Notes To My Mother

The Wave is a very special place located in the north west corner of Arizona.  You can not just go there, you have to enter a lottery and hope you name gets pulled.  They do the drawing every month and I met one lady who has been trying for 6 years.  I've heard of others who waited 10 years.  Three of us went and one, Andy, submitted our names to the lottery and we got selected after only 4 months of trying.  Amazing. Thank yoy Andy! The hike in is about two miles and is rated from easy (seasoned hikers) to hard (people like me).  The trail is easily lost as much of the hike is on sandstone with no visible trail.  Then there is the soft sand part. Very difficult and when you are just about there and tired, you find yourself walking up a steep hill in VERY soft sand. When I got to the top I poured myself onto the hard sandstone that makes up The Wave and rested.  And then I started exploring and what a wonderous place it is.  What you see are ...

If you Google "Badlands" you will find that there are badlands in a lot of different places because the term badlands refers to a dry terrain with soft sedimentary rock.  For instance, there is a badlands section of Death Valley, California.  These images were taken at Badlands National Park in South Dakota.  The image above is a sunset shot. I don't remember the exact location of this image but I do remember the climb to get it.  It was VERY steep and once to the top it took a few minutes to get used to it and convince myself I was not going to tumble down.  You can see here the cracked sedimentary soil and the layers of sediment deposited over the years. Sunrise at the Doors.  A person can walk into the landscape in this park but it would be very easy to get lost.  On one morning we saw a group that apparently had spent the night.  They were down in a lower area of the park and could be seen from the rim next to the road.  They spent a cons...

It is hard to pick a favorite place to be at night in the Sierras because there are so many great places. Lake Sabrina ranks very hight on my list for a number of reasons.  One, its elevation is very high at just over 9,100 ft which helps with reducing the atmosphere between the camera and the stars.  It is also a very scenic spot, both in the daytime and at night.  In the middle of the drought the water level was very low which made a shot like this one impossible.  But during wet years it is a joy to shoot.  It is also very scenic in the daytime, especially first thing in the morning.  And finally, it is easy to get to being just 18 miles on highway 168 out of Bishop.  Another easily accessible night location is Tioga Lake located along highway 120 just past the top of Tioga Pass when heading west.  The only problem with this location are the cars that keep coming on the highway to the left of this scene.  A little patience and you will get...

Have you ever awakened in the night to strange sounds outside your bedroom window? I have and I investigated. We live in the city limits of Santa Rosa so I was surprised to discover how much animal night-life goes on in our yard in the wee hours. On one occasion it was a family of raccoons in our fig tree. I thought they only came for the figs once a year, but as it turns out they seem to make nightly excursions through our yard.  Likewise with the skunk who only occasionally will nearly drive us out of the house with its odiferous discharge. Much less noticeable are the possums who are seemingly frequent but not particularly regular visitors and no apparent trouble at all. My favorites though are the grey foxes. I like to call them urban foxes as they have definitely adjusted to city life. You might wonder how I know of these visitations. Well, a few years ago we had an outdoor cat. Outdoor cats are fed outside. Having my curiosity peeked by the raccoons in the fig tree,...

  In 2021, in the middle of the pandemic, my grandson, Levi, and I took a road trip to the Eastern Sierras. These images are from that trip and are intended to be examples of a few of the different kinds of light you can experience at relatively high altitudes.  These were all taken at around 7,000 feet.  The one above is morning light on Laurel Mountain with foreground reflections separated in the man made fence, mid ground. One of the delightful characteristics of the weather in the Eastern Sierras revolves around cloud formations.  Clouds will often build first thing in the morning as the sun is making its first appearance.  They can then pretty much disappear.  Later in the afternoon clouds will often begin to build again.  I recall one time being up Lee Vining Canyon and getting caught under one of those afternoon build ups and getting drenched in rain and pelted by hail.  On the afternoon depicted above one of those storms was developing wit...