No Boundaries

One of Dozens of Several Hundred Foot Lamoille Canyon Waterfalls

This Post and accompanying gallery addition were intended to include a fairly comprehensive shoot of  two important examples of the sky-island aspect of saline environments: Great Basin National Park and Lamoille Canyon in the Ruby Mountains. Both are isolated high-elevation alpine ecosystems in Central Eastern Nevada.

Things often don’t go as projected, so I can only provide a few good images from what was a largely botched expedition. Fortunately, I can blame almost everything on the weird weather that we’ve been having this year. One of the problems with a winter that extends into June is that, eventually, it has to warm up, and when it does, Summer temperatures ensue without regard for those absent Spring months which have fallen by the wayside, discarded by mother nature. Then months of snow melt are compressed into days or weeks and havoc reigns at elevation.

The general concept of the sky-island is an easy one to explain. Millions of years ago the rocks of the great basin were pulled apart resulting in what is called basin-and-range topography: long north-south oriented high-elevation ridges separated by similarly oriented flat valleys. Thousands of years ago, when everywhere was cool and wet, all of this terrain was covered with either forest or alpine tundra above the forest. As global warming progressed, long before human utilization of fossil fuels, things heated up and dried out. The valleys became desert and the ranges became isolated, forested ecosystems. These small mountainous regions are similar because they share their beginnings in a unified whole and have had a similar environmental history, but all are also somewhat different because they have been isolated from one another, by the intervening desert, for some time.

If you are interested in a more involved and informed explanation please consider “The Sagebrush Ocean: A Natural History of the Great Basin” by Stephen Trimble or “The Desert’s Past: A Natural Prehistory of the Great Basin” by Donald K. Grayson. These are the best books on the subject. The first is more of an extremely-well curated photography exposition and fluid narrative  intended for layman readers while the second is a scientific treatise valuable to those of us willing to put up with large amounts of dry text in order to find answers to the perpetually recurrent question: “I wonder how they figured that out?”

The thing that most people miss when considering the mountains of the great basin is that these are, although limited in aerial extent, serious kick-ass mountains. The elevation of Wheeler Peak at the tippy-top of Great Basin National Park is 13,063 ft — exceeding the tallest peaks in Idaho, Arizona and Montana and just a bit shy of the top spots in Utah, Wyoming and Nevada (in the Sierra Nevada). When you toss in the associated facts that the great-basin high points are often little used and visited, haven’t anything resembling cell-phone service, are largely lacking in navigable roads to the top-parts (or lower-middle-parts even), have lousy trail systems, and are often only accessed by traveling dozens and dozens of miles on dirt, these can range from daunting to downright intimidating.

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Things get strange on a Phoenix winter's evening.

I’ve encountered a few of the symptoms lately. I’m sure that, although unique, they are not unique to me. First there was the realization that a magpie had filled my ski boots with dog food. I wasn’t upset. It lives in the backyard of it’s own volition and had made it’s way into the garage every now and then. I’ve taken to calling it Frederick. Magpie’s have an historical Prussian aspect about them. I just threw out the old boots.

Then there was the time I saw the woman in the SUV in the Blockbuster Video parking lot and instantly recognized her as the wife of the American ambassador to China. (I think her husband may make a decent president some day; Just saying).

And, when given a choice between spending the week between Christmas and New Years skiing the finest snow on earth at my own doorstep, or venturing to a slightly chilly Phoenix, I chose Phoenix with only minimal hesitation.

Losing all regard for ski equipment, recognizing the local celebrities, skipping town during one of the best weeks of the year, I may have lived in Park City, Utah for too long.

Phoenix was a lot of fun.  My girls and I ascended all the requisite Phoenix promontories: Camel Back, Squaw Peak, South Mountain; visited the world’s first Windows Store (no big whup); did a little hiking around Tucson; visited the Sonoran Desert Museum and the University of Arizona (both girls want to apply to this one as well); and the whole family unit did the Tempe New Years Eve thing (the Doobie Brothers, absent one significant component).  It was in the low sixties most of the afternoons, so a  bit chilly.  But there was no snow.  And I think I’ve come to think of that as a good thing.

Two items, worthy of note, occurred.  First there was the marching band:

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The Sears Tower: Exemplar of American Ambition

Chicago has never looked better. I’m referring to the city and not my photography. I spent another couple weeks in the city; two days of which were given to wandering around the loop (the city’s lofty core) with a couple of cameras.  I had intended to spend five days photographing but found myself returning to Utah on short notice.  So the diversity of images isn’t as great as I would like. Everything, almost, is wide-angle HDRI of architecture.

I keep finding myself back there. So after another couple of winters I should have a good set of photographs.  The very urban provides a nice balance to the bulk of my nature-based work.

I’m fond of HDRI for a place like Chicago.  The world is crawling with images of the buildings of Chicago and HDRI offers a lot of artistic potential to make things weird when you want to go that way.  Also, the dynamic nature of a big metropolis, where people are of less significance relative to their environment, fits HDRI very well.  Walking people and moving cars on a city street become ghosted and part of the image in a way that suits the ephemeral reality well.

The images were all processed initially with photomatrix and then with camera raw and standard photoshop techniques.  The new photomatrix exposure fusion technique was used extensively (and I really like it).  Several images are blended composite panoramas.

Also I love it when it’s cold.  I think it is the low level of the sun in the sky and clarity of the air, in addition to the hard nature of the subject matter. Chicago photographs best when below freezing.

I’m not sure where the source of Chicago’s current good-looks lies.  The city may simply be all decked out for the Olympics that wasn’t.  Or it could be an artifact of the economy that shouldn’t have been.  Now, the general tone of the people I met, the conversations I overheard, and the chatter over the airwaves was decidedly down.  More so than when I was there this past summer or last winter.

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A working dog does the hollow.

For most of my life I have had a fondness for both exotic sports and dogs. So the annual Soldier Hollow Classic sheep dog trials located just a few towns away along the backside of the Wasatch Mountains has long been on my to-do list. As an event it is something of a hodgepodge. Dogs herd sheep as well as ducks. They jump into splash tanks. They do other things that I didn’t get around to seeing. All is accompanied by a avenue of food, art, and knickknack tents as is typical of most every American fair.

My purpose in coming was to photograph the main action: the “trials”, wherein border collies go about their business of getting the sheep to go places and do odd things as directed by the clicking, clucking and occasional spoken word of the shepherd. So the attached gallery, which can be reached by clicking the photograph above, is predominately images of either border collies or sheep or the two together. There are a few images from the splash tank part of the program here and there.

I expected to be enthralled by the photographic opportunities at the trials and less so by the competition. The reality proved to be the opposite. The photography was hampered by all of the dogs looking very similar to all of the other dogs (they are all border collies in the trials), and the sheep are all the same as the other sheep (although they possess nice texture).

The sport is very cool. It is a little like croquet but instead of wickets there are gates, instead of balls there are clots of sheep, and instead of a mallet there is the strange combination of the shepherd who stands at a post down at the bottom of the course and makes noises and the dog who does the herding. This is all very amazing because the noises were not entirely differentiable, or audible even, to me anyway, from around thirty meters away, but could be discerned and obeyed by the dogs over a distance approaching a third of a mile (I’m guessing).

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Sunrise in the Valley of Fire

I have a secret.  It goes like this: Valley of Fire.  Now the cat is out of the bag.  One of the great things about living in the west is the stumble-upon factor.  There are plenty of places that make the pages of national magazines (now being rapidly replaced by travel blogs) on a regular basis.  This is due to either: they are really cool places and everyone should spend some time there before their time is up, or they have retained superlative PR teams and have themselves mentioned in exchange for ad spending on as frequent a basis as they and their guests can afford.  The later creates a less than virtuous cycle.

There is an entirely different category of places which are either intentionally not publicized because the people who visit them realize that publicity would bring catastrophe or those that  can’t be monetized (in terms of touro-dollars) usually because there is nowhere to locate a hotel right nearby.

I’m not sure of the reasons why, but the Valley of Fire, located between Las Vegas and Mesquite, Nevada is one of these places which goes without a whole lot of mention. It used to be almost completely unheard of, but is becoming less so of late.  It offers a taste of the Colorado Plateau experience within easy driving distance of the Las Vegas strip.  You’ve seen it a thousand times even if you’ve never heard of it, because it is often used as the setting for television commercial and print ad shoots.

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