Rock lake, sunset, Wrangell St. Elias National Park and Preserve. Please click on the thumbnail to view a larger version of the photo.

Hey Folks,

It’s summer time, and I don’t have much time to blog – but I’ll try to keep up with the Image of the Month. Here’s one from the north side of Wrangell – St. Elias National Park and Preserve. Taken from Rock lake, at sunset, the light on the distant Wrangell Mountains was gorgeous.

Thanks.

Cheers

Carl.

Hole in the Wall, near Skolai Pass, is a great place to explore. Wrangell St. Elias National Park and Preserve, Alaska. Please click on the thumbnail to view a larger version of the photo.

Hey Folks,

Photo of the Month for June, 2010, is this photo of some folks hiking up at Hole in the Wall, near Skolai Pass, Wrangell – St. Elias National Park and Preserve. I love the sense of scale this photo gives for the peak in the background. This is one of the peaks known as the 7 fingers, glacier-capped outcroppings towering above the tundra. Hole in the Wall is a classic old glacial formation, and a great place to walk and explore; I’ve spend many a day wandering around on the moraine, awestruck at the magnificent jagged cliff faces soaring above me.

This trip was a few years ago, and we had a grand time. The weather was, as you see here, unbeatable, and we all enjoyed the week we spent in Skolai Pass. We camped on an open ridge above the pass, before heading south to Chitistone Pass, where we camped and enjoyed the scenery. From Chitistone Pass, we ventured down to Russell Glacier, over into Chitistone Valley, and checked out the Goat Trail. Then we made out way back along the floor of Skolai Pass.

The big boulders in the foreground are called erratics; a piece of rock that differs from the size and type of rock native to the area in which it rests. They’re moved into place, carried by glacial ice , and deposited when the ice retreats. Sometimes they’re moved hundreds of miles by advancing glaciers; at Hole in the Wall, they were moved a mile or so. But a number of these large boulders technically aren’t really erratics, as they have fallen from the cliffs above. Massive, some of them are the size of a small house. The geology here is incredible.

I’m looking forward to getting back up to Skolai Pass this summer; it’s just one of “those” places that I can go back to every year and love it. It’s kinda like going home each summer. Each trip brings both new vistas and intimate views of the nooks and crannies, the secrets of Skolai. At the same time, seeing the features like Hole in the Wall and Russell Glacier again is a welcome treat. I love it.

We’ll be up at Skolai mid july this year, and I can’t WAIT!

Cheers

Carl

Coastal Plain and Brooks Range, Arctic National Wildlife Refuge, ANWR, Alaska. Please click on the thumbnail to view a larger version of the photo.

Hey Folks,

I thought’d post a quick promo here for a radio show I’ve been invited to join on lensflare-live. I’ll be talking with Greg Downing and EJ Peiker of naturescapes.net, a fantastic nature photography community and radio show host Dave Warner. The topics for discussion include wilderness and backpacking photography, art, conservation and environmental topics, as well as a discussion of a few images we’ll be presenting on the show.

I’m really talking forward to this conversation. Greg and EJ are photographers I’ve been a fan of for quite some time, and I really am looking forward to talking with them. Dave is a great photographer as well, so the discussion should be a lot of fun. If you have any questions regarding any of these subjects, feel free to join in the conversation online or by calling in. The show is scheduled to be broadcast at 9pm EST, Tuesday, May 4, 2010. You can listen to it here.

After we’ve finished, naturescapes.net will edit the broadcast down, remove all the “ahhh’s” and “uhhmmms” and long periods of silence, and present the discussion as a podcast. I’ll provide a link to there here as it becomes available.

The image above is from the Arctic National Wildlife Refuge (ANWR). That seems particularly relevant in light of the horrific Gulf Cust Oil disaster. Hopefully we can learn something of the importance of ecosystems and fragility via this mess.

Please check out the radio show. It should be fun.

Cheers

Carl

Grizzly bear rubbing on a tree, Katmai National Park, Alaska. Please click on the photo for a larger version.

Hey Folks

Welcome to April! The Image of the Month for this month is a grizzly bear rubbing his head on a tree. I photographed this bear sleeping not long before I took this photo, and after he woke up, he strolled directly over to this small Black Cottonwood tree, and rubbed and scratched on it for quite some time. I got a few photos of him standing at full height, which is an impressive sight for a bear this size. I’d estimate him to be well over 9′ tall.

April is the month the bears typically will be waking up from their long winter hibernation, and start moving around again. Won’t be long before my sojourns into the woods will again require my can of bear spray in my pocket. This bear had just awoken, so I thought it might be a good photo of the month for April for that reason.

Bear hibernation is a pretty amazing phenomena. No other animal anywhere near the size of the grizzly can sleep an entire winter away, living off it’s fat reserves, stored up from a summer of eating. Some folks argue that grizzlies (and black bears) aren’t true hibernators, because they actually wake up during the winter, and their body temperatures don’t reach down to the temperatures of other (what we call) “true hibernators”, like the Arctic Ground Squirrel, etc. Other people contend that given it’s size and mass, the grizzly is probably the greatest hibernator on the planet.

However we refer to it, I’m not sure the grizzly cares.

Cheers

Carl

Backcountry skiing on the Root Glacier, with Stairway icefall in the background. Springtime brings melt, opening a small pool of water on the glacier's surface. Cross country skiing, Wrangell - St. Elias National Park and Preserve, Alaska. Click on the image to view a larger version of the photo.

Hey Folks

Here’s our Image of the Month for March 2010. Backcountry skiing on the Root Glacier one gorgeous spring day. This little blue pool of crystal clear water was simply too nice to pass up for a photo op.

Carrying a tripod allows me to set up for photos when I’m out and about by myself. I set up the shot, and visualize where I’d like to stand to make the composition. Sometimes standing a bit further away allows the photo to be more of a scenic shot, without the person being too dominant in the frame.

This is where a digital camera really helps, being able to review the shot in the LCD, as I’m not able to guess exactly where to stand. For example, I didn’t want my head here to merge with the horizontal line at the end of the glacier – base of the mountain in the distance, so it took a couple of tries to get it right.

Normally I wouldn’t leave quite as much room for the sky, but I wanted to give the image a bit more of an expansive feeling here, with more space. I also wanted to leave plenty of room for text, if the photo were ever to be chosen for a cover shot for a magazine or story. (more…)

Snowshoeing through the forest in search of the wolf, Wrangell - St. Elias National Park, Alaska.

Hey Folks,

A week or 2 through the winter boreal forest hoping to find wolves is always a treat – whether the wolves show themselves or not. So far, no luck – they remain the mystery.

But what a treat it is to hear their howls, or find their soft tracks in the snow, and to know they too sift through the boreal forest. To enter the winter boreal forest is to enter the realm of the wolf – the home of Canis lupus. Few creatures can quite so vividly engage our mind and spirit like the wolf – so rarely even seen, yet so enmeshed in our cultural histories and stories.

I’ve walked I don’t know how many miles and waited hours, days, hoping for a glimpse, (more…)

Backcountry cross country (XC) skiing in the Mentasta Mountains, Wrangell - St. Elias National Park and Preserve, Alaska. Click the image to see a larger version.

Hey Folks,

Happy New Year to you all! I hope the coming year brings you all the good times you’re looking for.

I know for me the Year got off to a phenomenal start. 12:30am on January 1st had me skiing through the boreal forest for nearly 90 minutes under a gorgeous full moon, just me, the snow, my skies, the big full moon, the mountains and the cold. The temperatures were down around minus 5 (Fanhrenheit) so it wasn’t too bad at all – just perfect for a nice long ski through the Mentasta Mountains in Wrangell – St. Elias National Park and Preserve. It’s pretty hard to think of a better way to start the new year – it was possibly one of my favorite experiences yet, absolutely amazing. I got back to the cabin feeling a sense of what it really means to be fully ‘alive’ – Awesome stuff!

This photo is of me on another ski (I didn’t take the camera on New Years Eve) up around the Mentasta Mountains, right at dusk. The wind was fairly whipping by, and the minus 10 temps felt like minus 50 and then some. Ouch!

Best to all,

Cheers

Carl

A grizzly bear approaching along Brooks River, Katmai National Park and Preserve, Alaska. Click on the image to see a larger version.

Hey Folks,

OK, I’ve moved the Image of the Month page to here for now; I’m in the process of overhauling the site, and will gradually either remove or shift the older Image of the Month pages to the blog. I think that will make them easier to  keep a handle on. So that’s the plan, for now. It’s simply too difficult to keep up with the Image of the Month on a static html page, and keep re-writing it, during the summer months when we’re hiking and backpacking all the time. So I think this format will work better. I hope so.

So we can start off the Image of the Month, for December 2009, with this grizzly bear photo I shot last fall, in October, in Katmai National Park and Preserve. (more…)