The why

River Driftwood

Zion National Park

A battered old stump, polished after it's long trip down the river canyon from banging on the rocks. How's that for a metaphor?

Something drove me to do the Subway hike I spoke of in the last post. Not just the hike itself, but the unsettling need to do it now. Not wait until next year, or next time. This was the time.

I'm not a religious man or someone who believes in a higher power. I'm happy for those who do, and jealous of the peace it brings them, but I can't seem to latch onto that thought. My peace comes from a different source. It started the first time Denise and I visited the west and has grown stronger with each trip and each year that passes.

Maybe it's just the distance from home or the difference in the scenery, but I find that just about the only time I'm really in touch with my thoughts is when I'm alone with the red rocks of the west. It's too simple to call it being at peace, it's more than that. It's a time and a feeling of being somewhere I belong.

I truly believe, deep down and sincerely, that the rocks talk to me when I'm with them, and that they listen when I talk back to them. They share their knowledge with me and make me a better person. Being with them alone in the wilderness, or walking among them on this river hike was the reason I had to go. To think through some things, and to get the rocks advise.

Some sit in a church, or a temple, or a mosque. I sit on a rock.

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The where and the how

This isn't the best picture I've ever taken, but to me, it's the most important one. Not because of the image, or the light, or anything I can show you.

 

This is the story of what it took, of the where, and of the how.

 

The Subway

Zion National Park

This spot is in the Zion National Park wilderness and is called the Subway. It's carved out by the rush of the small river over ions of time into the two canyon walls and now appear to be a tunnel through them. It's a place not visited much. The park service only gives out permits for a maximum of 40 people a day, and the day I went there, only five.

I first heard about the Subway a couple of years ago and have since studied pictures of it, read about it many times, and found out just how special it could be.

To get to it, would mean a nine mile hike through the canyon and up the river. That's what the stories tell you, but they don't come close to telling it all. I realize that even a nine mile walk on a sidewalk to someone old and fat like me would is a challenge, but I figured if I took my time and kept things at my pace, I would be OK.

How stupid I was.

I started off in the dark with only my head-lamp to show me the way along a nice level trail over the mesa for the first half mile or so; came to the edge of what I had read was a steep descent into the canyon, and just stood there in awe and fear of what this really meant. I don't know how far it really was down to the river below, but to me it looked like thousands of feet into an abyss down what could not have been called a trail anywhere east of the Mississippi. It was so steep that at times I felt like I was just stumbling and falling down the path rather than hiking down. But I was continuing. It couldn't get worse. Stupid move number two.

There was not a real path to follow, but only three miles of scrambling, climbing, pulling myself over boulders along the sides of the river, with no other way to go upstream because the walls of the canyon were so close that these obstacles blocked any other way of progress. The few easy patches of walking on the riverbank, few and short, were like little gifts. The cairns stacked by earlier hikers to show the way around particularly tough stretches became reasons to rejoice. It became three miles of doubting myself, and cursing the extra fat on my middle and the camera in the pack on my back.

Finally, five hours after I left the car in the dark, I got out my camera for the first time and made the image above. I stayed about half an hour, wanting to wait for different light than I had at the time, but consumed by the thought that if it took me this long to get here, how long would it take to get out and how soon dark was coming. I started back, hopping those same rocks, doubting myself with every one. My knees and ankles screaming at me, calling me every bad word they knew, joining me in my quest to just have it over. After what seemed like hours (wait, it was actually hours), we made it to the bottom of that climb out of the canyon, and had a decision to make.

I sat there on a rock, by this time barely able to move, and came to the realization that I could either make it up that climb or just sit there and die. It sounds dramatic, but those were the only two choices I felt I had at that time. It really wasn't much of a choice after all (drama again), so after a half hour or so, the three of us, knees, ankles, and I started up. At first I was telling them "go to that big rock 50 yards ahead and you get a break", then it was "go 25 yards", and eventually became "stop screaming at me and we'll stop in five". It took one-hour-and-forty-five minutes to get there, but we did it. We drug ourselves across that mesa top to the parking lot, twelve hours from when we started, where two of the others that passed by me on the way out, were without a doubt waiting to toss a coin to see who had to go back down the trail and see how the fat guy was doing.

I had made it, but why?

I have strong feelings about this, but need to think longer on them. As they say...........

Stay tuned in.



 

  


 

Another reason

Star Trails Over Grafton, Utah

I'm sitting at the airport waiting to come back from my selfish trip to Zion National Park.

A lot of time with just me and my rocks, and a lot of time to think. I'm not sure of my thoughts yet, and may put them down  here given a little time to sort them out.

But for now, here's something totally new for me, and something we just can't do at home. It's a rare night when we see a star, and never this many at one time.

Now the rocks have company. The  stars will probably be pulling me just as hard to come back.

The call gets louder

Shadow of the Watchman on the Towers of the Virgin

Zion National Park

In a couple of days I leave for a short trip to Zion National Park. It's something I've been looking forward to all summer, working long hours of extra work to help pay for.

It's probably just about the last thing I should be doing now, and I'm feeling very selfish for doing it. I've cancelled the trip in my own mind many times over in the last few weeks, but just keep going back to something that tells me I have to go. I'm not sure why.

I think the reality that I don't have many more of these trips in me might be the pull of this one. Pulling me to the rocks. Telling me I have to go.

I told you earlier that the rocks were calling. They're getting louder each day and I can't ignore them.


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Look Close

Denise at the End of the Hall

Fort Point, San Francisco

Look close at this one and you'll see the most important person in my life.

She's the one that takes care of me; listens to my complaints; keeps me in line.

She never complains; never takes credit for all the good things she does; always thinks of others first.

She gives more of herself and her time away than anyone could even imagine. Others come first in her world.

I'm proud to call her my best friend and my wife.

Look close to see Denise at the end of the hall.

Remember Me

 

View from Hunt's Mesa into Monument Valley

We used to take all of our pictures of the family or the vacation and get them printed at the local drugstore to show off to friends. But then what did  you do with them? If you were like us, you started putting them in special albums, thinking you would keep them forever.

Then the magic wore off of putting them in the albums. The second kid came along, or the second trip to Disney wasn't as special as the first, or things just got to busy. The pictures ended up in a box. The box got full and hidden away in a closet. The pictures got forgotten about.

But they're still there. Someday our kids will be cleaning out our house and find them.

What do you do now? There isn't that box anymore. Now it's the cellphone picture put on Facebook or on a hard drive somewhere. Just pixels floating around to be forgotten about and lost forever when the old computer is replaced with the shiny new one.

I don't want that to happen with my images. I want my kids and grand kids to see what I worked on for all those years, and to share with their kids what old grandpa did. I don't know if it will ever be kept or passed on, but I have a new project in mind. I'm going to take all of my best images and put in a book; something tangible to touch, feel, and look at. Not a pile of pixels, but something on paper.

The image above will be in that book. I don't know what the book will be like yet, or what its name will be, but hopefully it will be around longer than me and someone will look at it and think about me once in a while.


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Trapped by the Rocks

Virgin River in Autumn, Zion National Park

Ever since Denise and I started going west about 20 years ago, I've been trapped.

Trapped with a feeling that I need to see the red rocks;  that I need to just be with them. That feeling gets stronger every year that I get older.

I sometimes think that I started this photography thing just to have an excuse to go to the rocks, because honestly, and I really mean it, I could leave the camera at home and be just as happy.

Denise has always made fun of me when I tell her I truly believe the rocks have feelings (not too get to weird about it) and souls. Somehow when I'm with them I feel them passing their peacefulness along to me.

Right now I could use some of that peacefulness.

The rocks, they are a calling.

Pretty to Look At

Sequoia in Mariposa Grove
Yosemite National Park

On a recent trip to Yosemite National Park, I learned the meaning of something an instructor said in a workshop I took last year. It didn't mean much at the time; it was just something he said in a passing conversation when we were alone walking through the woods.

Sometimes it takes a while for things to sink in. Sometimes you just file away the little things, and all of a sudden they come back to you.

These images were taken in the Mariposa Grove. A wonderful section of the park with the magnificent sequoia trees dominating the landscape.

They stand there among the other trees----no I take that back---they stand there above all the other trees, with a special glow about them. Even if they weren't the biggest thing in the forest, they would be special for that glow. I've never seen it before and tried to capture it in my images. No matter how I tried, I couldn't get it just right.

Now, back to that little lesson.......


Pretty to look at, just can't take a picture of it.




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The End and the Beginning

Rainbow over Balanced Rock,  Arches National Park

Rainbows come at the end of a storm. Something good out of bad.

Something took place this week that shouldn't have. It was a shame it had to come to an end, but like the storm that makes the rainbow, it's over. Now it's time to work on other things.

An end and a beginning.


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A Sad Place

Gary Methodist Church
Gary, Indiana

Not to far from where I work is this fantastic old historic church. It's a sad place.

Sad because it's there all alone falling down more and more each day. It doesn't look like anyone cares at all about the story of it; of the lives it touched; of the craftsmen who put their souls into building it.



Why do we just give up on things?

Old Feelings

I found this one while looking through old images a couple of days ago. It wasn't what I was looking for, and caught me by surprise a little.

I hadn't looked through this file for quite a while and I had forgot about this one. At the time I took it, I had high hopes for it, but after working with it didn't feel it was up to my expectations. It got put away and ignored.

Teton Valley
Grand Teton National Park

Now I like it. It's still not the best picture I've ever taken, but something about it has caught my attention. I'm not sure what changed. The picture didn't, so it must be me.

My goal has always been to show something in my images more than the scenery, to have the viewer feel the same way I felt when I was there. I try to take a picture and turn it into more than just a bunch of colors on a piece of paper. I try to share the light, the sunshine, the wind, the cold, the things that made that particular place what it was at that small slice of time. When it works like that and takes the viewer into the scene just a little, it turns that picture into something special.

Maybe that's why all of a sudden I like this one. It took me back to that special place in time. It made me feel something I had forgot about.

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And almost back again

I'm back. I gave up on this for a while. A long while. Almost a year. The title of the last post I did was "Fall is Just Ahead", and it is again.

Hyatt Lane
Great Smoky Mtn. National Park

A lot has changed this last year for me and my family. Things have been busy with two new grand-kids and one daughter finishing college and starting new. My Summer work is over leaving a little time for me. I think I want to start getting serious about my photography again. It's time to make time.

So I'll start putting images up here again once in a while. Some will be good, some will be average, but maybe just now and then, one might be something you'll like.

Like Autumn, I've come and gone and I'm almost back again.

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