Photoblog 2.0

Yawn, photo by Harold Davis. View this image larger.

Yawn scratch bellow sniff rut flip bellow yawn, watching the world go by! I photographed these elephant seals on the California coast about ten miles north of Old San Simeon. (Not, as has been suggested at Ano Nuevo on the south San Mateo coast, I’ve got to get there some time.) This was on my recent road trip with my two oldest sons after the Moneterey Aquarium and before Hearst Castle.

From the viewpoint of photo composition, I didn’t know quite what to do with the vast and raucous field of elephant seals, playing fighting, pooping, and mostly lying like some awful parody of our own civilization. Looking at this scene, I felt I needed some visual counterpoint to the drab colors of the sand beach and these gigantic, weird, and wonderful beasts. When the elephant seal in this photo yawned, I was ready to capture the pink of his mouth, which together with the bird nearby makes this composition work through contrast: the eye is drawn to the pink, regardless of the activity in the rest of the photo. Only gradually does the full extent of the scene sink in. The effect is perhaps best viewed larger.

[Nikon D300, 18-200mm VR zoom lens at 200mm (300mm in 35mm terms) with image stabilization engaged, 1/250 of a second at f/8 and ISO 100, hand held.]

Road, photo by Harold Davis. View this photo larger.

Rain, rain, rain! It’s raining here today in the Pacific monsoon way it has here on the, well, Pacific rim. So I’ve gone through some out takes (meaning photos I passed by the first time around). These are from my trip to the mountains and desert in the autumn.

By the way, I’ll be talking about Thinking Digital in the Field at MacWorld in San Francisco on Wednesday January 11 2006 at 12:30 at the Wiley Publishing booth. So if you happen to be there, stop by and say “Hi!”

The photo above is from the eastern lateral to Convict Lake in early October. I wasn’t too worried about being in the middle of the road taking the picture because there wasn’t too much traffic. I processed the Raw once for the background and once for the road. I used Image > Adjustments > Selective Color and the lasso tool to increase the saturation of the yellow in the road lines.

This photo is one of the oldest living things (yes, Virginia, it is alive!) from my visit to the Bristlecone Pines on the same trip:

View the ancient tree larger.

I took this one later in the same trip, homeward bound at Twin Lakes in the Sierras above Bridgeport:

View Twin Lakes photo larger.

Road Trip, photo by Harold Davis.

If you’ve been reading my blog, you know that lately I’ve been to some lonely and lovely places that are surprisingly near to where I live in Berkeley. Here are links to the stories that tell in pictures and words about my autumn trip to Yosemite, the eastern Sierra, and Death Valley. In other words, the Table of Contents…or click here for the whole story (in reverse chronologic order).

	There and Back Again!	Yosemite Valley in the autumn and a map of my trip
	Dark is the Valley in the Morning	Wandering feet in Yosemite
	A Rainbow of Light!	Well, what other kind is there?
	Sunset from Sentinal Dome	High above Yosemite Valley
	Processing a Photo for Flickr	…and Lake Tenaya reflections
	The Hitchhiking Millionaire	Reflections in Lake Tenaya and on wealth
	Risk Management	Sharing Hot Creek with a volcano and a risk expert
	The Deepest Valley	Owens Valley
	Beyond Westgard Pass	Gateway to the desert and Nevada
	Seeking Methuselah	The Oldest Living Things
	Rhyolite and Ozymandias	Ghost Town at Sunset
	Death Valley Sunrise	Desert sunrise from Hells Gate
	Zabriskie Quilt	Patterns in the desert
	Lonely Road	Stovepipe Wells to Lone Pine
	Mount Whitney Sunrise	Dawn on the eastern Sierra crest
	Crossroads of the Cowboy Universe	Alabama Hills
	Homeward Bound	Autumn in the eastern Sierra

Twin Lakes, photo by Harold Davis.

I called Phyllis, and it was pretty apparent she was at her wits end. I don’t know how she managed the three kids for so long by herself. She is a miracle.

But it was time to come home.

Leaving the Alabama Hills behind, I headed north up Owens Valley. The fall colors were beautiful on the eastern slope of the Sierras:

Sunset was special at Twin Lakes above Bridgeport:

In the morning, temperatures were in the low twenties and ice was everywhere. I had a straight shot home over Sonora Pass and then across the central valley to Berkeley.

You can view a map of my recent travel towards the bottom of my first story in this series.

Alabama Hills 1, photo by Harold Davis.

The Alabama Hills lie below Mt. Whitney and above Lone Pine in Owens Valley.

You can view a map of my recent travel towards the bottom of my first story in this series.

If any of these Alabama Hills landscapes look vestigially familiar, it is because the Alabama Hills have been used extensively for filming by Hollywood. One dusty intersection has appeared so often in pre-1960 cowboy flicks that it is known as “the center of the cowboy world.”

Here’s a map showing where in the Alabama Hills some movies were filmed.

I spent a great deal of time photographing the Alabama Hills in the late afternoon, at sunset, at sunrise, and in the morning:

Mount Whitney Sunrise, photo by Harold Davis.

Above Lone Pine, I camped near the Alabama Hills and directly below Mt. Whitney.

What a wonderful, glorious suprise to wake up just before dawn, clamber up a rock, and see the sun peeping over the east wall of Owens Valley and hitting Mount Whitney, the highest peak in the continental United States.

A little later, everything had become golden:

You can view a map of my recent travel towards the bottom of my first story in this series.

Lonely Road, photo by Harold Davis.

It’s a long and lonely road from Stovepipe Wells in Death Valley to Lone Pine in Owens Valley.

But the scenery in the rugged Panamint Range is worth it:

You can view a map of my trip towards the bottom of my first story in this series.

Zabriskie Point 2, photo by Harold Davis.

I arrived below sea level in Death Valley in the early morning after photographing sunrise from near Hells Gate.

You can view a map of my trip towards the bottom of my first story in this series.

The landscape at Zabriskie Point, with its folds and crevasses and cliffs, reminds me of a textile, or maybe even a quilt.

Death Valley Sunrise 2, photo by Harold Davis.

After photographing sunset at Rhyolite, I spent the night in a motel-casino in Beatty, Nevada. This motel-casino was truly a disturbing place, with the constant clink of gambling machines invading the air made fetid and stale by old tobacco smoke. Here’s more about my feelings regarding Nevada culture (an oxymoron). View a map of the area towards the bottom of my first story in this series.

Before the sun was up the next morning I was on my way west on Nevade Highway 374. At the Hells Gate entrance to Death Valley National Park, I took a cutoff past the Wonder Mine. A little above the Wonder Mine, I pulled off by the side of the road to photograph the sunrise.

Stop squinting in the sun with polarized sunglasses. Not only do shades look great but read how sunglasses can protect you from aging prematurely.  Get that tough look with aviator sunglasses. You can still look stylish while being safe with designer replica sunglasses.

Rhyolite Under Moon, photo by Harold Davis.

Rhyolite is a ghost town at the eastern entrance to Death Valley. (View a map of the area towards the bottom of my first story in this series.)

Once Rhyolite was a bustling metropolis with a three-story shopping district, carriages, and fashionably dressed people.

Today there’s nothing but the whistling wind, and dusty signs warning tourists about rattle snakes.

When I visit places like Rhyolite, I am inevitably reminded of the poet Percy Bysshe Shelley’s Ozymandias:

I MET a Traveler from an antique land,
Who said, “Two vast and trunkless legs of stone
Stand in the desart. Near them, on the sand,
Half sunk, a shattered visage lies, whose frown,
And wrinkled lip, and sneer of cold command,
Tell that its sculptor well those passions read,
Which yet survive, stamped on these lifeless things,
The hand that mocked them and the heart that fed:
And on the pedestal these words appear:
“My name is OZYMANDIAS, King of Kings.”
Look on my works ye Mighty, and despair!
No thing beside remains. Round the decay
Of that Colossal Wreck, boundless and bare,
The lone and level sands stretch far away.

Will our civilization–so grand and impressive to us–vanish like Rhyolite and Ozymandias?

Julian, my eight-year old, and I visited Bodie, another famous ghost town, earlier in the year. Here’s the story.

Endurance, photo by Harold Davis.

Bristlecone Pines are the oldest living things in the world, and the largest group of Bristlcone Pines are high in the White Mountains on the eastern side of Owens Valley. (View a map of the area towards the bottom of my first story in this series.)

These trees grow best in harsh conditions where it’s hard for other species to compete with them:

A hike around the Methuselah Grove, where the oldest of the old trees lives, is like a visit to God. If ever there were a real temple or church, this is it.

Methuselah itself is not identified by the Forest Service (the ancient Bristlecone Pine Forest is part of Inyo National Forest). This lack of specific identification is intended to protect Methuselah, the oldest of all living things, from vandalism and souvenir hunters.

But hiking on the trail around the Methuselah Grove, I felt sentience — ancient, sleepy, wise — and that the eyes of the old ones were upon me:

Westgard Pass, photo by Harold Davis.

Westgard Pass lies on lonely Route 168 between Big Pine and the great open desert country of basins, ranges, and valleys. (View a map of the area towards the bottom of my first story in this series.)

Westgard Pass is closed to commercial trucking (the road is too narrow, steep, and twisting). Beyond Westgard Pass, to the east is a small, isolated college in Deep Springs, a ranch or two in Oasis, and nothing much else in terms of towns or people until you hit Goldfield or Beatty in Nevada, hundreds of miles away.

Oh yes, at the otherwise barren intersection of Nevada Highway 266 and U.S. 95 there are a series of legal whorehouses in the middle of nowhere. Invariably created from a number of pre-fabs stitched together, these hermetic and airconditioned institutions have big signs saying “Brothel,” “Open for Business,” and “Free Parking All Night.” If you are curious about legal prositution in Nevada, here’s the Wikipedia article on the topic, and here’s a site put up by the marketing arm of the legal Nevada prostitution business organization.

As far as I am concerned, human society in Nevada is pretty gross. Stinking of stale tobacco smoke in every room, Nevadans have even managed to make consensual sin with another person look lonely and solitary.

This picture shows Westgard Pass, which I think of as the gateway to the desert, from above.

Owens River Gorge, photo by Harold Davis.

After reluctantly leaving Hot Creek, I headed down Route 395 into Owens Valley. (View road map of my route here.)

Between the Sierra crest on the west rising to heights above 14,000 feet, and the White Mountains to the east — with summits above 12,000 feet — Owens Valley is the deepest valley in the United States. It’s elevation varies, but is typically around 4,000 feet, so you are looking at a valley that is 8,000 feet deep. Deeper, in other words, than the Grand Canyon.

Here’s a photo looking across the valley towards the Sierra crest:

I think that Owens Valley is one of the surpassingly beautiful places on this earth. It is still fairly undeveloped, although beginning to get a little more crowded.

Early last century, the city of Los Angeles engineered a notorious heist of the water flowing through the valley. In some ways, this may have helped preserved the remote, undeveloped, and beautiful feeling of Owens Valley. (Although this was surely not the motivation of the Angelenos, who merely wanted to wash their cars, water their lawns, and fill their swimming pools.)

The photo at the top of this story shows the inner Owens River gorge, which has become a climbing mecca. The climbing spot is to the left and behind this picture.

Further down Owens Valley, the river becomes a gentle creek, as you can see in this picture I took of an Owens River swimming hole in the early morning:

Hot Creek, photo by Harold Davis.

Hot Creek is a cold mountain stream flowing out of the eastern Sierra. Intense volcanic activity makes eddies of hot, bathable water in the middle of the stream.

For me, Hot Creek is a canonical stop in any trip to the eastern Sierra, as it was recently after I headed over Tioga Pass and before I went down into Owens Valley (view a map of my trip).

Despite fairly heavy usage — on a summer weekend there will likely be hundreds of people in the various pools in the creek, the Green Tortoise makes it a regular stop, and German tourists on Harley Davidson motorcycles visit on a schedule — the place is pretty clean and unspoiled.

Hot Creek lies on U.S. Forest Service land, which calls the place a “geologic feature” and plays down the bathing aspect. Signs at the parking lot at the top of the trail down to the creek report various accidents at the creek (dogs have gone into scalding hot pools, and their owners have been hurt going in after them).

There’s nothing like lolling around in 104 degree water for hours to facilitate pleasant conversations with strangers. One of my companions this time was a risk management professional. His job was to assess risk from things like storms, earthquakes, and volcanic activity for clients like electric utilities.

We chuckled together about a risk management consultant placidly bathing in one of the most active volcanic sites in the country. Then he said something I’ve been thinking about since then:

I know it could blow here anytime, but it’s worth it. As a professional matter, the risks you know about can be judged and calibrated. The risks someone doesn’t know about are incalculable to that person — because they don’t know about them. When something you haven’t thought of that is bad happens, you feel blindsided. But this is not a realistic attitude, because everything has a probability.

Reflections, photo by Harold Davis.

Leaving the waterfalls of Yosemite behind, I continued with my trip.

The sun was just reaching the trees, as in this picture, when I drove through the Valley on my way to the junction with Route 120 towards Tioga Pass. (You can see a map here.)

At the opening to the Valley, where Route 120 peels up and away from Route 140 (which heads down to Merced), I saw a hitchhiker with a backpack headed my way. It’s perhaps appropriate to mention at this point that the car I drive, fondly called “URL” (his license plate — we pronounce it “earl”), was bought with tech bubble proceeds to impress investors, and not as a photographer’s car. Here’s a picture of URL-the-car (taken later on this same trip in Rhyolite-the-ghost-town):

To digress, “URL” is a great car for roadtrips, but not really the thing for navigating tracks in the mountains and deserts (let alone the trackless mountains and desert) . The ideal photographer’s car should be four-wheel drive, have high clearance, not be conspicuous, and have room to sleep in the back.

The hitchhiker was about my age (definitely old enough to know better) as scruffy as only someone can be who has been spending unwashed time on the trail. His name was Mark. Mark smelled bad enough that I inwardly winced when he said he was going up to Lake Tenaya — when I smelled the stink I’d been hoping the ride would be of shorter duration. I powered down my window even though it was morning chill outside.

Things got better when we started talking. Mark was from Idaho. He’d left his car up at the Sunrise lot near Lake Tenaya, and hiked down to the Valley. After several days, he was on his way back to his car.

Mark explained to me that he wasn’t carrying any food to avoid having to deal with bear canisters (and the bears in the Valley). I stopped by Yosemite Creek at a picnic ground to get him some jerky and trail mix. Mark said he could eat as we drove. I explained to him that nobody eats in URL-the-car, and asked him to finish eating before we started driving again. I think Mark thought this was pretty funny — he started asking about my kids, the state of my wife’s car, and how I felt about desert dust.

I asked Mark what he did for a living, and he said he was an investor. Pretty soon we were deep in arcane discussions of Brazilian index funds, energy options, and technology stocks.

Mark said he thought people in their twenties were different from him and me. I asked how, specifically. He said they didn’t have a clue about vaccuum cleaners. (Meaning, I guess, that cleaning wasn’t high on the agenda for young people, and also that they found it hard to follow the linear instruction materials that typically come with appliances like vaccuum cleaners.)

I asked Mark why he thought he knew about twenty-somethings. He said he winters in the south of India, spending $1.23 a day, and spends a lot of time with young people on the beach in India and at Burning Man.

I think Mark was missing what the social scientists call an intervening variable: the people who end up on the beach in Southern India, or at Burning Man, of whatever age, are less likely to be interested in vaccuum cleaners than people walking the corporate path. When I was much younger, I had a girlfriend I thought very exotic and intriguing because she had spent a great deal of time hanging out in India. She was inordinately fond of her bong from Goa. And she certainly didn’t have a clue about vaccuum cleaners, or cleanliness. QED.

But Mark was truly right about one thing that is usually very hard for wealthy people to grasp. He said, “I think having too much money can really isolate you from important life experiences.”

For example, most millionaires don’t hitchhike. If Mark were one of them, he and I wouldn’t have met, and I would have missed getting to know a fascinating soul.

It’s hard for me to remember all of our wide-ranging conversation, but I do think that the most important for Mark was that people should avoid being trapped by their habits, and avoid getting stuck in a narrow rut. In his view, having money is a potential trap — as is simply following habits reflexively. He said, “If you are getting stuck doing the same thing without thinking, move to another city.”

I dropped Mark off at his car (a battered camper with Idaho plates) and stopped beside Lake Tenaya to photograph the reflections shown at the top of this story, in a previous blog story, and here: