Martha and I, together with Bend friends Andy & Marcia, spent 5 weeks in Europe and East Africa this fall. We spent the first week at Chez Mirabel, our shared house in Provence, France. Then 4 days in Amsterdam, followed by two weeks on safari in Northern Tanzania. Lastly, we spent a week on Zanzibar, mostly on Pongwe Beach. It was not a photography oriented trip as most of our activities occurred in the middle of the day, under bright sun. Nonetheless, I did take a full photography “kit” and managed to come back with 13,000 photos! Details about the trip and selected images can be found here: Europe & East Africa Galleries
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Photo Galleries Updated for Retina Displays
As a result of acquiring a new iPad Air, I have started updating my photo galleries to take advantage of the increased display resolution of such devices (i.e., their “retina” displays). All of the 2013 galleries have been upgraded, as will all future galleries. Both static images and moving panoramas are now of higher resolution and appear much sharper. However, the panoramas have greatly increased in size and I am a little concerned that some retina tablets may crash when trying to display them. I would appreciate your feedback if you do experience problems.
Backpacking Trip to the Ritter Range in the Sierras
When I was in the Owens Valley this Spring, looking up at the Sierra’s eastern front, I couldn’t believe that I hadn’t hiked in my favorite mountains for about 30 years. So this summer I substituted a 10 day backpacking trip for my annual week-long Cycle Oregon cycling tour.
Teaming up with Bend friend, Andy, we spent a couple weeks planning and outfitting ourselves for the endeavor. 12+ pounds of photo equipment and 3+ pounds of required bear canisters spurred each of us to “invest” in new, lighter equipment; and we got the weight of each of our packs down to just over 50 pounds. After a 10 hour drive down and a night’s stay at Mammoth Lakes, we were able to secure a wilderness permit for the same day, caught the Devils Postpile shuttle into Agnew Meadows, and hiked 8-ish miles up the Middle Fork of the San Joaquin River and Shadow Creek into Lake Ediza. The wildflowers were so amazing, and explorations so fun, that we spent 6 days there. As a result, I was able to explore the area in more breadth and depth than my previous 4-5 visits, combined. Other than a thunderstorm the last full day, we had hot, clear days and warm nights.
The trip’s photo galleries can be found here: Ritter Range Galleries
The areas that were explored around Lake Ediza were:
- Lake Ediza — this was John Muir and Ansel Adams’ favorite Sierra lake, and mine too. It has it all: beautiful water ringed by green meadows and forest, set at the base of the rugged, majestic Minarets and the duo of Mt. Ritter & Banner Peak. And this year was a great wildflower year, which we hit exactly at peak bloom (about 3 weeks early this warm, dry year). I was amazed at how little the lake had changed in the last 30+ years — the meadow hadn’t encroached into the lake, the willows hadn’t much enlarged their meadow footprint, and its popularity hadn’t caused egregious wear and tear. One noticed change was marked deterioration of the ancillary trail along the lake’s north shore — rock falls had made this route pretty much impassable while carrying heavy packs.
- Nydiver Lakes — This set of 3 small lakes, and some nearby tarns, lies above and just to the north of Ediza. To get there I climbed up Ediza’s NW inlet stream, full of beautiful falls and cascades, to a desolate tarn nestled right at the base of Mt. Ritter & Banner Peak, then went up to the lakes themselves, and returned to Ediza via their outlet stream down to the Shadow Creek trail back to Ediza. We had hoped to later camp at the lakes, but this day hike proved the route too steep & rugged for us carrying heavy packs. I still would love to do this so that I could capture this area’s stunning vistas in early & late light.I did have a “holy sh*t” moment while at the base of Mt. Ritter — remembering three nearby close calls in 1971. In that year we climbed Ritter from Thousand Island & Catherine Lakes, via the north glacier to the Ritter/Banner saddle, and up Ritter’s north face to the top. While climbing the north face, a very large rock came loose as I used it to pull myself up. I warned David below me to watch out as it (but not me) tumbled down to the glacier below. After reaching the summit, we realized that it would be too difficult to descend the way we came. So we came down Ritter’s south side, glissading down its SE glacier and taking the long route around the base of Banner, back to Thousand Island during a severe thunderstorm.
The second “tight spot” was below the SE glacier when we decided to stay high, contouring along ledges at the base of Ritter and the Ritter/Banner saddle. We did this so to avoid dropping down toward Nydiver Lakes and having to re-climb around Banner. However, the chosen ledges at one point narrowed to only a few inches wide, with a huge vertical exposure. Somehow we mustered the courage to tightrope across. It was this section that I was looking up at during this trip and wondering how the hell we did it.
The last 1971 close call occurred a little later in the above described day when I heard David scream. I immediately whipped around and saw him being showered in icy snow. A very large rock had fallen off of Banner (probably displaced by a lightning strike) and had hit the snowfield only feet away.
- Cirque Meadows, Steams, & Tarn SW of Ediza — I spent two days exploring this area, which I hadn’t visited before. It is a beautiful, wide glacial cirque meadow crisscrossed by streams flowing down from the northern segment of the Minarets. And it contained the best display of flowering heather I have seen. At its top is an amazing small tarn set at the base of Leonard Minerat. And its SW ridge has an outstanding view down on Iceberg Lake (see below).
- Iceberg Lake — Early one morning I climbed up to indescribable Iceberg Lake, set at the foot of the Minarets’ middle section to the south of Ediza. There I found another spectacular wildflower display, but unfortunately I missed sunrise by about 15 minutes. So I spent the next morning there as well (darn :>) ). I noticed another change from 30+ years ago — a large rock fall had choked its outlet so that the lake level is about 10-15 feet higher and its outlet is no longer through a shear-sided rock chute.
We then moved camp to the north and finished the trip with two additional campsites:
- Garnet Lake — In previous visits, I had only quickly hiked past Garnet Lake and was excited to now have the opportunity to stop and explore. The lake is set in a relatively narrow, shallow valley framing the eastern face of Banner Peak. Our campsite on its southern shore was a great vantage point for sunset and sunrise shots.
- Thousand Island Lake — This lake is a popular stop on the John Muir Trail, and deservedly so. It is a large lake set in a broad, shallow basin, filled with an uncountable number of small islands (maybe a thousand if you could count every boulder), and with Banner Peak looming at its SW end. And we found a fabulous elevated campsite overlooking all of this. And, once again, the wildflowers were putting on a show. The weather did take a turn for the worst — warm & humid air came up from Mexico and gave us two days of clouds, one of the days mostly filled with rain. And, on the last day hiking out to civilization, we had smokey skies from a fire on the Sierra’s west side.
All in all, a wonderful trip … already thinking about the Sierras backpacking trip next summer!
Photography Trip to California’s Eastern Sierras & Death Valley
In late February, I spent a week on the eastern side of the Sierras and in Death Valley. The core of the trip was a five day workshop long scheduled with Marc Adamus. I took another workshop with Marc two years ago on the Olympic Peninsula and Columbia River Gorge. At that time, I found it to be a whirlwind adventure, with every day filled with photo taking from before sun-up to after sun-down. This trip proved to be the same, with treks to many of Marc’s favorite locales. The weather wasn’t great for picture taking, but I still came home with quite a few “keepers,” as I think you will see in the galleries at Eastern Sierra/Death Valley Galleries
Website Changes
I have made, or are in the process of making, a number of changes to the Samcos website:
- New Photo Gallery Software. I have long been looking for new website software with the ability to give ancillary info along side the photo galleries themselves. For example, I often would like to give a trip description, moving panoramas, and videos along side photos from a trip. But, at the same time, I didn’t want to compromise on the quality of the photo galleries themselves, especially on phones and tablets. Well, I found an apparent candidate and tried it for showing the images from my Southern Utah-Northern Arizona trip. Since originally posting those galleries, I have continued to tweak their look and function to the point that I am extremely pleased with the result. Therefore I have decided to start only using this software (TTG’s Photoswipe plugin for Lightroom). As time & energy permits, I will be converting previously posted galleries to it, especially those where I wanted to give more information and couldn’t.
- New Website Look. As a result of the above effort, I “propagated” some of the new image galleries’look & feel to the rest of the website. In short, I change the typography and simplified even further the simple, white theme. There are still a few rough edges that I intend to smooth out in the short term.
- Reprocessing of Previously Published Galleries. As I have worked on new images these past few months, I have been extremely pleased with Lightroom’s most recent 2012 image “development” process. So much so that I started going back and trying it on images processed with earlier Lightroom versions. In many instances the improvement was significant. And, better yet, much better results were achieved with much less effort. Therefore I have gone through all of my website galleries, reprocessing images that “needed some help.”
- Removal of Grandson’s Galleries. Marcus recently turned four and I hadn’t put out any public picture galleries of him for two years. Therefore I felt that it was time to remove his “baby photos.” Many are still getting their “Marcus fix” through Facebook postings.
Hope that everyone enjoys these changes!