Tibet Fest 2016

I wonder how often we Americans stop to realize how lucky we are: That we can stand on a street corner shouting grievances we might have about our government; that we can freely practice our religion of choice; that we can assemble and march in parades and celebrate American culture…or German or Japanese traditions…or whatever strikes our fancy.

There are, of course, many countries in our world where citizens can do none of the above without fear of being tossed into jail, or worse.  My Tibetan friends tell me that in Tibet they cannot even possess a picture of their spiritual leader, the Dalai Lama.

I spent Saturday and Sunday photographing Tibet Fest, held for 21 years now a stone's throw from the iconic Space Needle at the Seattle Center. The event is part of Seattle's "Festal" program which celebrates various world cultures that are parts of Seattle's melting pot human makeup.

The event is colorful, and wonderful, and I was proud of Seattle for hosting celebrations like this.

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/

Work it, work it...

When friends and I head into the mountains for a hike or climb, my buds half-jokingly refer to me as "The Expedition Photographer;" and typically I think they expect that I'll shoot photographs like you see above…images one might broadly refer to as "Scenic Beauty," or "Humans in the Wilderness."  I'm generally okay with that kind of categorization, as it offers a lot of creative wiggle-room. Most anything I shoot can fit into those two pigeon holes.

Once we return home, I go through my pictures and email a selection out to members of our group. We always have a great time on our hikes, and the photographs are a kind of after-the-fact celebration of the day we spent together.

On our most recent hike, however, the humans in our party, as well as the amazing wilderness, kind of got upstaged. We hikers had chosen Miller Pk. in the Central Washington Cascades as our ultimate destination for the day, and it took us several hours to get to the top. As we arrived and considered which summit rocks looked like the best spots for eating lunch and taking in the views, we realized we were not alone. A mountain goat wandered up, and, though he kept his distance -- we were happy for that because that fella had BIG, sharp-looking horns -- I swear he saw my camera and started posing.

He stood on this rock, and that. He strutted about in a way that reminded me of a body builder in competition, workin'-it, workin'-it  on stage, showing off his well-trained physique.

I think the goat was pretty full of his fine self, and the wonderful environment where he lived.

It's a good thing goats don't use smartphones, because I have no doubt this fella would be a Selfie-Shootin'-Fool.

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.

Up High

It seems like the mountain adventures I've been doing lately have presented me with circumstances that have resulted in images with a bit of a common thread: Relatively small human figures in an expansive,  high country landscape.

The snow in my Washington state alpine playground is melting fast in this unusually warm spring…and thus, because we enjoy a pristine, white setting,  my friends and I have been doing trips that take us higher and higher. Plans are afoot for an even more ambitious trek in mid-June into the North Cascades. If the weather cooperates and the trip comes off, it could be amazing. Stay tuned.

Until then, here are several images from the past several weeks.

Creation and Destruction

A group of Tibetan Buddhist Monks came to the art museum on Bainbridge Island last week to create a sand mandala,  and, as I photographed that process on two different days, it appeared that the monks' visit made quite an impact on my neighbors.

You see, the making of a mandala is an elaborate and fascinating process, usually taking several days… monks patiently and painstakingly funneling grains of sand through metal tubes onto the design, one color of sand,  then another.  The finished mandala is quite beautiful, but it is a work of art created with an unusual twist:

Once finished, the monks will brush away the sand and destroy the mandala, dramatically trying to illustrate the lesson that we human beings too often become attached to things that are not permanent;  or we look for fleeting sources of contentment like wealth or possessions, traveling  dead-end behavioral alleyways where lasting happiness will not be found.

The monks spent five days making the mandala; and, on the last day, a group of about 50 museum visitors gathered around the mandala as one of the monks explained the lesson behind the mandala's creation and destruction.  Initially the visitors chatted among themselves, talking about what a nice day it was outside, and about where they'd go for lunch,  paying (it seemed to me) only cursory attention to what the monk was saying.

Slowly, however, the visitors began to listen.

In the end, as the monks brushed away the grains of sand, the crowd was silent.

 

Away, and Home

My hiking buds cooked up a plan to climb Mt. St Helens this past weekend. And, though my reaction to any proposed outdoor adventure is typically "count me in!", my feeling about slogging up St. Helens for the umpteenth time was:  "Been there, done that (too often!)"

What I'm posting here today, then,  are my What I Did With My Weekend (Not Hiking or Climbing) pictures.

On Saturday Leah and I made a little one-day road trip to Central Washington and to Yakima. Above is a picture I shot from a ridge high above Ellensburg -- Mt. Stuart and her sister peaks (Sherpa, Argonaut, Dragontail) under a dramatic, Ansel Adams-esque sky. The first two pictures below are from our drive through the rocky landscape of the Yakima River Canyon.

The last two pictures are from Sunday, back at home in Western Washington,  as Leah, Pax and and I worked at gardening and other outdoor chores…the payback labor I had promised my mate who, other weekends,  lets me run off and play in the mountains with my ne'er-do-well friends.

Talking to Trees

 

 An admission: I often talk to myself.  Not silent and mindless monkey-mind chatter.  I mean I talk out loud.

I'll be out alone, walking the half-mile trail that winds through the woods on one side of our property. I'll come around a bend in the trail and, through an opening in the trees,  I'll see an eagle flying overhead,  or, at my feet I'll notice a wildflower in bloom,  and I'll say "WOW!" 
If I'm feeling particularly verbal I might say "OH MY!"

Other times, when I'm out in the mountains on a hike with my friends and I see something amazing and comment about it, my friends probably think I'm sharing a thought with them. This is not necessarily so. I'd likely say the same thing if I was hiking alone…as if the big trees and ferns or the mountains might answer back.

Since today is Earth Day, I thought I'd post a number of recent photographs I have made when I saw something that prompted me to stop, and to respond, either verbally or photographically -- most likely,  both.

Above are two pictures from the property where we live. Below are images from a hike two friends and I did in the nearby Olympic Mountains, starting out in lush, green forest and climbing up and up above the clouds into the alpine high country. It was a day of many WOW moments.

 

Prayers in the Wind

 Two dear friends are experiencing ongoing (and I assume scary) health challenges, so on my last hike I put a small string of prayer flags on the summit of a beautiful peak in the Olympic Mountains.

Though I always practice a leave-no-trace ethos in wild places, the prayer flags I left seemed appropriate in that instance. If another climber comes along, my guess is that he/she also will have no problem with the prayer flags -- perhaps even smile and enjoy their presence.  If not, the climber can remove them. By the time someone else visits that summit, the winds and weather will have spread the prayers anyway.

So, that's me in the photo above, a peak called "The Brothers" in the distance. Below is an image I shot in 2007 on our first (of two) trips to the Himalaya, in Nepal. Prayer flags are common there on a high mountain pass, or even on Buddhist shrines in cities.

Plan C

Two friends and I headed to Mt. Rainier yesterday with a plan to hike to Camp Muir, the small, flat-ish area at an elevation of 10,000 feet on the massive 14, 411-foot mountain where most summit climbers put up tents and spend their first, often somewhat breathless night,  before climbing to the top the next day.

When we arrived at Paradise, however, the winds were howling and spindrift snow was blasting the landscape -- this at the relatively "low" elevation of 5,000 feet -- such that we didn't even want to get out of the car, much less climb five thousand feet of elevation higher into the teeth of the nastiness.

We considered a Plan B: To drive a bit lower and snowshoe out the Stevens Canyon Rd (still closed for the winter and snow-covered) toward the Tatoosh peaks;  but it turned out that the winds were whipping there too, and we were also concerned about avalanche potential.

In the end, we drove further down the mountain below Longmire,  hiked/snowshoed the Kautz Creek trail up toward (but not quite to) Indian Henry's Hunting Ground,  and wound up having a great outing. From our lunch spot on a high, snowy knoll, we could look out toward Mt. Adams (above) and some of the westerly Tatoosh peaks.

Once back at the car at the end of the day, we watched a lenticular cloud form over Rainier, an indication that the high winds on the mountain had not let up. Magic Hour photographic light was wonderful.

Post-hike dinner was at the Wildberry in Ashford, a sweet little restaurant run by a Nepali Sherpa family.  I got to say "Namaste" a lot, drink Nepali tea, and we three hikers enjoyed a fine meal. I had Nepali dalh (lentils) and was in vegetarian heaven.

Hike stats:

Approx 8+ mi RT
2300'+ ele gain