Daddy's back

The fellow responsible for the care and feeding of this blog -- that would of course be me -- has been a poor blog parent of late.  Daddy's attention has been focused, not here,  but on a new Instagram child I've recently adopted.

Until now, I have stubbornly avoided social media -- mostly, I guess, because it felt too much like high school ("LIKE me! PLEASE LIKE me!!!)  I see, however, that a lot of my photographer friends are doing Instagram. And so I bow to peer pressure.

We never completely get over high school, do we?

Anyway, I hafta admit that Instagram is kind of fun to do, though it seems like a one-off photographic forum: I do a hike,  or one of my shoots for the Seattle Tibetan community. I make maybe 500 pictures, but post only one on Instagram. This blog is a place where I think I'll show more backstory.

The images I'm posting here today are from two recent hikes/summit scrambles that my buds and I did in the North Cascades. I invite you to click on the images (particularly the top one, the panorama) to see them at a larger size.

And if you are curious, here is a link to my Instagram baby:

 https://www.instagram.com/kurtphotojournal/

Multi-chrome or monochrome?

I rarely spend a ton of time debating whether I like one of my photographs better in black in white, or in color. Images somehow seem to have a way of deciding that for me.

In these days of digital imagery, I shoot everything in color, knowing that I can always convert the picture to B&W later on the computer. Once I do that, I can toggle between the color image and the monochrome version on my computer display screen. If I'm still not quite sure which I like best, I happen to be married to someone whose visual taste I trust completely -- often more than I trust my own.

("Leah, can you come here and look at this?…")

Back in film days,  color vs. black and white was a much tougher decision, at least for mountain trips where every ounce counts.  Schlepping a backpack that held an extra camera body or film back loaded with color/B&W,  or even extra film, on a hard hike of many miles and four or five thousand feet of elevation gain was a drag (literally.)

Today I'm posting images from recent hikes. The two above I like in color (though neither is particularly, um, colorful.)  The bottom two I prefer in B&W.

I can be more than a little OC about most any consideration about my photographs... poorly-handled light or composition or technical mis-steps, all can and do make me crazy.
But color vs B&W? Nah, I'll save my angst for other worries.

Here, and There

I saw a bumper sticker the other day that I guess was a parody of the theme "I'd Rather Be Jogging," or "I'd Rather Be Fishing," or "I'd Rather Be Shopping."

The sticker I saw was: "I'd rather be HERE,"  and I took it as a gentle reminder that happiness is best found in the present moment, not in some dreamland, fantasy island place in the future.

Nevertheless -- and bumper sticker wisdom notwithstanding -- a friend and I headed up into the mountains yesterday.

We left here behind, and ventured there.  I fully admit that the landscape where I feel most content and at peace is up in Earth's high places.

Our trip took us through the Skagit Valley, where I photographed moon-set at dawn (above.) And then we drove up, up, up, toward Mt. Shuksan, one of the most beautiful peaks on the planet in my opinion.  And to Mt. Baker.

At a number of points in our snowshoe hike, my friend and I exchanged grinning expressions of joy, moments when no words were necessary.

We were both so happy to be where we were.

White Friday

I did a hike to a place called Sibley Pass in the North Cascades on October 17, before snow began to fall in the high country. It was a gorgeous, almost-balmy day as several friends and I trekked up out of a basin and climbed onto a ridgetop where we took in amazing views, dramatic and severe-looking peaks in every direction.

As perfect as that October day was, I found myself wondering what that landscape would look like in Winter. And without even realizing it, I guess I began planning a return trip.

A week ago, the day after Thanksgiving -- the day that the marketing world calls Black Friday -- two friends and I went back to Sibley Pass.

Above are two images from the October hike, and below are pictures from the most recent trip -- a day we trekked in so much snow I took to calling it White Friday.

Call of the Wild

I assume that most people have heard about "Ski Bums" and "Climbing Bums" -- individuals who, when the weather is right,  or a good-for-nothing friend calls on the phone and says "Let's Go!",  blow off responsibilities like school or jobs to head up into the mountains for a Play Day.

Well, if Webster's Dictionary or Wikipedia ever coin the term "Snowshoe Bum,"  I'm pretty sure I could be first in line to qualify.  Not that I live in an old VW van,  or squeak by on a meager income from a trust fund,  or any of those stereotypical ski/climbing bum lifestyles.

Yet.

But don't tempt me, because there are days when I lean toward that kind of dirtbag-ish path.

I mean, check out these pictures I shot two days ago on a snowshoe outing in the North Cascades and tell me if you blame me for throwing my winter gear in the car and heading for the hills on a weekday, a day when most responsible folks were punching the clock.

The weather was right.

The snow was right.

Oh wow, dude. I was so there!

Click to Play!

 

So today I thought I'd give you a chance to have a little participatory,  video game-like fun with some of my recent pictures -- wide,  panoramic images that BEG to be viewed at a size larger than what you'll initially see here.

I'll keep this text short and sweet, to give you time to play. Click on the photographs to see them at a larger size.

You will be looking at the recent "Blood Moon" and the Seattle skyline viewed from Bainbridge Island...and a number of wide shots of my hiking buddy, Neil, on a trip we did a couple of weeks ago at Mt. Rainier...while the bottom two photographs are from hikes we did this summer in the North Cascades.

Ready?
Set…
CLICK!!!

 

Serendipity

For nearly 40 years now I have made my living as a photographer, and one of the things that I really enjoy about my work is that most of the time it is not -- work, I mean. 

Often I play. And always there is so much serendipity involved in the seeing and shooting of a photograph.

The image above presented itself one day last week when I stepped out our door and noticed pretty light on the Japanese anemones that grow in front of our house, and on the string of prayer flags that hang nearby.  I used my phone camera for the image.

Then, last Saturday some friends and I headed to the North Cascades to do a hike, except that we never made it to the trail because our van broke down in the town of Mazama in the Methow Valley, about three hours from home. We had to call a tow truck to transport the van and we four hikers back to Seattle.

The picture below was shot out the tow truck window during the (expensive) trip home, and it is a testament to the beauty of the North Cascades that such an image can be shot at 55 miles per hour, through a dirty window, on a day that did not even remotely go as planned.

On Ruth Mountain

I guess there are many reasons I have climbed mountains over the years:

I climbed Mt. Rainier because she is the highest peak in Washington.
I climbed Mt. Stuart because, to me, she is the most beautiful.
I climbed Mt. St. Helens because she is arguably the most notorious.

And, last week, three friends and I climbed Ruth Mountain in the North Cascades, and it happens that two of us have mothers named Ruth.

After my climb of Ruth Mountain, I called my mother to tell her that I had made the trip to her namesake.  Mom seemed pleased about the mountaineering adventure I had done in her honor. But,  in true Mom style, she was, more than anything, happy that I'd come back healthy.

We climbers were tiny figures in the vast landscape of Ruth Mountain.  Click on the images to see them at a larger size.

Snail's Pace

I guess I kind of knew it would happen eventually.

Month after month this winter my friends and I have headed off nearly every weekend for a hike, and,  trip after trip, all we have experienced is Perfection.  Great weather. Good trail conditions. Fun times by the bucketful.

I suspected that, one day, the law of averages would catch up with our posse and we'd have a dud of a hike... or at least a just-average,  meh hike.  And that's what happened Sunday.

Though we always put quite a bit of forethought into various possible trip destinations -- we study maps and hiking guidebooks, and we get online and read trip reports other hikers have posted -- in the end, the choice of where we'll go is always a bit of a crap shoot. We just never know exactly what we'll find…and that not-knowing, of course,  is a huge part of "adventure."

The trail we did Sunday proved to be a cornucopia of difficulty and the only consistent thing about the conditions we experienced was inconsistency.   We'd hike 20 yards of bare but often rocky trail, followed by a 20 yard snow slog -- sometimes fairly deep stuff where we'd posthole up to our knees. In short order we'd invariably come to a winter storm blowdown: a huge tree,  blocking the way,  and we'd have to do a laborious,  tree bark scramble.  This rough trail/posthole-in-snow-slog/blowdown-climb proved to be our outdoor adventure scenario for the whole day. It makes me tired just writing about it.

The good news was that, even had we wanted to hike fast, the trail conditions slowed our group to a snail's pace. Thus I saw details around me, little things, that I might normally have walked right past.

Somebody should invent a really tiny digital camera,  just the right size for a snail, because I'm thinking that those slow-moving creatures might well have what it takes to be great photographers.

Back Yard

Out in my garage, packed away in a box stored on some undetermined and probably cluttered shelf, are Sierra Club engagement calendars that I used in the late 1970's when I lived in my home state, Ohio. Though it has been something like 35 years since I made notations in those calendars so that I did not absent-mindedly forget a dentist appointment, or when I needed to get the oil changed in my car, or birthdays of family and friends, there are two things that, to this day, I remember very clearly about those calendars:

The photographs.
And the places where they were made.

There was an image of Comet Falls, the water dropping like a shot over a vertical rock face perhaps 300 feet high in Mt. Rainier National Park. And a photograph of the rock formations called sea stacks, looking like giant, geological shark fins, rising up near the beaches of the Pacific Ocean on the Washington Coast. I also remember pictures of the rainforest in Olympic National Park…and of the severe and scary-looking peaks of North Cascades…and of the basalt cliffs glowing red just before sunset near the Columbia River.

Those are places that are in my (extended) back yard now; and, thought I often miss family and friends in Ohio,  the Pacific Northwest has become our Home.

Several days ago a neighbor and I drove to the trailhead of the Buckhorn Wilderness, just 45 minutes from our homes, and we wandered with our cameras in the forests near the Olympic Mountains.

It was not a day where we hiked to get someplace. 

Rather, we were content to simply be.