuits…packed up and headed to Taos, New Mexico.

Taos, NM turned out to be another bust, as I just could not find any of the real authentic old colorful adobe houses. Everything I found was adobe look-alike or mocked the old houses. I drove up and down as many of the back roads as I could find staying away from the main parts of town, which are nothing more than tourist traps selling dust collectors. I have enough of them already from my past adventures out west.  I was really hoping to find were those old adobe structures with the varied pastel colors of doorway and windows but Just came up short. I guess I should have got out and asked around for directions to what I was looking for.

On the way to Taos earlier that week I did another waterfall in the rain, Bridal Veil Falls in Telluride, Co. and shot a little of this and a little of that along the way and headed southeast towards another destination, The White Sand Dunes National Monument in New Mexico. However, after I looked at my computer mapping system and saw that my next destination was taking me past Bosque del Apache NWR I thought that I might stop in and see some familiar landscape.  I was there in 2001, but that was in the winter when the bird migration was in full swing. This was summer… it was very hot and the place was bone dry, not even a roadrunner could be found. I found a small campground close by and stayed the night hoping that the earlier morning hours would be a bit cooler and I would hopefully find some animals. What I didn't realize was that management at Bosque had decided to relocated elk back into the area. I found this bit of information after hearing and seeing a bull elk cross one of the side roads in the park.

About mid-morning and most of all of that day and the following day found me arriving at the White Sands proving grounds and The White Sand Dunes National Monument. Now that place could be interesting but I found it very difficult to shoot. The sand dunes were very cluttered and I found it hard to come up with pleasing landscape compositions. So once again I used my telephoto lens to isolate the big picture and look for much smaller detail studies, as I call them, I could somewhat tame the beast when making larger landscape compositions, by waiting until the sun was much lower casting very long shadows in the image. This was when the larger scale landscapes became more interesting. I was contemplating going back for the morning but actually thought that everything would be much the same thing, but with a different lighting direction.

So the last phase of this photo adventure found me making a 2 day long drive to Rockport, TX. to meet up with my cousin for some salt-water fly-fishing at his "fish shack”, he calls it, condo on the water. I hadn’t been there in over 13 years and it was a much-needed break before heading the 1300-mile trek back home in Florida.

Rockport is always windy and this 4-day stay was no exception. The winds shifted direction and created fishing situations much difficult than the week before when my cousin and his wife caught 11 Redfish in 4 hours of fishing. But we managed to catch a few fish to take back to Florida.

So, all in all, I would have to say that this photo adventure, which was nearly 8 weeks and well over 7500 miles long was another “Great Photo Adventure” with many “Memories and Moments in Time” to share with family and friends. The Good Lord willing, maybe there will be another adventure story to add to the list.