Canyon Creek Meadows, at the eastern foot of Three Fingered Jack in Central Oregon, often has one of the best wildflower displays in the Oregon Cascades; and every year I attempt to catch its peak during late July. I knew that it would be early this year but never dreamed that it would be the third week in June. Luckily I happened to run into someone who had just hiked in and found its wildflowers peaking. So, I was able to drop everything and spend a night up there … it was spectacular! The entire photo gallery can be found here: Canyon Creek Meadows & Three Fingered Jack Gallery
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Oregon’s Painted Hills
Every spring I try to visit Oregon’s Painted Hills to catch its wildflowers, especially hoping that the golden bee plant (Cleome Platycarpa) is blooming. This plant must have continuously moist conditions through the entire winter and early spring if it is to bloom. Well, for the first time in a number of years, those conditions were met this year!
It always amazes me how the hills’ colors vary under different lighting and weather conditions — these images were taken over two days, separated by three days and some rain, and the reds differed significantly. According to a park sign, wetter clay produces darker reds.
The trip’s photo gallery can be found here: Oregon’s Painted Hills Gallery.
South America Trip
This past April we returned to South America. There were two impetuses for this trip. First, our Bend friends Andy & Marcia asked us to join them for a week’s stay at a wine country Finca in Mendoza, Argentina. And together we decided to also visit Bolivia and Buenos Aires. In addition I had obtained a spot on a photography workshop in the southern Patagonia. So I was able to combine the two trips and the four of us spent almost four weeks in Bolivia and northern Argentina, followed by my two weeks in Patagonia.
All the trip’s photo galleries can be found here: South America Galleries.
New Photography Website
I have moved my blog and photo galleries from our Samco Family website into this new rick.samcos.com website dedicated to my photography and travel work. If you wish to be notified of new blog postings, click on the 
button at the upper left and choose your method of notification.
This new website was created using WordPress, together with The Turning Gate’s CE4 WordPress Theme. All photo galleries are published using The Turning Gate’s Lightroom plugins (Gallery, Auto Index, & Publisher in the CE4 product family). All provide a “responsive” display of high quality images on all kinds of devices.
Website migrated to new server
This website has been hosted on the same Linux server technology at GoDaddy for almost ten years and it has been increasingly showing its age. And there have been recent problems which didn’t have any work arounds. So, I finally bit-the-bullet and spent the last couple of days moving samcos.com to a modern-day cPanel Linux server. You shouldn’t notice any changes … if you do, please let me know. This change is a pre-requisite for a future website change that you will notice: upgrading the site to the newest version of The Turning Gate+WordPress software.