Whooping cranes, endemic to North America, are among the most endangered birds in the world.  Back in 1940, due to habitat loss and hunting, there were only 21 whooping cranes left in North America.  Today, as a result of conservation efforts and captive breeding, the current wild population is estimated to be around 500 birds.  The only naturally occurring, and self-sustaining, flock of Whooping Cranes breeds in Wood Buffalo National Park, in northern Alberta, Canada, and spends winters in Aransas National Wildlife Refuge in Texas.

You can understand that I would want a chance to photograph the endangered whooping crane.  Besides its endangered status, the whooping crane is also the largest crane species, standing more than five tall with an eight-foot wingspan.  It is a most impressive bird but also a difficult bird to find.  Most of the wintering cranes forage for food among the coastal barrier islands of the Aransas National Wildlife Refuge.  Searching for them involves motoring along the edges of the barrier islands in a boat and hoping you will spot cranes close enough to photograph.

Whooping CranesCranes In Flight Whooping CranesCranes Eating A Snake

We spent three mornings with Captain Kevin Sims on his boat, with two other photographers, searching for whooping cranes.  There are thousands of acres of barrier islands where the 500 remaining cranes could hangout.  So, we were very fortunate to find several family units of cranes within a reasonable distance for photography.  When crane sightings became scarce, Captain Sims motored to a small rookery island with breeding great blue herons, reddish egrets, roseate spoonbills, great egrets, and Caspian terns.  Of particular interest was the ability to photograph the distinctive white morph of the reddish egret.

Great Blue HeronsHerons At Rookery White Morph - Reddish Heron

Caspian Terns White IbisIbis Foraging for Food

After regaining our “land legs” and a satisfying lunch, we headed for a blind on Kevin Sims’ property where whooping cranes are often enticed to feed on corn.  We four photographers spent hours in the blind waiting for cranes to arrive.  Fortunately, cranes did show up, but they were sandhill cranes, the same crane I have photographed often at Bosque del Apache National Wildlife Refuge near home.  Eventually, though, some whooping cranes did arrive and we could see the huge difference in size between the whooping crane and sandhill crane.

Whooping Crane & Sandhill CraneSize comparison Whooping CranesTaking Off

In addition to whooping crane photography, we also visited the El Potrero Nature Photography Ranch near Kingsville, Texas, an hour’s drive inland from Rockport.  The Ranch has purpose-built photo sites with blinds to photograph regional birds.  The variety of birds showing up at the photo sites was disappointing.  Jane was able to add four new species of birds to her list, however.  Perhaps the most interesting photo site was the one dedicated to attracting raptors where we had ample opportunity to photograph the Crested Caracara.

Crested CaracaraCaracara Landing Crested Caracara

Golden Fronted Woodpecker Yellow Throated Warbler

Bumble BeeBee on Purple Thistle Roseate Skimmer

When all the photography was done, we packed up and headed for home, ending our first major road trip with the new Rav4, that now has a whopping 3,500 miles on the odometer. That means only one thing, more road trips to come.

For photos from our Whooping Cranes & More trip, check out the “Latest” gallery on the website.

The excitement of Santa Fe was followed a month later with our first trip for the new year, a repeat February journey to Costa Rica.  For this weeklong excursion, we had decided to stay at just one location, the Arenal Observatory Lodge the only accommodation inside Arenal Volcano National Park.  This was our third trip to Costa Rica coordinated by Costa Rica Focus, a travel company specializing in organizing private bird watching and photography tours.  It is so easy working with Costa Rica Focus.  We tell them what we want to do and where we want to stay and they arrange airport transfers, lodging, meals, and guide services.  Easy as pie!

The Arenal Observatory Lodge is a lovely place to stay.  Jane and I had stayed there a couple of nights on a previous Costa Rica trip and decided that we would spend this entire trip at Arenal.  The lodge is situated on 870 acres, of which nearly a third are primary (old growth) forest. There is a myriad of paved and dirt trails to explore and find birds to photograph.  Finding the birds is the hard part and that is why having a birding guide from Costa Rica Focus is so valuable.

From previous trips to Costa Rica, I knew of some places I wanted to go back to.  So, while staying at the Arenal Observatory Lodge, we made a couple of day trips to those locations.  The first was the Catarata del Toro waterfall and the adjacent Blue Falls on a private reserve.  Catarata del Toro is truly impressive with water from the Toro River cascading nearly 300 feet into an extinct volcanic crater.  There is an easy, short trail with three viewpoints overlooking the falls.  There is also a much longer, steeper trail down to the bottom of the falls that we did not attempt to navigate.

The trail to the Blue Falls, on the other hand, was not easy.  Far from it.  The ticket agent assured us that the path was fairly level for most of the three-quarter mile track.  That was certainly not the case. The trail was pretty much all uphill with some rather steep ascends.  Upon approaching the waterfall, the trail became narrow with lots of steep, wet steps descending down into the river gorge.  We hiked down to only one of several Blue Falls.  The water gets its robin-egg blue tint from an abundance of dissolved aluminum sulfate, of volcanic origin, that reflects blue from sunlight.  The hike was a bit strenuous but worth the effort.

One of my recurring hopes for trips to Costa Rica is to photograph a sloth with a baby.  So, our second day trip was to the Bogarin Trail near the bustling tourist town of La Fortuna.  The trail is known for sloth sightings, and, we were informed that there was one with a baby.  We started out very enthusiastically, only to learn that the sloth with baby had left the area.  We did spot and photograph two other sloths.  Photography was difficult due to the sloths being so high up in the canopy of the trees, hidden by branches and leaves, and backlit by a cloudless sky.  Again, I was foiled in my attempt for a baby sloth shot.  Obviously, a reason for a future return trip to Costa Rica.

To see images from this Costa Rica journey go to the “Latest” gallery and for bird images go the “Birds” gallery and then “Birds of Costa Rica”.

The early December air was crisp and cold, with temperatures in the teens, as I walked out of the Gallup Holiday Inn Express to attend the 43^rd annual Red Rock Balloon Rally.  Frost had to be scraped off the 4Runner windshield before I could drive off for the morning Mass Ascension.  Chemical warmers kept my toes and hands toasty warm as I listened to the pilot’s briefing.  A clear sky with a gentle breeze was forecast as the pilots headed cheerfully to their balloons.  The launch area at Red Rock State Park is divided into a north field and south field, separated by a camp ground.  As the ground crews prepared their balloons for flight, I hustled between the launch areas to find the best photo locations. 

OLYMPUS DIGITAL CAMERA OLYMPUS DIGITAL CAMERA

Several dozen balloons, including a few special shapes, ascended into the calm sky against a backdrop of red sandstone bluffs.  To the delight of spectators, some of the pilots were able to maneuver their balloons close to the bluffs and scrape their baskets against the red rock.  The calm weather also allowed tethered balloons to be tightly spaced for a colorful, synchronized evening balloon glow.

OLYMPUS DIGITAL CAMERA OLYMPUS DIGITAL CAMERA

Jane joined me for the second of my two year-end jaunts.  We spend a day at Bosque del Apache enjoying unusually warm December weather at the National Wildlife Refuge.  In order to catch sunrise with the sandhill cranes, we overnighted in Socorro rather than driving super early from Albuquerque.  Driving around the south and north loop roads looking for cranes and other wildlife, with a baren, winter landscape, was very enjoyable.  There were not a lot of birds, but the few that were there provided some fun photography.  Perhaps the highlight of the excursion was seeing a mom javelina with a very young infant trotting behind.

With these two short year-end trips completed, Jane and I are now getting ready for the many social event planned with our neighbors to celebrate the holidays.  For New Year’s, however, it will be just to two of us in Santa Fe to ring in the new year.

We started out with a short drive to Chama, New Mexico, a bit north of Santa Fe.  There we enjoyed a day-long adventure on the historic Cumbres & Toltec narrow gage railroad.  The Cumbres & Toltec Scenic Railroad is America’s longest and highest narrow gage railroad and is designated a National Historic Landmark. We left Albuquerque early in the morning for the three hour drive to Chama to catch the ten o’clock train for the 64 mile journey to Antonito, Colorado.  The 1880 era, coal burning, steam Engine 484 pulled our restored Denver & Rio Grande carriages along the tight turns over the mountains from New Mexico to Colorado.  Jane had booked us in the Parlor Car where we marveled at the turns and twists of the narrow gage tracks and enjoyed mimosas while watching the scenery pass by.  The historic train journey ended at Antonito where busses were waiting to transport us back to Chama.

After spending the night in Chama, we continued our road trip to Chimney Rock National Monument in Colorado, about an hour’s drive northeast of Chama.  The name suggests that this national monument is all about the outstanding geologic rock formation.  But that would be wrong.  Actually, this national monument is a one thousand year old archaeological site consisting of ancient dwellings, kivas and a great-house pueblo.  Archaeologists believe that the people who lived here a thousand years ago were part of the Chaco culture who inhabited Chaco Canyon in New Mexico. Jane and I hiked the steep Great House Trail to view the ruins.

From Chimney Rock, we drove a short distance to Arboles, Colorado, situated near the north end of Navajo Reservoir.  Arboles is a small, unincorporated community, with an estimated population of around 300 people.  Two of those people are my nephew Mike Riebeek and his wife Aneda.  I had not seen Mike for many years and had never been to his home in Arboles.  We had a great, although short, visit with Mike and Aneda sharing stories and talking family stuff.

After bidding Mike and Aneda adieu, we headed further north on U.S. Highway 550 to Montrose, Colorado.  The goal there was to spend a few days photographing at the Black Canyon of the Gunnison National Park.  The canyon was not easy to photograph.  When the sun was low on the horizon, one side or the other of the extremely deep and narrow canyon would be in shade.  When the sun moved higher into the sky, the bottom of the canyon would have sunlight, but both sides of the steep canyon walls would be shady.  We hiked to most of the view points on both the South Rim and North Rim roads.  The most spectacular views were from Exclamation Point on the north side of the canyon.  From Exclamation Point we had several clear views up the canyon.  We thoroughly enjoyed the three mile, round-trip, hike to Exclamation Point.  The trail was relatively flat and traversed through pinyon- juniper woodland and the cool morning air was invigorating.

OLYMPUS DIGITAL CAMERA

When arriving at Montrose, Jane noticed the Ute Indian Museum along the highway and we decided to make time for a visit there.  As the name suggests, the exhibits at the museum were all about the indigenous Ute tribes of the Great Basin and Colorado Plateau.  Ute history, during the “westward expansion” of the 1800’s, parallels New Mexico’s Navajo and Apache history with their confinement to reservations.  In addition to providing insight into this sad history, the museum also provides contemporary programs highlighting Ute tribal activities.

From Montrose, Colorado, we continued are journey to “our place in Montana” with overnight stops in Casper, Wyoming and Great Falls, Montana.  In Casper, of all places, we discovered the National Historic Trails Interpretive Center located in a very avant-garde facility near our hotel. This impressive interpretive center highlights the “westward expansion” from the pioneer’s perspective. Exhibits documented westward migration along the Oregon Trail, California Trail, Mormon Trail and the Pony Express. So, Jane and I were exposed to the history of the west from two opposing viewpoints.

Since our stay at the timeshare cabin is two weeks long, it is not unusual for us to take a short overnighter to some nearby attraction.  This year we opted to visit the Writing-on-Stone Provincial Park in the Milk River valley near Lethbridge, Alberta, Canada.  The park contains petroglyphs created by nomadic Blackfoot tribes of the Great Plains.  The area is sacred to current Blackfoot tribal members and has been designated a UNESCO World Heritage Site.  Our guide for the petroglyph tour was a Blackfoot and he had wonderful stories to tell about the rock art and his personal experiences.

OLYMPUS DIGITAL CAMERA OLYMPUS DIGITAL CAMERA

On the way to and from the Writing-on-Stone Provincial Park, we sidetracked to Waterton Lakes National Park in Canada.  Waterton National Park shares its southern, international, border with Glacier National Park’s northern, international, border.  Together these two parks make up the Waterton-Glacier International Peace Park: World Heritage Site.  We detoured to Waterton National Park in order to have lunch at the historic Prince of Wales Hotel.  Built in 1927, the Prince of Wales hotel is reminiscent of the great railroad hotels built in America’s western national parks.

OLYMPUS DIGITAL CAMERA

We enjoyed our brief foray into Canada.  The drive along Chief Mountain Highway, in the eastern foothills of the Rocky Mountains, is always a stunning ride especially when the hills are adorned with fall colors.  Eventually, though, the time came to head back south to New Mexico.  It’s a long way from Albuquerque to our cabin, about 3,500 miles round trip, including visits to Writing-on-Stone and the Prince of Wales hotel.  Jane had downloaded an Audible book on her phone and we listened to Anthony Horowitz’s novel Moonflower Murders (a PBS Masterpiece series).  At each stop along the way we would try to figure out who the culprit was, but we never did.

OLYMPUS DIGITAL CAMERA We stopped in Logan, Utah, to visit with my sister, Neli, and my nephew, Bryan, and his wife, Margaret. Neli is now a young 97 years old and still doing very well, thank you.  She needs a “walker” to get around but is pretty sharp and delighted in sharing stories with us.  Bryan had arranged for the five of us to have lunch at Cody’s Gastro Garage, an actual auto repair garage turned into a trendy café, in Garden City along the west shore of Bear Lake.  It was a special treat for me to spend some fun time with my sister.

The next day, Jane and I headed home to Albuquerque.  We arrived back in time for the 52^nd annual Albuquerque International Balloon Fiesta.  Normally, we don’t get back to Albuquerque from our cabin in time for the Balloon Fiesta.  So, this year we were able to go out early a couple of mornings to watch the balloons launch into the air.  The weather in Albuquerque was particularly favorable for the event this year and there were balloons in the air most every day during the nine-day Fiesta.  We were fascinated by the special-shape balloons with their unusual, often whimsical, designs.

Autumn has arrived and a new year will soon be upon us.  We have started some early thinking and planning for trips in 2025.  So, stay in touch to see what we will be up to next year.

For Jane and me, the venture really started in December of 2022 when we first decided to embark on this safari with Stu Porter and deposits were made.  After that, it was eighteen months of anticipation for the adventure to begin.  Reading the trip information, we knew this was going to be a most memorable journey.  Our excitement grew as departure time approached, but so did apprehensions about airline schedules and potential delay problems for the long, multi-stop flight from Albuquerque to Johannesburg, South Africa.  So, Jane schedule our flights to arrive a day before the start of our tour.  We spent our first night in Africa at the City Lodge Hotel at the Johannesburg airport.

On July 27^th we met Stu and our fellow travelers, Lin and T.J. Lenahan, and Jean and Keith Aclin, for the Airlink flight from Johannesburg to Maun, Botswana.  In Maun, we quickly gathered our bags and transferred to a Mackair charter flight to Moremi, in the Okavango Delta.  Waiting for us at the Moremi landing strip were our guides Nkosi Sibanda and Frank Mashebe with the modified Toyota Land Cruiser safari vehicles that would transport us for the next ten days.  It was all very exciting as we encountered jackals, giraffes, lions and leopards along the drive from the airstrip to our first camp site.

Staying in a mobile, tented camp was a brand new experience for us and we didn’t know exactly what to expect.  An obvious conclusion was that everything, including food, drinking water, kitchen paraphernalia, cots, bedding, and tents had to be brought along as we moved from one remote camp to another.  Our outfitter, Thru-the-lens Photographic Safaris, was well experienced in remote, mobile camping and, logistically, all the camp relocations and setups occurred seamlessly.  The camp itself was also managed efficiently from the 5:30 AM wakeup call, through breakfast, noon lunch, three o’clock high tea and the evening dinner.  Kudos to the camp staff who were always helpful and friendly, but most importantly, kept the camp safe from marauding wildlife through the night.

Our accommodation was an aluminum-framed, marquee style ridge tent large enough to stand up in and contain two cots with space for two bedside tables.  There was a covered “porch” area in front with a couple of large folding chairs, four screened window openings, and an attached en suite bathroom.  Bathroom facilities included a folding console table that accommodated two small galvanized tubs that were filled with hot water every morning at 5:30 for washing up.  There was also a thermos with drinking water for brushing teeth and a bucket shower that was filled with hot water during the lunch break.  The toilet was a “porta potty” placed over an open pit.

OLYMPUS DIGITAL CAMERA OLYMPUS DIGITAL CAMERA

The daily routine started at 5:30 in the morning when camp staff would bring hot water for washing up.  After washing up and dressing warmly (morning temperatures ranged in the mid-40’s), we gathered around the campfire for coffee, tea and breakfast.  Then, as twilight started to lighten the sky, we boarded the land cruisers for the morning game run to see what wildlife could be found to photograph.  Each vehicle was set up with three rows of seats so each of the six photographers would have a full row for shooting and storing camera gear.  Stu instituted a rotation system so that each day we would start in a different row.

During the game run, around mid-morning, there would be a coffee break with cookies, and the proverbial “pit stop”.  Typically, we arrived back at camp around noon where staff would be waiting to greet us and prepare lunch.  Lunch was buffet style with choices of salads and main course.  After lunch, during the harsh light of mid-day, was “free” time for charging camera and laptop batteries, showering and napping.  At three, we would gather again at the dining tent for high tea and cake. The afternoon game drive started after high tea, when temperatures ranged in the high-80’s, and lasted until dusk when it became too dark for photography.

OLYMPUS DIGITAL CAMERA

After returning to camp from the afternoon drive, it was time for relaxing around the campfire, sharing stories of the day’s experience, and enjoying a cocktail or glass of wine.  Dinner followed after Holly, the very talented camp chef, announced the evening’s menu followed by her hearty, high-pitched, tongue trill, ululation.  Dinner started with appetizer, or salad, followed by the main course, usually a meat or fish dish, and finished with a tasty dessert.

The game runs were amazing.  Frank and Nkosi would maneuver the land cruisers skillfully through a maze of sandy tracks searching for signs of wildlife. They were exceptionally good at reading the signs and tracks of the animals we pursued.  Scouring the dry grass and scrubby terrain, they had an uncanny knack for spotting something interesting to photograph.  Every run was unique and I anxiously anticipated our encounters with Botswana’s wildlife.  At times I felt the experience would have been similar to those of the early big game hunters, only we were shooting with cameras, not guns.

OLYMPUS DIGITAL CAMERA

There were many, memorable wildlife encounters.   One in particular stands out that I refer to as a “National Geographic” moment.  I was in Frank’s land cruiser when he spotted a pack of about twelve wild dogs on a hunt.  He immediately left the sandy track we were on and started pursuing the dogs on a parallel course across the open velt, avoiding large shrubs and deep ruts, at a hectic pace.  Keeping up with the speeding dogs allowed us to witness the wild dogs take down and devour an impala.  That adrenaline inducing chase was truly a “National Geographic” moment.

OLYMPUS DIGITAL CAMERA OLYMPUS DIGITAL CAMERA

Water holes were especially productive for photography.  However, during the dry season, especially now with global warming, water holes are typically dry.  Consequently, Botswana’s wildlife reserves have drilled water wells to seasonally fill a few strategic water holes.  We observed a variety of large mammals, including elephants, giraffes, impala, wildebeest, wild dogs, as well as flocks of birds, drinking at the water holes.

OLYMPUS DIGITAL CAMERA

After ten nights in our mobile camp tents, we departed the dry Okavango Delta for the Chobe River at Kasane, Botswana.  Sadly, we left Frank, Nkosi and our, now familiar, land cruisers at the Savute “International Airport” for our charter flight to Kasane and the Pangolin Hotel.  It was way beyond joy to be at the Pangolin Hotel with a real shower and a comfortable bed for two.

At Kasane, our safari mode changed from land cruisers to small boats with outboard motors and special gimbal supports for our cameras.  We cruised the Chobe River during mornings and afternoons to photograph wildlife. Along the wide waterway, it was not so much searching for wildlife but rather being at the right place at the right time. The river naturally attracts thirsty animals and the reeds along the river’s edge attract many birds.  Our new guide, the boat captain, was adroit at finding small birds, including bee-eaters and several unique kingfishers.  Our cameras were kept pretty busy on the Chobe.

We bade Stu an emotional goodbye as he prepared for his next safari and we prepared for our trip extension to Victoria Falls. All six of us hardy travelers loaded our luggage into a van for the transfer to Victoria Falls.  Crossing the border from Botswana into Zimbabwe came with its own bit of confusion and humor. Eventually, though, all paper work was completed, visas paid for, and passports stamped. Our destination was the Ilala Lodge near the entrance to Victoria Falls National Park.  Once at the hotel, Lin and T.J., as well as Jean and Keith, had their own plans so each couple started their Victoria Falls visit independently.

David Livingstone, the British missionary and explorer, named the falls after Queen Victoria in 1855 and in 1989 the Victoria Falls was declared a UNESCO World Heritage Site.  During the wet season, nearly 300,000 gallons per second of water thunder over a mile long precipice falling 350 feet into the narrow Zambezi River gorge.  During the dry season, when we were at the falls, the volume of water cascading over the precipice is only about a third, but still an impressive volume of water.

It was a short taxi ride from the Ilala Lodge to the Victoria Falls National Park entrance.  In the park is a paved trail along the edge of the gorge opposite the water fall with a number of viewpoints.  In mid-afternoon, the sun is positioned so that a vivid rainbow appears in the spray of mist created by the falling water. Jane and I made sure not to miss that spectacle.  We also signed up for a helicopter flight over the falls for an impressive aerial view.

OLYMPUS DIGITAL CAMERA

OLYMPUS DIGITAL CAMERA

On August 10^th, after fifteen adventurous days in Africa, we departed the Ilala Lodge around ten in the morning for our 30 minute taxi ride to Victoria Fall Airport.  From there, it was a long journey home.  We arrived back in Albuquerque mid-afternoon on August 11^th, having spent more than 24 hours in airport terminals and airplanes. Looking back, it is hard to imagine an adventure more memorable than this African safari.  The comradery among all our fellow travelers, Stu, Frank, Nkosi, and camp crew, as well as the wildlife encounters, made this a unique, one-of-a-kind, exciting adventure.

Clret Cup Cactus FlowerClaret Cup Cactus, aka Crimson Hedgehog, In Full Bloom Showing Red Flower Petals And Reproductive Elements King Cup Cactus Flower and BudBright Orange Bloom Of Hedgehog Cactus, aka King Cup Cactus, In Profile View Illustrating Flower Petals and Reproductive Parts

OLYMPUS DIGITAL CAMERA OLYMPUS DIGITAL CAMERA

My good friend Neil Solomon told me about a pair of peregrine falcons that were nesting and raising chicks along the cliffs of the Torrey Pines State Natural Reserve in La Jolla, California.  Unabashedly, I invited myself and Bruce to come and photograph these raptors with him.  So, in early May, Jane and I ventured to San Diego for a short visit to photograph the falcons.  Neil generously guided Bruce and me to the best photo locations.  Needless to say, these nesting peregrines and their chicks attracted many other photographers and we were not alone on the beach waiting for the birds to appear.

OLYMPUS DIGITAL CAMERA OLYMPUS DIGITAL CAMERA

Jane had arranged for us to stay at the Hilton Garden Inn in Old Town.  We did not realize it at the time, but it turned out that we ended up in the middle of the Old Town Cinco de Mayo celebration.  It was a noisy, crowded party and we happily joined the throng of revelers while enjoying a margarita along the way.

A recent issue of Arizona Highways Magazine featured an article and photographs of Chiricahua National Monument in southeastern Arizona.  I found the geology and scenery of this “sky island” fascinating and was immediately drawn to the rhyolite rock pinnacles and spires to try my own photography there.  So, we were back from San Diego a short three weeks before hitting the road again. OLYMPUS DIGITAL CAMERA

This time it was road trip.  Chiricahua National Monument is only about a six hour drive from home.  Since it was my idea to make the trip, I made the necessary accommodations.  For the first four nights of this week long trip we stayed at the Dreamcatcher Inn at Chiricahua, an extremely nice B&B, somewhat in the middle of nowhere.  Phillip and Ramon (Ray) were our very gracious hosts.  In fact, once Ray found out about my photography interest, he provided directions to a great horned owl nest with three chicks about to fledge.

OLYMPUS DIGITAL CAMERA OLYMPUS DIGITAL CAMERA

OLYMPUS DIGITAL CAMERA

Although a “sky island”, with peaks reaching nearly 10,000 feet in elevation, the Chiricahua Mountains are situated on the edge of the Sonoran Desert and in early June day time temperatures were starting to sizzle.  We mostly kept our photo hikes to late afternoons/early evenings when the sun was low on the horizon and temperatures moderated a bit. To pass the time of day, we made some short excursions visiting the old copper mining town of Bisbee (where a hazardous open pit mine is a tourist attraction) and Tombstone (where there is a shootout at the O.K. Corral at one, two and three in the afternoon).  We also made a trip to the Kartchner Caverns State Park near Benson (no photography allowed inside the cave).

From the Dreamcatcher we moved to Cave Creek Ranch for three nights in Portal, Arizona.  Portal is a birding hotspot and Neil Solomon had told me about it.  We were not in Portal at prime birding time but since it was only a couple of hours from the Dreamcatcher, and on the way home, we decided to make it part of our summer journey.  As part of the trip planning, I had arranged for a guide to help in locating birds to photograph.  That worked out well.  James Petersen was our guide and he found us 55 different bird species, fourteen of which were new ones for us, including a spotted owl, red-faced warbler and elegant trogon.  Not all the birds James found were in positions where photography was possible, but I did my best.

Be sure to check the Latest Images gallery for photos from this trip.

A few months back, after previously having decided not to photograph the 2024 total solar eclipse, I had a change of heart and made arrangements to travel to San Angelo, Texas, for this extraordinary event.  In 2017, Jane and I had traveled from San Diego to Idaho to witness the total eclipse.  Having experienced the spectacle in 2017, I had decided we did not need to do it again.  But as April 8 drew closer, the challenge of photographing another eclipse got the better of me.  Jane was not as keen as I was to go again, so we decided that I would ask my photo buddy, Bruce Hollingsworth, to join me for a photo trip and that Jane would make arrangements to visit her friend Gigi Alpers in New York City.  And that is what we did.

Bruce drove from San Diego to Albuquerque and from there we started a week long, two thousand mile, photography road trip.  The venture started, of course, with a drive to San Angelo, Texas, for the eclipse.  As part of the trip planning, I had chosen several alternative viewing locations from San Angelo in case weather became an issue.  And weather did indeed, become an issue.  According to weather reports our original shooting location in Llano, Texas, was going to be socked in with over 90% cloud cover.  We opted for an alternative location, Evant, Texas, where the cloud cover was projected to be only around 45%.  It turned out to be a good decision.  Bruce and I had a good view of the eclipse where as in Llano, we learned, the overcast sky blocked the eclipse.  Unfortunately, shortly after “totality” clouds moved in over Evant and we also lost sight of the ongoing eclipse.

OLYMPUS DIGITAL CAMERA OLYMPUS DIGITAL CAMERA

Based on my experience returning from the eclipse in Idaho, I fully anticipated heavy traffic and long delays driving back from Evant to San Angelo.  But, fortunately, those stressful driving conditions did not materialize.  Instead we enjoyed a leisurely drive on rural “farm to market” roads with occasional opportunities to photograph roadside wildflowers along the way.

OLYMPUS DIGITAL CAMERA OLYMPUS DIGITAL CAMERA

Our next objective on this photo journey was Carlsbad Cavern National Park in New Mexico.  The drive from San Angelo to Carlsbad routed us through the oil patch of the Permian Basin.  The barren, oil well studded landscape was a dramatic change from the pastoral ranches and orchards of the Texas hill country.   For hours we dodged 18-wheeler semi-trucks loaded with heavy equipment to service the myriad oil wells scattered throughout the prairie.

As is the case now at most national parks, timed tickets are required to enter the Carlsbad Caverns.  I had acquired our timed tickets a month before starting the trip.  That turned out to have been a good strategy since there were no tickets available for the days we were at caverns.  Bruce and I spent two days photographing the speleothems in the cave.  I was certainly challenged to find compelling compositions.  Inside the cave, the main cavern, the “Big Room”, is huge and I found it difficult to convey the size and complexity of the cave photographically.  But I tried.

OLYMPUS DIGITAL CAMERA OLYMPUS DIGITAL CAMERA

OLYMPUS DIGITAL CAMERA

From Carlsbad we traveled to the Mesa Prieta Petroglyph Site, a private preserve some fifty miles north of Santa Fe.  Bruce and I had visited Mesa Prieta in 2022, so I had arranged for private tours in new areas where we had not photographed before.  As before, our enthusiastic and energetic guide was Cathy Benthagen.  She overwhelmed us with stories and anecdotes about the spiritual aspects of the many petroglyphs we encountered.  Trails on the private reserve are fairly steep and not well established.  Bruce, being from sea level, was struggling a bit at 7,500 feet.

OLYMPUS DIGITAL CAMERA

After morning and afternoon petroglyph tours with Cathy, we continued on our photography road trip, driving past the communities of Abiquiu, Coyote, Regina and Cuba, to our next destination for a three night stay in Bloomfield. The Best Western Hotel in Bloomfield served as our home base for two exhaustive days of photographing the San Juan Basin Badlands.  Although Bruce and I had photographed portions of these badlands before, I had learned about other sites with intriguing erosional features that I wanted to photograph.  These unique formations came with fascinating monikers like Alien Throne, The Sentinel, King of Wings, The Castle, and The Guardians.  With names like that, who wouldn’t want to photograph these eroded hoodoos.

There turned out to be a small problem.  The San Juan Basin Badlands is a vast, treeless plain cut by broad east-west trending valleys.  Ownership is mostly divided between federal lands, managed by the Bureau of Land Management, and Navajo Nation lands.  The road system throughout the badlands is a spider web of rough graded tracks and two-track dirt toads with little or no signage.  I was very concerned that we would not be able to find our way to the trailheads, nor find the trails, in this desolate area without a knowledgeable guide.  Fortunately, I was able to find just such an experienced, knowledgeable guide.

OLYMPUS DIGITAL CAMERA OLYMPUS DIGITAL CAMERA

Kialo Winters, Owner/CEO/Tour Guide of Navajo Tours USA, was our guide for the photo adventure in the badlands.  As we bounced along the rough rutted dirt tracks to the various trailheads, Bruce and I would frequently confide that we would never have found our way without Kialo.  In order to be in place for photography by sunrise, we met up with Kialo each morning at 5:30 AM at a Sinclair service station, about thirty miles south of Bloomfield.  That also meant getting up by 4:30 AM in order to be on the road by five for the thirty minute drive to the Sinclair station.  By late morning, around 10:30 or so, we would head back from the photo locations driving laboriously on those deeply rutted, washboard roads to the Sinclair station and from there back to Bloomfield for lunch and a short nap.  Then, we would meet Kialo again at the Sinclair station around 3:30 PM for the afternoon excursions and sunset photography. By the time we left the field and drove back to Bloomfield we would arrive there around 9:30 PM just before Blake’s Lots-A-Burger fast food establishment closed.  That was our routine for two days.  After that, it was happily back to Albuquerque for a satisfying, tasty meal and long, sound sleep.

OLYMPUS DIGITAL CAMERA

In the meantime, I’ve not let my camera lie dormant in its case.  On October 14^th, I photographed the annular solar eclipse from the backyard.  That was followed by a couple of short trips to the Bernardo and Bosque del Apache wildlife refuges.  Then came an evening excursion to the popular “River Of Lights” exhibit at the Albuquerque Botanical Gardens.  And finally, in early December I journeyed to the National Radio Astronomy Observatory on the Plains of San Agustin for a night sky photography workshop with the Very Large Array antennae in the foreground.

Images from these late-year trips can be viewed in the “Latest Images” gallery. 

P.S.

I made another trip to Bosque del Apache right of after new year's and have added images from this excursion to the Latest Images" gallery.

We finished our travel year in a more relaxed mode with a September trip to our timeshare cabin in the woods of the Flathead National Forest near the west entrance to Glacier National Park.  We have been going to the cabin at Glacier Wilderness Resort for nearly twenty years, not every year, but often enough to call it “our place in Montana”.  We own the last two weeks of September and had specifically chosen that time so we could enjoy the seasonal foliage color change.  With a full two weeks it is possible to just kick back and relax.  Late September is also when the weather becomes more unsettled and this year we had more clouds and rain than in the past.

OLYMPUS DIGITAL CAMERA OLYMPUS DIGITAL CAMERA

Jane and I don’t do long ten hour drives anymore. So we broke up the 1,275 mile one-way trip to Glacier Wilderness Resort with a couple of overnight stops.  Our first stop was along Interstate 15 in Utah Valley just north of Provo.  It was a very advantageous stop.  Traffic on I-15 along the Provo – Salt Lake City corridor was horrendous.  Our second en-route overnight was at the Ninepipes Lodge in Charlo, Montana, only a couple of hours from the cabin.  We spent the next morning searching for wildlife at the National Bison Range located on the Flathead Indian Reservation.  The Bison Range is now managed by the Salish and Kootenai Tribes and the bison on the range are descendants of a pure-blooded herd of bison from the 18oo’s.  In the past, we have photographed many bison, pronghorn and elk on the Range, but this year, no such luck.

We thoroughly enjoyed our two weeks in and around Glacier National Park.  Fall colors were spectacular, especially on the east side of the Park, along the foothills of the Lewis Range.  This year we ventured as far as Chief Mountain, but mainly we spent our time exploring familiar haunts like the Avalanche Lake trail, Hidden Lake trail, and sights along the Going-To-The-Sun Road.  We searched for wildlife at Logan Pass and Many Glaciers but this year, for some unknown reason, there was not much wildlife to photograph.  We did manage to stumble upon a big, burly black bear foraging for berries and roots near the Many Glaciers Hotel parking lot.  This wooly bear, most certainly, was ready for its hibernation. And, after several fruitless visits and many boring hours of waiting, a cow moose finally did emerge from the tall willows at Fishcap Lake, trailed by a bull.  While idling away my time waiting for moose, I did manage to get some shots of common mergansers fishing in the lake.

OLYMPUS DIGITAL CAMERA

We extended this last trip of the year with a four night stay at the Snow Lodge in Yellowstone National Park.  Photographically, the objective was to obtain some panoramic landscape images of the hydrothermal features of the Park, primarily the vividly colored hot pools scattered throughout the geyser basins.  As they say, “the best laid plans often go awry”.  I did not consider that the cold ambient air temperature would create so much steam, coming from the hot springs, that the photogenic pool surface would be mostly obscured.  C’est la vie!

OLYMPUS DIGITAL CAMERA

OLYMPUS DIGITAL CAMERA

A couple of mornings, we started our day trip around Yellowstone with breakfast at the Running Bear Pancake House in the bustling town of West Yellowstone.  The Running Bear menu included box lunches that we availed ourselves of for a “dinner” in the room topped with a bottle of wine.  Our day-trip destinations included Lower Yellowstone River Falls at the Grand Canyon of the Yellowstone, Tower Falls, Gibbon Falls, Firehole Falls, Mammoth Hot Springs (where we encountered bull elk gathering their harems), and Lamar Valley where we searched for but found little wildlife within camera range.

OLYMPUS DIGITAL CAMERA OLYMPUS DIGITAL CAMERA

After our journey into Yellowstone National Park, we headed south for home, traveling through Teton National Park and Jackson Hole, Wyoming’s picturesque Star Valley and Utah’s colorful Logan Canyon.  In Logan, Jane and I had dinner with my nephew Bryan, his spouse Margaret and my 96 year old sister Neli.  My sister now resides in an assisted living facility, but she absolutely doesn’t require any assistance.  She’s a 96 year old livewire!  Reminiscing and sharing family stories with my sister was a most wonderful way to close out our 2023 travel year.

OLYMPUS DIGITAL CAMERA

OLYMPUS DIGITAL CAMERA

We had selected Joseph Van Os Photo Safaris, a well-recognized organization specializing in wildlife photography excursions, for our Pantanal trip.  Jane and I had good memories from our previously photo safari with Van Os to Madagascar and were confident we would have another memorable experience.  Before joining the Van Os group in Cuiabá, however, we arrived in Brazil a few days early in order to make a side trip to Iguazú Falls on the Brazil-Argentine border.  This system of waterfalls, straddling both countries, is reportedly the largest in the world.  The falls were indeed phenomenal and defy description.

OLYMPUS DIGITAL CAMERA

We flew into Foz do Iguaçu, Brazil, from Albuquerque via Chicago and San Paulo.  We had arranged for a local guide to meet us at the airport and help facilitate with logistics including crossing the border in order to experience Iguazú Falls from the Argentine side.  Weather was not on are side as we experienced heavy overcast and rain during our tour of the falls.  The disappointing weather did not lessen the thunderous impact of 470,000 gallons of water per second falling hundreds of feet over successive layers of basalt in a horseshoe array of multiple waterfalls.  Iguazú Falls is without doubt one of the world’s greatest natural wonders.

OLYMPUS DIGITAL CAMERA

We stayed at the Belmond Hotel das Cataratas located within Iguazú National Park and within walking distance of the falls on the Brazil side.  We were as impressed with the service and amenities of the hotel as we were with the roaring waterfalls.  Of course, staying at the Belmond was not inexpensive.  We reluctantly left the luxury of the Belmond Hotel das Cataratas to meet up with our fellow photographers of the Van Os group in Cuiabá.

Our group consisted of nine people, seven photographer clients and two guides, Mark Thomas from Joseph Van Os Photo Safaris and Paulo Boute, of Boute Expeditions, our local Brazilian guide.  I would be remiss in not including our bus drive, Elton, in our travel group.  Elton did an outstanding job maneuvering the bus to enhance photo opportunities.  After our “meet and greet” dinner at the Gran Odara Hotel, we met Elton at the bus early the next morning for the long anticipated journey south into the Pantanal. 

We reached our first accommodation, Pousada Rio Claro, after about five hours on the graded Transpantaneira highway.  We stopped along the way as Mark or Paulo sighted something of photographic interest, mostly various species of birds.  By the time we reached Rio Claro our group had jelled into a congenial band of likeminded naturalists.  The highlight of our stay at this Pousada (Inn) was photographing a variety of birds from boats on the Rio Claro.  Mark and Paulo had perfected a way to call in the birds, including Amazon Kingfishers, Cocoi Herons, and Black Collared Hawks, using fish as bait.

OLYMPUS DIGITAL CAMERA

OLYMPUS DIGITAL CAMERA

From Pousada Rio Claro, Elton drove us deeper south into the Pantanal to the end of the Transpantaneira highway, at Porto Jofre, where we stayed six nights at the comfortable Hotel Porto Jofre.  The highlight here was photographing jaguars.  We ventured out on the Rio Cuiabá twice a day for five days looking for and photographing jaguars.  It was no walk in the park, however.  Up and out before the sun in the morning and chasing sunset on the way back to the lodge in the evening.  But what an invigorating experience it was, observing these wild creatures in their natural environment hunting and stalking prey.  Although jaguars were the focus, there was opportunity to photograph many other subjects along the river’s edge.

OLYMPUS DIGITAL CAMERA OLYMPUS DIGITAL CAMERA

After our exhausting stay at Hotel Porto Jofre, we headed back north on the Estrada Transpantaneira with a halfway stop at Pouso Alegre (Happy Land in Portuguese) for two nights.  It was a welcome relief to have breakfast at 7:00 AM instead of 5:00 AM.  At Pouse Alegre photography occurred at waterholes within about a mile of the lodge.  Paulo used his phone app to call in various birds but the large, colorful Toco Toucan alluded being photographed.

According to an old proverb, “all good things must come to an end” and so did our adventure in Brazil’s Pantanal.  From Pouso Alegre, Elton continued to drive us north, back to Cuiabá for a farewell lunch at the Churrascaria Aeroporto Grill.  Lunch at the churrascaria (steak house) was a unique experience.  Smartly dressed waiters would bring various cuts of meats, lamb, beef, pork and chicken, to the table on long skewers.  We could select a rare or well done portion of the meat and the waiter would carve it from the skewer and serve it right on to our plate.

After lunch, goodbyes and hugs were shared as some of us departed for the airport and others back to the hotel for a later flight.  Jane and I retraced our route from Cuiabá to Albuquerque via Chicago.  It was a long day and night before we were comfortably back home.

You can see pictures from our Pantanal trip in the Brazil gallery on the home page of my website.  Please be patient when opening the gallery.  The files are a bit large and it may take a few minutes to load them for viewing.

OLYMPUS DIGITAL CAMERA

With that short introduction about Newfoundland, you might well ask “so what were Jane and Rinus doing in Newfoundland?”  Good question.  I had learned of photographers going to Newfoundland to photograph seabirds and so, a few years back, put the idea of going there on my to-do list.  After some covid-19 related delays, the trip finally came together this year.  The plan was to spend a couple of weeks photographing in Newfoundland and finish our Canadian trip in Ontario for some loon photography.

We flew from Albuquerque, via Dallas-Fort Worth and Toronto, to St. John’s.  With a population of about 112,000, it is the largest city, by far, in Newfoundland. We had a few days to explore this most easterly city in North America. We stayed in the downtown area near the working harbor.  Fishing and maritime activities are a mainstay of St. John’s economy and the wharfs were crowded with ships of all sizes, including the Polar Prince, mother ship to the ill-fated Titan submersible. 

OLYMPUS DIGITAL CAMERA

Our hotel was close to the shops, restaurants and pubs on Water and Duckworth Streets.  We sampled a variety of restaurants and found the funky Bagel Café with its small booths our favorite for breakfast.  Jane and I are not night owls, so we missed out on some of the live entertainment offered at the pubs.  We enjoyed our stay in St. John’s but found the downtown area a bit old and weathered, which is understandable in the harsh environment of Newfoundland.  Up the hill from Duckworth Street, however, are residential neighborhoods of row houses painted in an array of bright colors, nicknamed Jellybean Row, that give St. John’s a festive look.

OLYMPUS DIGITAL CAMERA

OLYMPUS DIGITAL CAMERA

A few miles south of St. John’s, the offshore islands of Witless Bay Ecological Preserve offered our first opportunity to photograph seabirds.  The preserve is host to large Atlantic Puffin and Common Mure colonies.  I had made arrangements with O’Brien’s Whale and Bird Tour to access the preserve.  The island is off limits to all but researchers, so we had to photograph the birds from O’Brien’s boat that wallowed in the swales of the Atlantic Ocean. Not the best of conditions, but seeing hundreds of birds in their natural environment was truly amazing.

OLYMPUS DIGITAL CAMERA

Our next stop was St. Bride and the Cape St. Mary Ecological Reserve, located at the southwest corner of the Avalon Peninsula, to photograph the Northern Gannet.  Gannets roost on a near-shore sea stack, called “bird rock”, about fifty yards from the mainland.  Tens of thousands of Northern Gannets have chosen the rocky ledges of this towering formation to mate and raise their chicks.  Like puffins, the gannets spend most of their lives out on the ocean, only coming ashore in late spring to reestablish relationships, build nests, and raise their young.  During our visit to the colony in early June, courtship, mating, and nest building were in high gear.  A few birds were incubating eggs and I only observed one chick that appeared to be only a day or so old.

OLYMPUS DIGITAL CAMERA OLYMPUS DIGITAL CAMERA

After our three nights stay at the small village of St. Bride, with a resident population of around three hundred, we drove north for a four nights stay in Bonavista, a much larger community with a population of three thousand.  It was in the area of Bonavista that the explorer John Cabot landed in 1497.  My primary objective for going to Bonvista was to photograph large puffin colonies at Elliston and Cape Bonavista.  Both of these colonies were located on large, rounded, near-shore sea stacks that had a covering of soil in which the puffins could dig their nesting burrows.  At each location the puffin viewing area was only a short walk from the parking lot.

Puffins appeared to have just started returning from their time at sea and looking for nesting sites.  There were groups of puffins scattered around the top of the sea stack and flocks flying overhead as if looking for their missing mates.  There were only a few obviously paired couples checking out nesting sites.  Squabbles occasionally occurred as mated couples appeared to compete for a nesting burrow.  At mid-June, we were too early to observe parents with fish laden beaks returning from the Atlantic to feed their brood.  As a bonus, however, on a rocky outcrop at the Elliston location, high on the cliff, I noticed several pair of Black Guillemots going through their mating rituals.

OLYMPUS DIGITAL CAMERA OLYMPUS DIGITAL CAMERA

OLYMPUS DIGITAL CAMERA OLYMPUS DIGITAL CAMERA

Every spring, as Nordic temperatures rise, the glaciers of western Greenland calve icebergs.  These large, ten thousand year old chunks of ice are carried on ocean currents some 1,800 nautical miles to Newfoundland’s coast.  Jane and I boarded the trawler “Lady Marguerite” in Bonavista to go iceberg hunting.  We encountered icebergs shortly after leaving the harbor and the captain maneuvered the vessel for some close views.

The next stop on our itinerary was a two night stay in the quaint fishing village of Twillingate.  Here we did not have to take a boat to find icebergs.  The bergs were floating around Twillingate Harbor right in front of our hotel.  The drive to Twillingate took us through the town of Gander.  Modest in size, with a population around twelve thousand, Gander is location of an international airport with a long runway that served as a refueling stop for flights between Europe and North America before the advent of long range jets.  When the U.S. closed its airspace on September 11, 2001, Gander’s airport was one of only a few capable of handling redirected aircraft.  This small community then provided refuge for nearly seven thousand stranded passengers.  This outstanding show of kindness and hospitality is now the basis of a Tony award winning Broadway musical, “Come From Away”.

OLYMPUS DIGITAL CAMERA OLYMPUS DIGITAL CAMERA

All through our tour of Newfoundland we were adversely impacted by smoke blown in from wildfires in other parts of Canada.  It was particularly bad in the Twillingate area.  With its numerous small islands, bays, coves and charming villages, the scenery around Twillingate would have been striking if not for the grey, hazy layer of smoke.  We did venture out to explore, however. The countryside around Twillingate and the rest of Newfoundland is primarily subarctic tundra and boreal forest.  Trees are mostly small conifers with black spruce dominating some areas.  Conifer lined roads with small ponds and lakes are prevalent throughout Newfoundland.  Treelined lakes would have made interesting, scenic landscape images if it had not been for the smoke.

OLYMPUS DIGITAL CAMERA OLYMPUS DIGITAL CAMERA

From Twillingate, we traveled back to St. John’s and on to Toronto for the last phase of our trip.  We rented a car at the Toronto airport and drove north to Huntsville in the Muskoka region of Ontario.  Back in 2020 I had made arrangements for a loon photography workshop with Michael Bertelsen.  Back then the Canadian border was closed due to covid-19, so this year I was finally able to make this three day workshop.  Including Jane and me, there were a total of four participants that embarked with Michael to search for loons on his specially outfitted boat.

Conditions were less than ideal, however, as the Muskoka region was also impacted by smoke from the Canadian wildfires.  The group was intrepid, however, and was out at five AM each morning.  We searched for loons on the Muskoka River, the Ox Tongue River and Lake Muskoka.  My hope was to photograph loons with chicks riding on their backs.  As with many of my wildlife photography aspirations, Mother Nature always calls the shots and success is totally dependent on Her.  According to Michael, there was a low probability of finding loons with chicks during this workshop. 

However, while we were photographing a nesting loon on the Muskoka River, Michael received a call from one of his fishing buddies that a loon with newborn chicks had been spotted on Lake Muskoka.  Early the next morning, that is where we headed.  Sure enough, Michael spotted the loon and chick and that morning my aspiration of photographing loon chicks on a parent’s back was realized.

OLYMPUS DIGITAL CAMERA OLYMPUS DIGITAL CAMERA

After nearly three weeks of travel, we left Huntsville and headed home to Albuquerque.  Rain slowed our drive back to Toronto but we got to the airport in plenty of time for our afternoon flight back to DFW.  From there, it was a late night arrival at Sunport, a taxi ride back to Lake Isabella Way, and good night’s sleep in our own bed.  Despite the annoyance of smoke from wildfires, our excursion through remote Newfoundland and finding loons in Ontario made for a very unique adventure.

Amsterdam

Our American Airlines flight from Albuquerque, via Philadelphia, arrived at Schiphol airport around 8:30 in the morning on April 11^th.  After proceeding through passport control, it was a short train ride from Schiphol to the Amsterdam Centraal train station, followed with an even shorter taxi ride to our hotel.  Arriving in the morning as we did, meant we could not check in at the hotel.  So, we parked our bags there and headed out to explore our first European capital.

It took only a few blocks of walking to realize that Amsterdam was a city of, and for, bicycles.  Cyclists appeared to have right-of-way over cars and pedestrians alike.  A large degree of caution was exercised as we explored the city.  Amsterdam is also a city of canals (grachts).  Our hotel, aptly named Canal House, is a converted old, 17^th century, canal house along the Keizersgracht.  After leaving the hotel, we navigated our way on this first day of discovery by counting and noting the names of the grachts we crossed.  It was at the Museum Of The Canals that we learned that canals were built to accommodate Amsterdam’s growth in the middle ages.  Construction of canals was integral with water management, creation of buildable land, and transportation.  Amsterdam’s canals are now a UNESCO World Heritage.

Before going back to the Canal House to check in for our four nights stay, we walked the busy streets of central Amsterdam familiarizing ourselves with its many landmarks, museums and restaurants.  We visited the Willet-Holthuysen House, a grand mansion on the Herengracht, turned into a museum featuring period décor and an extensive collection of nineteenth century art; lunched at the Blue Restaurant with its bird’s eye view of the city; and strolled by the Bloemenmarkt (flower market).

Amsterdam is home to a host of museums and during our three full days in the city we enjoyed many of them.  In addition to the Willet-Holthuysen House and Museum Of The Canals, we joined the crowds at the Hermitage Museum, Van Gogh Museum, House of Bols (gin) Museum, Rijksmuseum, and the very popular and congested Vermeer Exhibit.  Favorite restaurants included the Pancake Bakery, Seafood Bar, and d'Vijff Vlieghen (Five Flies) where we celebrated Jane’s zero-ending birthday.

A spring journey to Holland cannot be complete without a visit to the famous tulip fields of Keukenhof.  These gardens are a magnet for tourists, so Jane had made arrangements for our tour several months in advance of leaving home.  Contrary to the cloudy, chilly days we experienced in Amsterdam, our day at Keukenhof was warmer and sunny making the myriad flowers sparkle in the sun.

My nephew Wim lives with his girlfriend Marina in Middelburg, located in the south of the Netherlands.  Jane and I embarked on the train journey to Middelburg after our stay in Amsterdam to spend a couple of days with Wim and Marina.  We started that visit on a bit of a sad note.  Wim showed us the cemetery garden where my older brother Dick’s ashes were scattered.  Dick passed away, at age 97, shortly after Jane and I had visited with him last summer on our way to the Alps (see the Europe 2022 Blog of July 13, 2022).

After that emotional experience, we continued our visit with Wim and Marina on a much lighter note.  One day we drove the short distance to Veere, one of our favorite rural villages, for a meal of mussels.  We also made a day-trip to Ghent, in the Flemish portion of Belgium, with its medieval castle and cathedral.  Wim and Marina were perfect hosts and we very much enjoyed visiting with them.  But, we had two more European capitals to visit, so after a farewell dinner, Jane and I continued our journey by train to Bruxelles.

Brussels

The train from Middelburg, via Rotterdam, arrived at the Brussels Central Station around 2 PM on April 18^th.  Although we had travelled to Europe at least a half dozen times, we had never been to Brussels.  Jane had completed a lot of “armchair” exploring of Brussels before we left home and created a list of potential sites to visit during our three days in this capital city of Belgian.  Our accommodations were at the Juliana Hotel, within walking distance of La Grand-Place de Bruxelles.  This UNESCO Heritage Site is a collection of late 17^th century building around a cobble-stone paved square.  The buildings are an eclectic mix of municipal, ducal, and guild houses with a multitude of gilded architectural ornamentation.

For the following morning, Jane had arranged a private tour of the European Quarter of Brussels where the European Commission has its offices.  Although we did not enter any of the commission buildings, we found the modern architecture stunning and in dramatic contrast to the historic buildings of the Grand Place.  We visited the nearby Royal Museum that also included the Magritte Museum (Magritte is the artist famous for men in bowler hats) and the Library of the Dukes of Burgundy.  Dating from the 1,300’s, the collection of manuscripts in this library were copied by hand and illustrated by artisans of the Middle Ages.

Several decades ago, when Jane and I were first dating, we spent several weekends in San Francisco where we frequented the Mozart Café for dinners.  Now when we travel through Europe's major cities, we always look to see if there is a Café Mozart.  We found one in Brussels.  And, of course, we had to have their dinner special, all you can eat ribs, accompanied by their own red burgundy wine.  During our walks around central Brussels we found other interesting pub-like restaurants where we imbibed local beer and food.

Needless to say, any trip to Brussels is not complete without a visit to the Manneken Pis landmark. This pint sized, 22 inch, bronze fountain statue of a little boy peeing into a basin draws hundreds, if not thousands, of tourists a day.  A short walk from the Grand Place, Jane and I found ourselves among these tourists to see this obscure, small fountain wedged between buildings on the corner of Stoofstraat and Elkstraat.

Paris

It was an hour and half ride on the Thalys train from the Midi station in Brussels to the Gare du Nord station in Paris.  From Gare du Nord, it was a twenty minute taxi ride to the Hotel Raphaël for our seven night stay in Paris.  The Raphaël was a boutique hotel with traditional classic French décor.  Located on Avenue Kléber, the hotel was a five minute walk from the Arc de Triomphe and fifteen minute walk from the Trocadéro with its amazing view of the Eiffel tower.  The Kléber Metro station, right in front of the hotel, was our transportation link to Paris’ many attractions.

Upon arrival at Gare du Nord, we purchased Paris Museum and Metro passes at the Tourist Information store.  The museum pass allowed us to skip the long queues at museum ticket counters and the metro pass meant we could bypasses the confusing ticket machines and just tap our pass to enter any metro station.  Both passes were used extensively during our week in Paris.  We spent a lot of time at the Louvre, of course, and visited the Monet’s l’Orangerie Museum, the Rodin Museum, the Jacquemart-Andre Museum, and made the ascent to the top of the Eiffel Tower.

In addition to our time in the city, we also made a couple of day trips.  The first was to Monet’s garden in Giverny.  We arrived before the large tour busses and thoroughly enjoyed the uncrowded garden with its variety of colorful flowers and famous lily ponds.  We walked the short distance from the Giverny garden to Monet’s grave, located at the nearby Église Sainte-Radegonde de Giverny.  Our second day trip was to Château de Fontainebleau, a UNESCO World Heritage Site, and Château de Vaux-le-Vicomte, both impressive, ornate French architectural landmarks with opulent gardens.

We walked a lot in Paris, exploring the Montmatre area around the Basilica of the Sacré-Coeur; strolled the length of Champs-Élysées from the Arc de Triomphe, past Place de la Concorde, all the way to the Louvre Museum; sauntered through the Latin Quarter past the Sorbonne Université and Panthéon; wandered around the Hôtel de Ville and the Palais Royal; and made the easy trek from the Raphael to the Eiffel Tower several times.

Alas, our spring break to three European capitals had come to its conclusion and on April 28^th we boarded American Airlines flight 25 back to the USA, Jane having graciously come to terms with her zero-ending birthday.

In preparation for this short excursion, I had contacted the Las Cruces Chapter of the New Mexico Native Plant Society to obtain current information about the wildflower bloom.  One of their members, Gordon Berman, was nice enough to provide me with potential wildflower locations.  But he warned that there had not been sufficient spring rain to generate a good bloom and that there was only a sprinkling of poppies scattered along the foothills of the Organ Mountains.  His prediction proved correct and Bruce and I were only able find a few small clusters of poppies, but not the fields of flowers I had hoped for.

OLYMPUS DIGITAL CAMERA OLYMPUS DIGITAL CAMERA

OLYMPUS DIGITAL CAMERA I suggested to Gordon Berman that it would be nice to meet him in person and we arranged to meet for lunch at La Posta, an old station along the Butterfield stage couch route, converted into a restaurant, in Mesilla, near Las Cruces.  Gordon turned out to be quite the expert on native flowers many of which he grew in his yard.  He sympathized with us about the lack of poppies and offered to take us to some uncommon cacti that were in bloom along the Dripping Springs Trail in the Organ Mountains – Desert Peaks National Monument.  That is where we photographed the Chihuahuan Pineapple Cactus and the New Mexico Rainbow Cactus.

OLYMPUS DIGITAL CAMERA OLYMPUS DIGITAL CAMERA

During our last photo trip in August, 2022, Bruce and I had some success in photographing the Milky Way.  So, on a whim, I checked if it were possible to photography the Milky Way in early April.  I did not expect it, but it turned out to be possible during the early morning hours.  So, I made arrangements for an early entry permit at White Sands National Park hoping to photograph the Milky Way with the white gypsum dunes in the foreground.  We relocated to Alamogordo in order to be closer to the Park.  We were up at 4:00 AM, out the door at 4:30 AM and at the Park entrance at 5:00 AM for our early entry.  We had scouted photo locations the previous day so we would know where to place our tripods in the dark.

Night Sky With Milky WayMilky Way Over Yucca Plant At White Sands National Park, Near Las Cruces, New Mexico Milky Way Over Gypxum White Sand DunesMilky Way Over Yucca Plants At White Sands National Park, Near Las Cruces, New Mexico

When all was said and done, Bruce and I had a great time.  It was a bit disappointing that the Mexican Gold Poppies were scarce, but we had some good practice shooting the night sky.  From Alamogordo we both headed home after a brief stop at Bosque del Apache and lunch at the Owl Café in San Antonia. 

There was a déjà vu moment as we prepared for our Costa Rica journey.  Last year our flight from Albuquerque to Dallas-Fort Worth had been cancelled due to weather and, as a result, we arrived in Costa Rica a day late.  This time, American Airlines sent us an early warning that a storm was expected to move into the Dallas-Fort Worth Airport area on our departure date, so we had time to book a flight a day earlier.  We spent the extra day at the Bougainvillea Hotel near San José.  The hotel is known for its exceptional garden where we spent time looking for and photographing birds.

Costa Rica has many remote, isolated areas including Corcovado National Park on the Osa Peninsula.  Located along the Pacific Ocean in the southwest corner of Costa Rica, the peninsula is mostly undeveloped rainforest with only a few villages and lodges.  We stayed at the Casa Corcovado Wilderness Lodge near the San Pedrillo Ranger Station entrance to the National Park. 

The Pacific side of the Osa Peninsula has little in the way of transportation infrastructure.  We enjoyed a short domestic flight on Sansa Airlines in a 11 passenger Cessna 208-B aircraft from San José to Drake Bay where there is a small landing strip.  From there it was a slow, bumpy twenty minutes, or so, ride in an old van on a dirt track to the beach along the Drake Bay.  Staff from the Casa Corcovado Wilderness Lodge were waiting on the beach to transport us via a small boat with a large, powerful outboard motor to the Lodge. We changed into water shoes for the wet transfer from the beach to the boat.  After half an hour on the choppy waters of the Pacific Ocean, Jane and I awkwardly alighted from the skiff with the much appreciated help of the crew.

We were off the boat and on the rocky beach but not at the Lodge.  A short time after our arrival a tractor arrived pulling a small open trailer with snug seating for about eight.  We boarded the trailer and our luggage was placed in a rack in front of the tractor.  It was a steep haul from the beach to the main lodge facilities.  The Casa Corcovado Wilderness Lodge is small, only 14 bungalows on a 170 acre site, intimate resort with good food and very friendly staff.  We stayed five nights and participated in a number of activities, including a snorkeling trip to Cano Island, a boat tour into the mangroves of the Terrabe Sierpe National Wetlands, a hike into Corcovado National Park, and various hikes on the rainforest trails of the lodge.

From the Casa Corcovado Wilderness Lodge, we flew back to San José where Carlos rented a car for our journey to Sarapique and the Ara Ambigua Lodge.  On the way we stopped at Don Alvara’s farm where it was possible to photograph macaws from a close distance.  The large, noisy birds are wild but have become habituated to life on the farm where they are occasionally fed peanuts.

We were three nights at the Ara Ambigua Lodge including my birthday.  Carlos surprised us with special dinner arrangements that night including a bottle of fine wine.  Turned out that Carlos actually lives near Sarapique and invited his wife, Maribel, to join us for dinner the last night of our stay at Ara Ambigua.

Several sojourns were made around Sarapique.  The best birding occurred along some of rural agricultural tracks as well as the surrounding rainforest.  With the aid of local guide José (Cope) Perez, we were able to spot, and photograph, crested owls, Honduran white bats, a laughing falcon, and an adolescent sloth.  Cope also put some sugar water into a banana flower to attract hummingbirds that I was able to capture without flash.

Our last night in Costa Rica was spent at the Hotel Villa San Ignacio not far from the San José airport.  The vast hotel grounds were well secluded from the hustle and bustle of urban noise and activity.  We enjoyed some quiet relaxing time there before being transferred to the San José airport and our American Airlines flight home.

Some photos from this trip can be found in the Costa Rica 2023 Gallery on the Home Page.

The morning Qantas flight from Brisbane got us to Hobart, Tasmania, early enough to check in at the historic Lenna Hotel and do some exploring along Hobart’s waterfront.  We had actually arrived in Hobart the day before our three-day, private, Tasmania tour with Luke O’Brian Photography and packed as much exploring as we could during our day-and-half in this provincial capital of Tasmania.  That afternoon we walked the fashionable Salamanca Place, a redevelopment area with restored warehouses that now contain shops, galleries and upscale restaurants.  Around four o’clock that afternoon we happened upon the Pearl & Co., a waterfront oyster bar and restaurant, during their happy hour and stopped in for a glass of wine then stayed for dinner.

After breakfast at the small, bustling, but cozy Harbor Lights Café, we joined a walking tour, which Jane had arranged ahead of time, around Hobart’s historic downtown.  Like much of mainland Australia, Tasmania was first colonized and developed by British convicts.  After years of being downplayed, this unique history is now being touted with statues and informative plaques on buildings.

Later that afternoon, we learned that public tours were offered at the Tasmania Parliament House and, on impulse, decided to take the tour.  As it turned out we were the only ones on the tour that day and enjoyed the personal attention given us by our guide, a legislative analyst.  We visited the House of Lords chambers and those of the House of Commons, both simply decorated in an ornate, governmental sort of way.  We learned a lot about Tasmania’s system of government and voting process, most of which I have already forgotten.  Evening cocktails were enjoyed in the hotel lounge that reminded me of an old gentlemen’s club, often seen in British movies.  Dinner that night was seafood pasta at an Italian restaurant on Salamanca Place.

Tuesday morning, November 8^th, day 43 of our Australian Odyssey, was when Luke O’Brian picked us up at the hotel to begin our Tasmania photo adventure.  I was very much looking forward to some landscape photography after beating the bushes for birds in New South Wales, Northern Territory, and Queensland.  Cradle Mountain was our destination.  We made a refreshment stop at Ross, a small village in Tasmania’s Midlands, along the Macquarie River.  Ross exemplifies Tasmania’s convict heritage with the historic Ross Bridge over the Macquarie River having been built by convicts and the historic Ross Female Factory, a workhouse where thousands of female convicts worked in the mid 1,800’s, now a UNESCO World Heritage Site.  Luke also made a short detour on our way to Cradle Mountain to drive through Sheffield, known as the Town of Murals.

Cradle Mountain Hotel was our home for the next three nights. After checking in and a short respite, Luke and I headed to Dove Lake for some night sky photography.  Jane opted to take a break from activities and stayed at the hotel.  Luke and I arrived at Dove Lake in plenty of time to get in some sunset photography of Cradle Mountain reflected in the still water of Dove Lake.  As dusk and darkness approached we changed our vantage point to increase our chances of getting a shot at the Milky Way, although this time of year at Cradle Mountain the Galactic Center would be below the horizon.  As darkness crept in so did a full moon start to light the sky.  Conditions were perfect for night sky photography with a clear, cloudless sky and windless conditions for a glassy lake surface.  Only the bright full moon was problematic with its light obscuring the intensity of distant stars.  Just as we resigned ourselves to a wasted effort, the night started to get darker as the moon entered into full eclipse.  What an unexpected surprise that was.

OLYMPUS DIGITAL CAMERA OLYMPUS DIGITAL CAMERA

We spent the next two days hiking and photographing rain forest scenes, wildlife and waterfalls around Cradle Mountain.  A couple of return trips to Dove Lake were made to photograph at sunset with marginal success as a colorful cloudy sky never appeared.  We visited the Devils @ Cradle, a Tasmanian Devil Sanctuary and got some photos of the infamous Devils, although in captivity.  During our time at Cradle Mountain, Luke escorted us to an area that Wombats frequent.  Jane and I both developed an affection for these small, cuddly marsupials with their squatty frames nibbling away at the tussock grasses.  Like all grazing animals, they rarely looked up from their constant foraging, and it was difficult to get a facial portrait. 

OLYMPUS DIGITAL CAMERA OLYMPUS DIGITAL CAMERA

Evolution creates unique solutions to ensure survival of a species and the wombat is a great example.  Wombats live in long, deep burrows that they dig with dirt being kicked out behind them. If wombats had belly pouches like wallabies and kangaroos, all that dirt whipping by the pouch would have been lethal to developing joeys.  Evolution solved that problem for wombats by creating a backward facing pouch that protects joey wombats from flying dirt.  On one of our hikes among wombats, we observed a developing joey stick its head out of the rear facing pouch.

OLYMPUS DIGITAL CAMERA

Our Cradle Mountain adventure ended all too soon.  Luke drove us back to Hobart via Queenstown, with substantial buildings constructed by convicts, Nelson Falls and Lake St. Clair.  He dropped us off at the airport Travel Lodge where we spent the night before flying back to Sydney the next day.  In Sydney, we spent the night at the airport Rydges Hotel to repack and organize for our next day’s flight back to San Francisco and eventually Albuquerque.  We arrived home on Monday, November 14^th after 50 days of travel.

Trogon’s Photo Tour started in Cairns, Queensland.  We met our tour leaders, Kylie and Frank Pankas as well as our fellow photographer Rich Frank on Sunday evening, October 23^rd.  Jane and I had arrived in Cairns two days earlier and had already taken the scenic train ride to the quaint artisan village of Kuranda.  There we had our picture taken holding a soft, cuddly koala.  We had also taken a helicopter flight over the Great Barrier Reef and the rain forest around Kuranda.

Michaelmas Cay, a small, low, sandy island located some 20 miles east of Cairns, along the Great Barrier Reef, was our first photo destination.  This tiny little spec of sand hosts thousands of breading seabirds.  We were ferried to the islet from our excursion boat and spent an hour or so photographing Brown Boobies, Lesser Frigatebirds, Crested Terns, and the Brown Noddy.  Snorkeling was included as part of our morning’s sail to the Barrier Reef.

OLYMPUS DIGITAL CAMERA OLYMPUS DIGITAL CAMERA

Next morning the five of us were out early looking for birds to photograph around Cairns.  Trogon’s Photo Tour was very much a birding tour as we searched for birds at the Centenary Lakes, Cairns Botanical Garden, and Flecker Botanical Garden without much success.  By mid-morning, we were on our way, through the farming district of Dimbulah on the Atherton Tableland of Queensland, to Ironbark House.  This very comfortable holiday house was totally “off the grid”, with its own solar power and harvested rainwater.  The accommodation was new, well appointed, with a modern flair.  A small water feature off the back patio provided some good photo opportunities.

Kevin and Rachael, proprietors of this 1,345 acre remote “outback” property, were outstanding hosts.  Each morning Kevin would drive us around the property looking for birds and rock wallabies to photograph.  Each evening Rachael and Kevin would provide us with a delectable dinner, family style, served on the patio.  Afternoons were spent at the Black Swan Farm, a nearby accommodation where Kylie and Frank stayed.  Black Swan Farm was “on the grid” and Jane and I enjoyed air conditioned naps there.  At Black Swan Farm, I was attracted to some very noisy, distant bird calls.  I searched for the origin of this noise and found a small group of  Sarus Cranes, in a nearby pasture, squabbling among themselves.

Sarus CraneOLYMPUS DIGITAL CAMERA

Ironbark House was a very comfortable stay for three nights after which we were off again for two nights at the Chambers Wildlife Rainforest Lodge.  This turned out to be a typical accommodation set in the thick of the rain forest where a boisterous catbird kept our interest.  There not being much to photograph on the grounds of the lodge, we ventured out to find more productive photo areas.  The small village of Yungaburra provided some good photo opportunities including a platypus sighting along Peterson Creek.  Some new bird species were found in the Hasties Swamp area.  Curtain Fig National Park turned out to be very interesting.  The Park has a fig tree with extensive aerial roots that drop nearly fifty feet to the forest floor creating a dense “curtain”.  We finished our stay at Chambers with some night photography of a sugar glider, a small nocturnal marsupial, that feeds on tree sap.

Kingfisher Park Birdwatchers Lodge in Julatten was our next destination.  We were on the road by 7:00 AM stopping at Mount Hypipamee National Park to search for a Cassowary, a large flightless bird, but without success.  Lunch was at Mount Molloy Café a Mexican establishment where Frank ordered a hamburger with “the lot” that included everything that could be stacked on a burger.  We reached the Kingfisher in time to do some afternoon bird photography before heading for dinner at the National Hotel & Pub in Mount Molloy. 

The Buff Breasted Paradise Kingfisher is the iconic bird that nests on the Lodge grounds.  The bird migrates from Papua New Guinea and had arrived at the Lodge in time for us to photograph this colorful Kingfisher.  Carol Iles, our owner of the lodge, told us that somewhere during the migration from Papua New Guinea the Buff Breasted Paradise Kingfisher had lost its long signature tail feathers.  So, my picture of the bird is sans tail feathers.  Carol was very helpful and told us about a couple of other birding hot spots, Brooklyn Village caravan park where we found a Tawny Frogmouth on its nest with a chick, and a ranch area where we found a male Australian Bustard exhibiting its mating display.

OLYMPUS DIGITAL CAMERA OLYMPUS DIGITAL CAMERA

OLYMPUS DIGITAL CAMERA

After two nights at the Kingfisher Park Birdwatchers Lodge we were on the road again back to Cairns for a flight to Brisbane and drive to O’Reilly’s Rainforest Retreat.  O’Reilly’s was a busy place with lots of guests and a myriad of activities.  Although we hiked many of the trails looking for birds, most birds hung out right by the entrance to reception where you could buy wild bird seed and feed the birds.  Parrots, Bowerbirds, and Cockatoos were all over you once you had seed in your hand.  Our last day at O’Reilly’s was charmed when we found a Paradise Riflebird, female Australian Logrunner and Albert’s Lyrebird all on the same trail.

OLYMPUS DIGITAL CAMERA

The last two nights of the Trogon Photo Tour were spent at the unimpressive Shangri-La Gardens in Wynnum, a suburb of Brisbane.  Kylie and Frank did their best to find us some birds to photograph, but it was slim pickings.  We lunched at the Pelican’s Nest Café where Frank assured me again that I would get to photograph flying foxes (large fruit bats).  Sure enough, a short drive from the Pelican’s Nest Café, Frank drove us through some neighborhoods to a Black Flying Fox roost with dozens of the large bats hanging from tree branches. 

OLYMPUS DIGITAL CAMERA

We celebrated the end of our Trogon Photo Tour with a delicious seafood dinner at the lively Manly Boathouse Restaurant with its great view of Moreton Bay.  Early next morning, Sunday, November 6^th, forty-one days after leaving home, Frank shuttled us to Brisbane Airport for our flight to Hobart, Tasmania. 

NOTE:  Bird photographs can be found on the Home Page – Bird Gallery – Birds of Australia

Other trip photographs can be found on the Home Page – Austalia Gallery

Our Australian journey started in Albuquerque on Sunday, September 25th with a neighbor giving us a ride to the airport.  We arrived in Sydney early on Tuesday morning September 27th, having lost a day crossing the International Date Line.  Sydney was our home for a week.  We had arrived two days early for the Victor Emanuel Nature Tour (Chapter 1) and had five days in Sydney before the start of the Trogon Photo Tour (Chapter 3).

Upon arrival to this dynamic, cosmopolitan city, we stayed at the Pullman Hotel on College Street across from Hyde Park.  Located in Sydney’s central core, the Pullman, with great views from the rooftop, was a great home base for our exploration of the City.  We were in walking distance of the city’s major attraction, the Sydney Opera House.  And, walk we did!

Our flight from Los Angeles had arrived too early in the morning for us to check in at the Pullman.  So, that very first morning in Sydney, we parked our luggage at the hotel and, with street map in hand, started our explorations.  Quickly, we got our bearings, learned to stay left and with Jane’s excellent navigating skill stayed on course.  We found a convenience store adjacent the hotel where we could stock up on bottled water and a wine shop around the corner so we could enjoy a glass of chardonnay to relax in the evenings.

The initial couple of days in Sydney were spent getting familiar with the area.  We found that College Street provided convenient access to the Australian Museum, St. Mary’s Cathedral, Hyde Park Barracks, the old Mint, New South Wales Parliament House, and the State Library.  The hustle and bustle of the Central Business District was only a short walk further as were the opera house and Royal Botanic Garden.  Hyde Park, across the street from the Pullman proved a convenient short cut when returning from our forays.

When we returned to the City after completing the Victor Emanuel Nature Tour, we stayed at the five-star Sir Stamford Hotel at Circular Quay.  We splurged a bit staying at the Sir Stamford but the location was perfect, right on Macquarie Street across from the Royal Botanic Garden and only a ten minute walk from the opera house.  The Sydney Opera House is a spectacular architectural venue and we spend quite a bit of time visiting the area.  We viewed the opera house from Circular Quay, from the Royal Botanic Garden, and from ferries crossing Sydney Harbor.

Scheduled opera performances did not fit into our schedule.  Instead, we booked a tour to see the interior of this iconic facility and got tickets for L’Hôtel, a cabaret performance, in one of the ancillary theaters at the opera house.  Lots of Édith Piaf style singing, a magician, acrobats and the “coup de grâce” was the manly hunk behind the “hotel” check-in counter who ended up pole dancing in his briefs.  Lots of fun was had with hoots and hollers from the enthusiastic audience.

With the Royal Botanic Garden just across the street from the Sir Stamford, Jane and I visited the garden several times.  Walking the various paths in the garden was relaxing as we viewed the many species of flowers, shrubs, and particularly the amazing variety of trees.  Appropriate for a “royal” garden, the grounds were meticulously maintained.  We particularly enjoyed the Calyx exhibit with its plant covered walls.  A couple of the paths in the garden provided excellent views of the Sydney Opera House.

Before leaving home, I had envisioned an image of the Sydney skyline at dusk with light emanating from high rise buildings that I wanted to capture in a photograph.  To capture that image meant crossing over to the north side of Sydney Harbor.  To make that crossing meant we had to learn about the elaborate ferry system leaving from Circular Quay.  The anxiety of using the ferries quickly dissipated when we found using the ferries to be much simpler than expected.  Good signage led us to the appropriate pier and platform for the ferry we needed and then it was simply tapping a credit card to access the ferry and again when leaving.  I photographed the evening skyline from Cremorne Point, straight across from the opera house.

Just can’t say enough about how much we enjoyed Sydney.  One morning we joined a walking tour of the old harbor area known as the Rocks.  We learned a lot about how in 1788 the first crew of convicts arrived in Australia.  Mostly, however, we created our own walking tours finding interesting places to discover, like the State Library and cozy little bistros.  During one of our forays into the sky scraper lined business core, we discovered a subterranean food court under Martin Place.  With scores of vendors, food from all over the world was available along with an amazing array of pastries.  As we left the food court, after lunching on sushi, we happened upon the Theatre Royal where Agatha Christie’s “The Mousetrap” was playing.  Of course, we had to get tickets for that famous murder mystery.

On October 21st, half way through our Australian Odyssey, we somewhat reluctantly left Sydney on our flight to Cairns and the Pacific Hotel for the rest of our journey.  Chapter 3 will cover the Trogon Photo Tours portion of our trip.

As the crow flies, it is just over eight thousand miles from Albuquerque, New Mexico, to Sydney, New South Wales, in Australia.  Jane and I did not fly as the crow, we instead traveled first from Albuquerque to Denver, and then from Denver to Los Angeles, before boarding our fourteen hour, United Airlines flight to Sydney.  And that is how the seven week long journey to our seventh continent began.

This was a momentous journey with more adventures to relay than one Blog can contain.  So, I will detail this journey in several separate chapters.  But first, here is a short introductory recap of our Australian odyssey.  To begin, the trip had been planned for a 2020 departure but was postponed until 2022 due to that persistent coronavirus.  After this long delay, the journey finally started on Sunday, September 25th and ended fifty days later on Monday, November 14th.  Crossing the International Dateline going over and coming back caused some confusion with dates as did the sixteen hours of time zone change.  In summary, this long trip included twelve separate flights on three different airlines, including two fourteen hour Pacific Ocean crossings.   We scurried through eleven airport terminals and slept at seventeen different accommodations.

This was truly a monumental journey and can be separated into four distinct sections.  Each of these four sections will be a separate chapter of this Blog and will be published sequentially. Upon arrival in Australia, our first undertaking was a two week excursion with Victor Emanuel Nature Tours (VENT).  This tour was focused on birding and started in Sydney, New South Wales, and ended at Uluru (Ayers Rock) in the Northern Territory. Jane and I were two of ten participants on this tour and I was the only serious photographer.  Chapter 1 will describe our adventures on this portion of our trip.

At the end of the VENT tour, we flew from Uluru back to Sydney for a five night stay on our own.  Our days in cosmopolitan Sydney are detailed in Chapter 2.

From Sydney we traveled north to Cairns, Queensland, for a two week excursion with Trogon Photo Tours.  Jane and I were two of only three guests on this tour that started in Cairns and finished in Brisbane, Queensland.  The Trogon tour was to be a photo tour but turned out to be very much a birding tour as well.  Details for this portion of our trip are in Chapter 3.

Hobart in Tasmania was our next and final destination.  I had arranged a private tour with Luke O’Brian, a local Tasmania photographer, for three days of photography at Cradle Mountain – Lake St. Clair National Park.  Chapter 4 details our visit to Tasmania and encounter with the Tasmania Devil.

Chapter 1

We met our eight fellow travelers for the Victor Emanuel Nature Tour for lunch on Friday, September 30th, at the Pullman Hotel in Sydney, New South Wales, Australia.  Our tour was led by Dion Hobcroft, an exceptional birder with over twenty years of experience leading birding groups for VENT.  Dion wasted no time.  After brief introductions and lunch we were off in the minibus, with Janene Luff behind the wheel, to our first afternoon of birding at Sydney’s Centennial Park.

Next day, we were up at 4:15 AM to be out by 5:00 for an early start of birding at the Royal National Park about an hour’s drive south of Sydney.  That morning we hiked along the Lady Carrington Drive trail.  The birders, equipped with their binoculars and scopes, and me with my camera, followed Dion eagerly as he spotted and identified Australia’s birds.  The morning weather was gloomy with off and on light rain, making for low light photography.  After a picnic lunch, we traveled to Burraneer Park where Dion was able to locate a pair of Australia’s largest owls, the Powerful Owl.  This pair, perched high in the upper canopy of a large tree, was raising chicks.

OLYMPUS DIGITAL CAMERA

That same afternoon, while the rest of us were back birding with Dion at the Royal Park, one of Dion’s associates (Steve) was scouting the Engadine section of the park looking for koalas.  Finding a koala in the wild is not easy but Steve had lots of experience and was familiar with the habitat koalas frequented.  It did not take long for Steve to return with the news that he spotted a koala.  That was the good news.  The bad news was that the eucalyptus tree with the koala was located near the bottom of a very steep ravine.  Everyone in the group, however, was game for bushwhacking ourselves down the sheer, forested terrain.  The reward was seeing a koala in the wild and for me photographing the cuddly little marsupial.  To top the event off, while engrossed with the koala, a Rock Warbler, the only endemic bird species of New South Wales, flew into the area.

OLYMPUS DIGITAL CAMERA OLYMPUS DIGITAL CAMERA

After three days of birding the Sydney area, on Monday, October 3rd, our small group of adventurers journeyed west to the Blue Mountains for an overnight stay at the Blackheath Motor Inn.  From Blackheath, getting started before sunrise, we scouted the Blue Mountain region for birds.  Enthusiastically, Dion guided us through Glen Alice, Glen Davis and around Lake Wallis.  Even along the busy motorway back from Blackheath to a hotel at Sydney Airport, Dion called out bird sightings that only those in the front seats could see.

Next day we were off on a Qantas flight to Darwin in Australia’s Northern Territory.  Situated at Australia’s “top end”, Darwin’s climate is similar to that of other tropical countries near the equator, hot, humid and sweaty.  Even a short foray into the field for birding resulted in clothing sticking to wet skin.  We were an intrepid bunch, however, and followed Dion eagerly to find that new bird.  The Adina Hotel was our home for a couple of nights as we sojourned the Darwin area looking for more new bird species.  Howard Creek, Knuckey Lagoon, Buffalo Creek, and Lee’s Point were all visited as Dion continued his tireless search.

Cooinda Lodge in Kakadu National Park was our next destination.  The nearly four hour drive to Kakadu started after some early morning birding around Darwin.  It was a long haul getting to Kakadu National Park with lots of “road train” trucks on the two-lane highway.  A much needed break was lunch at the Orroboree Park Tavern with its huge crocodile statue in front.  There was much birding to be done in Kakadu National Park but I was attracted to the pristine aboriginal rock art found in the park.  While the rest of the group was searching for illusive feathered creatures, I concentrated on finding and photographing this very unique x-ray style of rock art.

OLYMPUS DIGITAL CAMERA

From the Cooinda Lodge at Kakadu we ventured to Knotts Crossing Resort in Katherine, Northwest Territory, birding along the way, of course.  The indigenous purple backed fairy wren was on everyone’s want list and Dion knew where to find it.  So, next day we were on the road at 4:45 AM for the two hour drive to the Victoria River crossing at Gregory.  Finding this diminutive bird was not easy.   For well over an hour, we trudged back and forth through dense flood plain vegetation.  Only Dion’s persistence kept us going and resulted in finally locating this illusive little bird.  I was not fortunate enough to photograph the bird, however.  The next day was another long one on the road as we traversed back to Darwin to catch an afternoon Qantas flight to the remote town of Alice Springs.

Alice Springs is a small community in the "red desert" of the Northern Territory.  The Mercure Hotel was our home for the night.  Temperatures continued hot in the desert but humidity became more tolerable.  The terrain changed noticeable to a desert environment with vegetation more open and geologic features more prominent. The ubiquitous large termite mounds continued to be a dominant feature of the landscape as we birded the Alice Springs area.  We searched for birds in the Simpson Gap, Ormiston Gorge and Glen Ellen Gorge areas.  Then it was off again in the minibus for the 270 mile drive to Uluru, the massive sandstone monolith formerly known as Ayer’s Rock.  On the way, lunch was consumed eagerly at the Erldunda Roadhouse, at Stuarts Well, an establishment typical of those along the Stuart Highway.

The first Europeans explorers arrived at Uluru in the late 1800’s but tourism to this amazing geologic feature did not get started until the 1950’s when less than 3,000 intrepid travelers braved the 12 hour primitive travel from Alice Springs.  An entire tourist village was planned and constructed in the 1980’s and today, with completion of massive upgrades to the village, more than 350,000 visitors arrive to experience this sacred UNESCO World Heritage Site. 

By mid-afternoon, we arrived at the Desert Gardens Hotel where we all enjoyed an afternoon break after a long, bumpy ride through the “Red Center” of the Northern Territory.  That evening, Dion treated us to a champagne sundowner at the Uluru sunset viewpoint.  It was a perfect setting for our last night together.  But, next morning, Dion had us up early again for sunrise at Kata Tjuta, “many heads” in the aboriginal language, a group of large domed sedimentary rock formations about 16 miles to the west of Uluru.  The Victor Emanuel Nature Tour ended at Uluru and after lunch the resolute birders headed to the airport for their flight back to Sydney.

Jane and I, on the other hand, stayed behind as we had booked two extra nights at the Desert Gardens Hotel.  Although we had thoroughly enjoyed the company of our birding friends, it felt really good to be on our own again after fourteen days of communal touring.  After bidding adieu to our fellow travelers, we prepared for a sunset helicopter flight over Kata Tjuta and Uluru.  We followed that up with a Uluru sunrise tour to complete our trifecta of sunrise, sunset and from the air views of the Uluru monolith.  I had also booked a night sky tour to photograph the Milky Way over Uluru, but unfortunately, the desert experienced one of its rare cloudy nights and that outing was cancelled.

OLYMPUS DIGITAL CAMERA

On Sunday, October 16th, twenty days after leaving home, we enjoyed a much needed sleep-in and leisurely breakfast, after which we shuttled to the Uluru Airport for our flight back to Sydney.  Our days in Sydney are described in the following Chapter 2 of the Blog.

NOTE: Bird photographs can be found on the Home Page - Bird Gallery - Birds of Australia Sub-Gallery

          Other trip photographs can be found on the Home Page - Australia Gallery

Bruce and I started this journey literally in my backyard with a short walk to the community gate into Petroglyph National Monument.  Two species of wren forage among the lava boulders scattered along the mesa escarpment, the rock wren and the canyon wren.  In the past, I had had success with calling the birds using an app on my phone.  It worked this time as well and we were able to obtain images of both birds.  After photography, it was a short hike back home for lunch.

OLYMPUS DIGITAL CAMERA OLYMPUS DIGITAL CAMERA

Shortly after lunch we headed west on Interstate 40 to El Malpais National Monument.  Not quite in my backyard but only about an hour and half up the road.  I had planned two photo objectives at El Malpais.  First, to photograph Mexican Short-Eared Bats as they emerged en masse from their lava tube cave, and second, some night sky photography with the Milky Way rising over the ruins of the historic Garrett Homestead.  Both these objectives were achieved.

OLYMPUS DIGITAL CAMERA

After a sleep-in the next morning, the plan was to drive to the small town of Truth or Consequences (referred to as T or C locally) and stay at the Sierra Grande Lodge for guided tours onto Ted Turner’s Armendaris Ranch.  Frequent blog readers may recall my September 2, 2021 blog where I had attempted to photograph Swainson’s Hawks preying on bats as they foraged for bugs on the Armendaris Ranch.  That was the plan also for this trip with Bruce.  Unfortunately, the plan did not work out.  Resent monsoon rains had made the dirt tracks on the ranch impassable.  Consequently, I had to improvise an alternative objective.  So, instead of touring the Armendaris Ranch, we scouted the area around T or C for a night sky photography opportunity.  Fortunately we discovered an old steel windmill within easy access of the paved road that made a great foreground for the rising Milky Way.  So, all was not lost at Truth or Consequences.

OLYMPUS DIGITAL CAMERA OLYMPUS DIGITAL CAMERA

Out next photographic target was the Three Rivers Petroglyph Site.  Bruce and I had been there thirteen years ago, about the time we first started photographing together.  At that time we spent all our time on the lower portion of the petroglyph site.  This time, however, we concentrated our efforts on the “upper trail” where we had not photographed before.  There are hundreds, if not thousands, of petroglyphs pecked into the boulders at the Three Rivers site and we found and photographed many new and fascinating panels.

After our morning shoot at Three Rivers, we turned north towards the small village of Mountainair where we planned to have a late lunch.  As it turned out, much to our chagrin, there was no restaurant in Mountainair for lunch.  We did find a deli counter hidden in the back of the grocery store where cold cut sandwiches were available.  The visitor center for the Salinas Pueblo Missions National Monument is situated in Mountainair and that is where we photographed next.

OLYMPUS DIGITAL CAMERA OLYMPUS DIGITAL CAMERA

There is little light pollution at the remote location of this national monument.  As a result, I included this location on our itinerary with the intent of getting images of the Milky Way with the Abó Pueblo Mission ruin in the foreground.  Night access for photography required that I obtain a Special Use Permit from the Park Service.  During the process of obtaining the necessary permit, the park ranger suggested that if I volunteered to be a guest night photography instructor they would waive the permit fee requirement.  That was all arranged, Bruce and I would volunteer to assist with photography and the Park Service would arrange a night sky astronomy event at Abó for the evening we arrived.  I estimated that about 25 people participated in the night sky event.  Not all were photographers, but Bruce and I assisted those that were.  The evening turned out to be highly successful.  The Park Service was happy, Bruce and I were happy, and event participants were happy.

OLYMPUS DIGITAL CAMERA We spent the night in Mountainair at a funky roadside motel with few amenities and the constant rumbling of freight trains going by.  Needless to say, that was not a happy night.  We headed back to Albuquerque after that for a more restful night.  The next morning we were off again, this time north to the Santa Fe and Taos areas.  We photographed at a couple of other petroglyph sites.  The first was the La Cieneguilla site near Santa Fe, and the second was the Mesa Prieta site near Taos.

OLYMPUS DIGITAL CAMERA OLYMPUS DIGITAL CAMERA

The Mesa Prieta Petroglyph Project (aka The Wells Petroglyph Reserve) is on private land and only accessible with a tour.  The site has an extensive collection of unique, undamaged petroglyph panels and I had wanted to photograph them for some time.  Fortunately, private tours were being offered again after a two year Covid hiatus.  Tours consisted of two hour hikes over boulder strewn hillsides.  I had arranged for two private tours, one in the afternoon and one the following morning.  Our docent guide was Cathy and her knowledge of local pueblo history and insight of the petroglyph panels made the tours very special.

OLYMPUS DIGITAL CAMERA OLYMPUS DIGITAL CAMERA

We concluded our week of New Mexico photography by visiting the Highway 64 steel bridge over the Rio Grande Gorge for some panoramic compositions.  Also open again after two years of Covid shutdown was the Taos Pueblo were we spent an hour or so as our last photography location.  After learning about the pueblo and its people, we packed up the photo gear and set the GPS for 9104 Lake Isabella Way Northwest.  Early the next morning, Bruce slid into his German made luxury sedan, set the cruise control for highway speed, and enjoyed his ride back to San Diego.  In retrospect, it was totally sweet for me to be back “on the road again”.

OLYMPUS DIGITAL CAMERA OLYMPUS DIGITAL CAMERA OLYMPUS DIGITAL CAMERA

Steer wrestling, calf roping, bronc and bull riding, barrel racing, what could be more exciting?  These were the rodeo events at the Gallup, New Mexico, Inter-Tribal Indian Ceremonial.  The last rodeo I attended was in my teen years at the Salt Lake County Fairgrounds in Salt Lake City, Utah.  I had read about the Ceremonial in New Mexico Magazine. Founded in 1922, the Gallup Inter-Tribal Ceremonial is one of the oldest continuous celebrations of Native American culture and heritage.  This year was the event’s centennial celebration and I thought it would provide an interesting photo opportunity.

OLYMPUS DIGITAL CAMERA

OLYMPUS DIGITAL CAMERA OLYMPUS DIGITAL CAMERA

OLYMPUS DIGITAL CAMERA

The Ceremonial was a ten day event but I attended just Friday and Saturday of the last weekend.  Gallup’s Red Rock Park, with its outdoor arenas and amphitheater, was the venue for the celebration.  Besides the rodeo, there was a parade showcasing the various tribes and pueblos participating in the event.  For me, highlights were the traditional tribal dances that are normally performed only at special tribal or pueblo holidays and ceremonies.

OLYMPUS DIGITAL CAMERA OLYMPUS DIGITAL CAMERA

OLYMPUS DIGITAL CAMERA OLYMPUS DIGITAL CAMERA

The entire experience was engrossing and most enjoyable.  I certainly gained a greater appreciation of Native American traditions.  Similar to the Gathering-Of-Nations Pow Wow I attended in the spring, the Ceremonial was a celebration for and by Native American families.

OLYMPUS DIGITAL CAMERA OLYMPUS DIGITAL CAMERA

OLYMPUS DIGITAL CAMERA OLYMPUS DIGITAL CAMERA

You can see more images from this trip in the New Mexico Gallery, under Gallup Inter-Tribal Indian Ceremonial, on the home page of the website.

It all started on Memorial Day, May 30^th, when our neighbor gave us a ride to the Albuquerque airport.  With our TSA PreCheck boarding passes, security was a breeze and we were soon on our way, via DFW, to Amsterdam, very much enjoying the comfort of our Business Class cubicles.  A visit with my older brother Dick is always an included stop when traveling to Europe.  This trip was originally planned for 2020 the year Dick turned 95, so this year he had turned 97 and we were certainly looking forward to seeing him.

Our nephew Wim picked us up at Schiphol and being a very tall person, he was easy to spot in the crowded arrivals area.  Wim lives with his girlfriend, Marina, in Middelburg, a small picturesque town about two hours south of Amsterdam.  On the way to Middelburg we stopped in Spykenisse where Dick lives, still in his own home.  At 97, Dick still looked good, a bit frail and using a walker, but mentally sharp and a good sense of humor.  After our visit with Dick we continued on to Middelburg where we stayed three nights at the Fletcher Hotel near the city center.  Wim and Marina entertained us with walks along the North Sea dunes and a sail on De Arne waterway in a rented motorboat.

On June 4^th, we had a morning flight from Schiphol to Zürich.  In order to avoid any potential traffic problems driving from Middelburg, we spent the night before the flight at the airport Citizen M Hotel.  By this time we had become aware of the extreme labor shortages at Schiphol, including baggage handlers.  So that night, at the Citizen M Hotel, we repacked our bags making sure we had all essential items in our carry-ons.  We also took time to walk from the hotel to the departing passenger check-in counters so we would know exactly where to go in the morning.  We also decided to leave plenty early in the morning to battle the long check-in and security lines.  During our reconnoitering, we had observed insanely long lines of people queued up to check-in.

We left the hotel at 5:30 AM with our bags in tow.  When we approached the long queue, we were directed by a friendly KLM staffer to follow the signed priority path that bypassed the long line of disgruntled travelers.  It turned out that Jane had had the foresight to purchase the priority boarding option that came with the economy ticket.  That saved us hours of waiting in line.  Instead, we got to wait several hours at the departure gate, but we were able to relax a bit in the crowded gate area and read our books.  The wait at the gate turned out to be a bit longer than expected, however, because the KLM flight to Zürich was delayed an hour.  That created some anxiety because we had only a short window of time to catch our train from the Zürich airport to Zermatt.  But it all worked out fine.  Our single checked bag was the very first bag to arrive on the baggage carousel.  After quickly retrieving the bag, we hustled from the baggage claim area down an escalator to the train platform and were comfortably seated in a designated first class quiet car with time to spare for our journey to Zermatt.

In 1865, the British mountaineer Edward Whymper became the first person to scale the Matterhorn.  This feat turned Zermatt from a small agricultural village into a Mecca for climbers, skiers, and hikers.  For me, the objective was to photograph the iconic, pyramidal peak of the Matterhorn.  Geologists call this unique shape a glacial horn.  Originally, when collision of the African and European tectonic plates created the Alps, the Matterhorn was a dome shaped mountain.  Subsequent ice ages covered the dome shaped mountain with glaciers.  These glaciers eroded cirques on three sides of the mountain creating the unique shape of today’s Matterhorn.

OLYMPUS DIGITAL CAMERA

At 14,690 feet, the Matterhorn creates its own weather and is often shrouded in clouds.  We were fortunate during our five-night stay in Zermatt with the photogenic mountain being visible about half the time, mostly in the mornings before obscuring clouds would form.  From Zermatt, there are several ways to traverse higher up the mountain to obtain different views of this glacier formed horn.  Not all the lifts were operating yet during our stay, so some of the photo locations I wanted to visit were not available.   However, the Gornergrat cogwheel railway was available to take us up to 10,000 feet in elevation.  We used this unique train several times to take us to different trailheads along the route.

Jane had gotten us a fantastic accommodation in Zermatt, a two room suite, with balcony, at the Perren Hotel, very close to the train station.  Some of our best views of the Matterhorn were from the balcony.  Lifts going up the mountain did not start running until about 8:00 AM well after sunrise at 5:30 preventing alpenglow photography.  Early on several mornings, however, we watched sunlight descend on the rocky face of the mountain from the comfort of our room.  Of course, I was out on the balcony with my camera.

OLYMPUS DIGITAL CAMERA

From Zermatt, we trained back to Zürich for a five-night stay at the Marktgasse Hotel in the city’s historic old town district of  Niederdorf.  We explored much of old Zürich on foot.  The hotel was near the Zürichsee, a large lake in Zürich, where throngs of people gathered to stroll along the waterfront and frequented sidewalk cafés. The opera house was also located near the lake and provided free performances on an outdoor screen where people gathered with folding chairs and spread blankets to watch an opera.  We actually had tickets for an indoors performance of Tchaikovsky’s Sleeping Beauty Ballet at the opera house.  It was a non-traditional, avant-garde, production with colorful costuming, great choreography, and superb dancing.  During our stay in Zürich we also enjoyed a day-trip by train to Bern, the capital of Switzerland.

OLYMPUS DIGITAL CAMERA OLYMPUS DIGITAL CAMERA

OLYMPUS DIGITAL CAMERA OLYMPUS DIGITAL CAMERA

Our time in the Swiss Alps ended when we packed our bags, boarded a tram to the bahnhof (train station), trained to the Zürich airport, and flew via Swiss Air to Venice to start the next phase of our European excursion.  At the Venice airport we rented a Fiat 500, stick shift, compact car with just enough trunk space to hold all our bags.  With the help of Google maps Jane navigated us through the maze of airport roads to get us to the autobahn and on our way to Cortina d’Ampezzo, our first destination in the Italian Alps.  Jane had rented us an apartment in Cortina d’Ampezzo for five nights and we day-tripped from there.

The Dolomites are part of the Southern Alps and are uniquely different from the rest of the Alps due to the lighter color of the dolomite base rock.  When the Alps were formed, millions of years ago, this area of uplift had been coral reefs in a tropical see.  Like the Matterhorn, ice age glaciers eroded the uplifted mountain range into the spectacular peaks, pinnacles and escarpments visible today.  Elevation wise, the highest peaks in the Dolomites only range just over 10,000 feet or so.  At approximately 5,500 square miles, the Dolomite area is about one and a half times the size of Yellowstone National Park.

OLYMPUS DIGITAL CAMERA

I had done my research and developed a detailed itinerary of places to photograph in the Dolomites.  We drove to some of location, including some picturesque lakes, but mostly we used cable cars and chair lifts to reach the higher alpine valleys where the bare Dolomite peaks and massive cliffs were impressively close.  Although the trails are well marked, the trail markers are not always easy to spot.  We found ourselves turned around and going somewhat it circles at times, but we were never really lost.  The trails were well groomed and easy to navigate but I found that, no matter where you started or what your destination was, there was always an uphill grade to conquer.

OLYMPUS DIGITAL CAMERA OLYMPUS DIGITAL CAMERA

After our stay in Cortina d’Ampezzo, we moved to Ortisei for a five night stay at the grand Hotel Stetteneck.  We found the Stetteneck more conveniently situated than the apartment in Cortina for walking into the village.  Ortisei is a very popular destination and we observed many groups of hikers, young and not so young, walk through the pedestrians-only village to the chair lifts.  The age range of hikers we passed on the trails was amazing, from young families with toddlers and baby-carrier backpacks, and a dog, to men and woman obviously at least my age, or older.  The Dolomites are riddled with cable cars and chair lifts.  Every high alpine meadow we visited had numerous lifts going in all directions on the mountain.  I told Jane that if we were to ski here, we would need a GPS to find our way off the mountain.  We enjoyed Ortisei a lot and had some wonderful day-trips from there with amazing mountain views.

OLYMPUS DIGITAL CAMERA OLYMPUS DIGITAL CAMERA

OLYMPUS DIGITAL CAMERA OLYMPUS DIGITAL CAMERA

OLYMPUS DIGITAL CAMERA

From Ortisei we traveled to Corvara for our last four nights in the Dolomites.  We stayed in the Hotel Italia where we also had a two room suite but the décor was very stark and we did not “warm up” to the suite.  One of the longest and steepest cable cars we rode was in Corvara and the views at the top were spectacular.  I spent a lot of time working on panoramic compositions there.  Also, there was a regional “Bike Day” while we in Corvara where cyclists were given free reign and roads were closed to vehicular traffic.  That day we embarked on long hike and ended up in the village of Colfosco where we took a cable car to an alpine rifugio for a much needed lunch break.

OLYMPUS DIGITAL CAMERA OLYMPUS DIGITAL CAMERA

OLYMPUS DIGITAL CAMERA OLYMPUS DIGITAL CAMERA

Like the Swiss Alps, the recreational infrastructure in the Dolomites is exceptional.  There are cable cars and lifts everywhere.  Trails are well maintained and signed.  Signage in the Dolomites, however, can be confusing.  A trail or roadway sign may appear to indicate direction to three different locations when it fact it is only one location in three languages, German, Ladin, and Italian. At the top of every lift there is a café or rifugio offering food, drink, and often rooms.  Roads throughout the Dolomites are steep, narrow and winding.  They are a magnet for speeding sport cars and daredevil motorcycles.  We encountered those continuously as we traveled to our photo destinations, not to mention cyclists slowly peddling up the steep grades or coasting extremely fast downhill.

On our fifteenth day in the Dolomites we left Corvara, turned south, and headed back towards Venice.  That night we stayed at the Marriott Hotel at the Venice Airport.  We repacked our bags again for the journey home.  On the morning June 28^th we boarded our American Airlines flight back to Albuquerque, again enjoying our business class cubicles, and arriving in Albuquerque near midnight after a twenty hour travel day.  It is always good to be home again.

To see some additional photos of the Matterhorn and Dolomites, return to the homepage and go the Europe Gallery to Switzerland and Italy.

The objective of our trip south was to photograph spring wildflowers at various locations.  Unfortunately the continuing drought in the southwest spoiled that. We did stumble upon some early blooming trees that were host to swarming pipevine swallowtail butterflies feeding on the blossom’s nectar.  During our random motoring along country roads we were also able to photograph some unidentified flowers growing along the shoulders of the road along with some birds and a field of cultivated bright yellow flowers that we assumed to be rapeseed.  So, all was not in vain for this short trip south.

OLYMPUS DIGITAL CAMERA OLYMPUS DIGITAL CAMERA

OLYMPUS DIGITAL CAMERA

OLYMPUS DIGITAL CAMERA

OLYMPUS DIGITAL CAMERA

OLYMPUS DIGITAL CAMERA OLYMPUS DIGITAL CAMERA

OLYMPUS DIGITAL CAMERA

Continuing our Spring 2022 travels, in early-April, Jane and I ventured to Fairbanks, Alaska, to observe and photograph the Aurora Borealis. We knew it would be cold and it was very cold.  Fairbanks had endured more snowfall this winter than it had for several decades and massive drifts of snow had been plowed along sides of the roads.  I had signed us up for three consecutive nights of aurora watching. As it turned out I did not need the “insurance policy” of three tours as we watched in awe at the spectacular display of the aurora each night.

OLYMPUS DIGITAL CAMERA

For three consecutive nights, the routine went like this.  Dinner around six (fortunately there were several restaurants to select from around our hotel, including a Japanese restaurant where we had dinner several nights), then back to the hotel where we would receive an email around seven each night letting us know at what time we would be picked up by the tour guide.  The pickup time was usually sometime just before ten o’clock.  We would grab a short snooze between seven and nine each night before bundling up in our cold weather gear.  And bundle up we did with multiple layers of warm clothing topped with heavy parkas and chemical warmers in our gloves and boots.

OLYMPUS DIGITAL CAMERA

Each night there were ten clients in the van heading out for the aurora.  Before starting, our guide would check the weather cams located around Fairbanks to find where there were clear skies.  Then we would set out driving about sixty miles or so out of town where there was no light pollution from Fairbanks.  The aurora is most vivid when the night is darkest and that was normally around one to two in the morning.  At that time, with clear skies, temperatures ranged from 5 to 10 degrees Fahrenheit making us very happy with our extreme attire.  We would get back to the hotel close to 4 AM each morning where we would unbundle ourselves and crawl into bed.

OLYMPUS DIGITAL CAMERA OLYMPUS DIGITAL CAMERA

Jane and I rated this trip a most definite success.  Images from the trip have been added to the Aurora Borealis gallery.

OLYMPUS DIGITAL CAMERA OLYMPUS DIGITAL CAMERA

In preparation for our trip, we had arranged a customized itinerary with a local tour company Costa Rica Focus, which also included a private naturalist guide/driver.  The itinerary consisted of extended stays at three different locations, Manual Antonio National Park on the southern Pacific Coast, Arenal Volcano National Park in the highland rainforest, and the Sarapiqui region of the Caribbean lowlands.  At each of these locations, Costa Rica Focus had arranged for private wildlife viewing and photography at various ecological reserves and private biological conservation sanctuaries.  This was a twelve day, all-inclusive tour for just the two of us with Minor Hidalgo, our guide/driver, taking care of everything.

OLYMPUS DIGITAL CAMERA OLYMPUS DIGITAL CAMERA
 

After all the turmoil dealing with airline issues it was a relief to settle in at the Hotel Playa Espadilla adjacent to Manual Antonio National Park.  We were more than ready to enjoy the warm humid air, appreciate the remote jungle setting, and marvel at the diversity of wildlife.  Most of Costa Rica’s wildlife consists of birds with 850 species.  During our travels, Minor Hidalgo helped us locate and identify 155 species and I was able to photograph more than a hundred of those, with about half being species I had not photographed before.

OLYMPUS DIGITAL CAMERA OLYMPUS DIGITAL CAMERA

OLYMPUS DIGITAL CAMERA

Arrangements for this Costa Rica adventure were made well in advance of the actual trip.  So it came as a bit of a surprise to us that the trip coincided with my 83^rd birthday.  We celebrated with dinner at El Avión, a very unique eatery at Manual Antonio where a C-123 Fairchild cargo plane had been converted into a pub and restaurant.  Now the pressure is on me to contrive a similar birthday experience for Jane.

At Manual Antonio, Costa Rica Focus’ itinerary included a private mangrove boat tour.  This excursion was tide dependent and required a pre-dawn departure from the hotel.   Jane and I had kayaked through a mangrove before in Baja California but that was nothing like the Costa Rica mangrove.  Here the various mangrove tree species were huge with a dense jumble of tangled roots reaching up from the water.  The narrow water ways gave the impression of boating through a jungle.  We encountered several new bird species including the diminutive American pygmy kingfisher and the very large bare-throated tiger heron.

OLYMPUS DIGITAL CAMERA OLYMPUS DIGITAL CAMERA

Our next destination was Arenal Volcano National Park where we stayed four nights at the Arenal Observatory Lodge.  Outings from here included Ecocentro Danaus, a private ecological reserve, Mistico Hanging Bridges, with its 16 bridges suspended through the rainforest canopy, and Arenal Natura, where we were able to photograph tropical frogs and reptiles.  All these were private visits for just the two of us and our own guides.  We also spent a lot of time searching for and photographing birds around the Arenal Observatory Lodge.  Playing birds songs recorded on the Merlin app on his smart phone, Minor was able to entice small songbirds to approach close enough to be photographed.

Ara Ambigua Lodge, a friendly family run hotel, was our last accommodation.  In addition to photographing birds feeding on melons and bananas provided by the lodge staff, Minor also led us on explorations of area pastures to locate other Costa Rica birds including macaws, parakeets, tanagers, woodpeckers, and flycatchers.  One morning was spent at the La Selva Biological Station, a world renowned research facility.  La Selva was the first private ecological conservation area in Costa Rica.  The trails at La Selva meander through origin old growth rainforest where we encountered a variety of exotic, colorful birds, including trogons, motmots, and woodpeckers.

Our final stop on this truly amazing Costa Rica adventure was Cope’s Garden not far from the Ara Ambigua Lodge.  Cope’s Garden was created by wildlife artist José Albert Pérez as a retreat for birders and photographers.  From the garden, we followed José into the surrounding forest where he cleared a trail for us with his machete.  The purpose of this foray was to locate spectacled owls and white bats, both of which José successfully found for us.  Photographing the white bats proved to be a challenge.  These bats are very small, white fluffy mammals about the size of a ping pong ball.  They are nocturnal and roost during the day under large plant leaves that are folded into a “tent” shape.  I had to lay supine on my back while Minor illuminated the bats with a flashlight in order to photograph them.  I would dare say that was the highlight of the trip.

OLYMPUS DIGITAL CAMERA

The ending of an outstanding adventure is bitter sweet.  To mitigate this nostalgia is to have reason to return.  I have a reason to return.  My primary goal for undertaking this Costa Rica trip was to photograph a mother sloth with her baby.  That did not happen.  Sloths were seen and photographed, even sloths with a baby were seen, but they were not photographable. So, happily I have a reason to return to Costa Rica and try again to attain my goal of photographing a sloth with baby.

To see more of the pictures from this trip to to the "Costa Rica 2022" Gallery on the home page of the web site.

The parade was not cancelled and we enjoyed our first road trip of 2022 to Pasadena, California.  It’s a comfortable two day drive from Albuquerque to Pasadena with an overnight in the Phoenix area.  For the holiday week, freeways were busy but not overly congested with lots and lots of eighteen-wheeler, big rig trucks.  You wouldn’t think there was a driver shortage with all the semi-trailer trucks on the freeways.

We arrived in Pasadena on a rainy December 29^th .  The plan had been to spend time in the LA area sightseeing.  But the weather prevented that and we ended up spending the stormy weather channel surfing the TV in the hotel room.  After the storm system moved on, the rest of our stay was southern California sunny, but on the cool side.  The Omicron variant hadn’t stopped commerce in Pasadena.  On New Year’s Eve restaurants were busy and crowded.  Fortunately, Jane had the foresight to make dinner reservations well ahead of the holiday.

On the first day of the new year we were up at the crack of dawn for the half hour walk from the hotel to our grandstand seats along the parade route.  Masked up with our N-95’s, we walked past sleeping parade enthusiasts who had spent the night camped out along Colorado Boulevard.  Even in the early morning, vendors were already set up selling souvenirs and greasy, beacon wrapped hot dogs.

The parade was marvelous, everything we had expected.  The floats with their vast array of colorful flowers were beautiful and ingeniously engineered and constructed.  Among the many creative floats, the Mutual of Omaha’s Wild Kingdom float was my favorite.  Marching bands from around the country, with their skimpily dressed, baton twirling, majorettes performed John Phillips Sousa favorites.  

After the parade we maneuvered back through the throngs of people to the hotel to pack up, check out and head for San Diego where we had arranged to meet up with old friends.  In San Diego, in addition to reuniting with our friends, we spent several delightful days visiting familiar sights including a stroll along the Embarcadero and Sea Port Village, a ferry ride across the bay to Coronado, and lunch at one of our favorite restaurants, The Prado, in Balboa Park.

OLYMPUS DIGITAL CAMERA OLYMPUS DIGITAL CAMERA

OLYMPUS DIGITAL CAMERA OLYMPUS DIGITAL CAMERA

OLYMPUS DIGITAL CAMERA

In mid-October we were getting “cabin fever” and opted for a short road trip to Ruidoso, a small town located in the Sierra Blanca Mountains, in central New Mexico.  With peaks at nearly 12,000 feet, the mountains around Ruidoso provided a pleasant respite from the low lying Rio Grande valley back home.  Before starting on this outing, Jane had found that there was a very nice and modern theater, the Spenser Theater for the Performing Arts, located near Ruidoso.  This $25 million gem was just fifteen minutes from our hotel and we enjoyed a performance by the Brothers Four, singing old favorites from the distance past.  The Spenser Theater also hosts a collection of colorful Chihuly glass sculptures.

We were three nights in Ruidoso and spent some time exploring the surrounding area with a brief stop at historic Fort Stanton.  The fort was established in 1855 to control the then warring Mescalero Apache Indians.  Eventually the Mescalero Apache were relocated to a reservation just south of Ruidoso where we enjoyed a lunch and beer at their Inn Of The Mountain Gods Casino.  During our forays around town we discovered that Ruidoso is home to herds of elk that roam the back roads and like to forage on grasses at the golf course and school play fields.

Upon returning home from our short trip to Ruidoso, we found that the cottonwood trees along the Rio Grande had started their fall display of brilliant yellow foliage.  Jane and I took the opportunity to make several trips to the open space corridor along the river to hike among the colorful trees.  Overhead we heard the gravelly calls of the sandhill cranes as they migrated back to their winter stomping grounds along the Rio Grande.

OLYMPUS DIGITAL CAMERA OLYMPUS DIGITAL CAMERA

OLYMPUS DIGITAL CAMERA

OLYMPUS DIGITAL CAMERA

In the early 1800’s New Mexico, and most of America’s southwest, was still part of New Spain with the governor of the Northern Provinces of New Spain located in Santa Fe.  It was the custom at that time for the governor to award land grants as a favor for political or military service.  In 1918, Pedro Armendariz applied for a land grant, citing his military service and loyalty to the King of Spain and in late 1919 was awarded the Armendariz Land Grant consisting of 397,235 acres.  During the ensuing decades, first Mexico in 1821 and later the United States in 1848 controlled the New Mexico territory.  Throughout these governmental and subsequent ownership changes, the Armendariz Land Grant remained pretty much intact.  In 1990, the last owner of the land filed for bankruptcy and in 1994 Ted Turner purchased the property and established the 362,885 acre Armendaris Ranch. 

OLYMPUS DIGITAL CAMERA

The huge ranch, with a landmass greater than the city of Phoenix,  is located along the Rio Grande River in south central New Mexico near the quaint town of Truth Or Consequences (T or C).  The landscape is semi-desert grassland of the northern Chihuahua Desert. Since 1994 Turner has allowed the previously overgrazed land to regenerate and has established a number of environmental initiatives to restore native species.  One of those initiatives was protecting the Mexican free-tailed bat population at the Jornada Bat Caves located on the Armendaris Ranch.  I convinced Jane that we needed to photograph these bats and that is how we ended up at the Sierra Grande Lodge in T or C for a two night stay.

OLYMPUS DIGITAL CAMERA

About 761,000 years ago a shield volcano erupted and spewed out a large basaltic lava flow.  As streams of hot lave flowed, the top crust cooled creating lava tunnels.  Centuries of erosion later, some of the crust lava, the roof of the lava tube, gave way and collapsed into the tube creating caves.  Some of these lava caves are on the Armedaris Ranch and from June to September, several hundred thousand female Mexican free-tailed bats migrate from Mexico to utilize the lava tube caves as their nursery. 

When tens of thousands of bats emerge from the cave each evening around dusk, Swainson’s hawks gather in the sky to prey on the bats.  This was a wildlife event I wanted to try and photograph.  I scheduled two tours to the bat cave to maximize the opportunity to capture some keeper images.  The bat tour departs from the Sierra Grande Lodge, a Ted Turner Preserve property, at 3:30 PM and requires a two and half hour drive across the ranch on dirt tracks to the bat cave.  We left home around noon in order to check into the lodge well before the 3:30 PM departure.  Our guide for the tours was Ken, a retired biologist and accomplished photographer.

Unlike last year, this summer New Mexico is experiencing a more normal monsoon season with clear skies in the morning transitioning to huge cumulus clouds with extensive lightning and dark ominous cumulonimbus clouds by late afternoon with cloudbursts following in a random pattern.  That was the scenario when we arrived in T or C that afternoon.  By the time Ken picked us up for the drive to the bat cave, threatening clouds were all around.  Ken checked his weather app that showed the storms were concentrated to the west and east of our trajectory and we pressed on.

OLYMPUS DIGITAL CAMERA OLYMPUS DIGITAL CAMERA

The contrast between the lush grassland vegetation on the Armendaris Ranch and the overgrazed conditions we had seen in southwestern New Mexico during our trip to Silver City was astounding.  By not grazing cattle or sheep on the ranch and allowing nature to restore the land, a healthy diversity of thriving plants and grasses abounded.  As we traversed the extensive ranch property there was a sense of isolation and returning to nature.  Along the way, we encountered a number of desert species I had never seen, let alone, photographed.  The western desert tarantula was one that Jane discovered as we were waiting for the bats to emerge.  The white lined sphinx, a type of hummingbird moth, we found pollinating and feeding on evening primrose flowers.  Ken nearly ran over a prairie rattlesnake that was sunning itself in the middle of the dirt track.  I also give Jane credit for spotting a tarantula hawk, although Ken had to tell us what it was, a spider wasp that preys on tarantulas.

OLYMPUS DIGITAL CAMERA OLYMPUS DIGITAL CAMERA

OLYMPUS DIGITAL CAMERA OLYMPUS DIGITAL CAMERA

OLYMPUS DIGITAL CAMERA OLYMPUS DIGITAL CAMERA

OLYMPUS DIGITAL CAMERA OLYMPUS DIGITAL CAMERA

Photographing the bats, however, proved problematic. The bats normally emerge from their roosting cave around dusk, a half hour before sunset.  We arrived at the cave at 6:30 PM and storm clouds to the west were obscuring the sun creating early dusk conditions.  The bats must have sensed that conditions that night were different and decided not the leave their shelter until nearly sunset.  We did see a string of bats fly out to forage for insects on the prairie but by that time it was too dark to attempt photography. That is why, as a form of insurance, I had scheduled two tours to the bat cave. 

The second night we arrived a bit earlier, but the weather was also a bit more threatening.  Ken had brought folding chairs so we would be more comfortable while waiting for the fly out.  We had barely set out the chairs and gotten cameras ready when it started to rain.  By the time we reached the shelter of Ken’s truck, a hundred yards off, we were pretty much soaked. This time the rain cells were right over us and Ken had to drive two hours on the water logged dirt track back to the paved road with torrential rain pelting down.  We made it back without incident but it was a scary ride.

OLYMPUS DIGITAL CAMERA OLYMPUS DIGITAL CAMERA

So, photographing Swainson’s hawks preying on bats was a bust but we experienced other photo ops during our two tours into the pristine grassland prairie of the Armendaris Ranch and the stay at Sierra Grande Lodge with its friendly staff was most enjoyable. Jane and I made a pact to return again to The Armendaris Ranch in the future to do more sightseeing in the area.  Of particular interest is a tour of the New Mexico Spaceport located not far from T or C and, of course, another chance to photograph Swainson’s hawks going after Mexican free-tailed bats.

OLYMPUS DIGITAL CAMERA

OLYMPUS DIGITAL CAMERA OLYMPUS DIGITAL CAMERA

We were a week at our time-share cabin at Glacier Wilderness Resort and only made the super early run into the park twice.  Each time the objective was to reach Logan Pass in time to obtain a parking spot before rangers closed the parking lot.  The Hidden Lake Overlook trail that starts at Logan Pass has always been a good location for spotting the park’s varied wildlife.  This time was no exception as we enjoyed watching and photographing bighorn sheep, mountain goats, hoary marmots, Columbia ground squirrels and the ubiquitous golden mantled ground squirrel.  Being on the Hidden Lake Overlook trail in July provided us the chance to observe some animal family interactions.  I was photographing a large, adult hoary marmot when I noticed one, then two and eventually three pups cavorting around the area.

OLYMPUS DIGITAL CAMERA OLYMPUS DIGITAL CAMERA

OLYMPUS DIGITAL CAMERA OLYMPUS DIGITAL CAMERA

OLYMPUS DIGITAL CAMERA OLYMPUS DIGITAL CAMERA

There are two areas on the east side of Glacier National Park that can be visited without the special ticket required for the Going-To-The-Sun Highway. So, after checking out of our time-share, we moved for a couple of days to the Glacier Park Lodge, built in 1913 by the Great Northern Railway, on the east side.  Two Medicine and Many Glaciers on the east side were inundated with visitors, who like us, did not have a special ticket.  We were turned back by park rangers during out first attempt to enter the park at Two Medicine because there were no parking spaces left.  It was suggested we arrive at this entrance early in the morning and that is what we did the second time.

OLYMPUS DIGITAL CAMERA

One of the scenic locations at Two Medicine is the Running Eagle Falls, a short walk from the parking pullout.  We made that our first stop and because we had arrived early, there were only a couple of cars there.  While photographing the falls, I noticed an American dipper flying along the water flowing from the waterfall.  Dippers are somewhat difficult to find because of their high elevation, clear stream habitat.  Obviously, I had to spend some time locating and photographing this bird.  It was “eagle eye” Jane, however, who spotted them first and had to point me in the right direction.  Eventually I was able to get some good images of the dipper, including a recently fledged immature bird being fed by an adult.  By the time we left Running Eagle Falls the parking area was full and numerous cars were parked along the shoulder of the road.

OLYMPUS DIGITAL CAMERA OLYMPUS DIGITAL CAMERA

OLYMPUS DIGITAL CAMERA OLYMPUS DIGITAL CAMERA

From the Glacier Park Lodge to Many Glaciers is normally a little over an hour’s drive.  This year, however, the entrance road from Babb to the park entrance station, an eleven mile stretch, was under construction, making this section of the route dusty, bumpy and slow.  When coming to Glacier National Park, we usually include a visit to Many Glaciers because we have had fairly good luck in finding large mammal wildlife there. 

OLYMPUS DIGITAL CAMERA OLYMPUS DIGITAL CAMERA

Fishcap Lake, a short hike from the Swiftcurrent Lodge parking area, is where moose are frequently seen and that was our objective.  We checked out Fishcap Lake for moose twice.  The first time, we got there mid-morning and it started to rain shortly after we arrived.  We were not prepared for rain and settled ourselves under the protective canopy of trees along the shore of the lake and waited, and waited.  We were far from being the only moose watchers along the edge of the lake.  Other likeminded visitors were practicing patience waiting for one of the big animals to appear.  Finally after more than an hour of waiting, the call “moose” went out from somewhere among the spotters along the lake. A female moose and calf had come out of the forest at the far side of the lake.  She and her newborn scurried along the edge of the lake for a few seconds and disappeared from view among the willow bushes.  Only if you happened to have your camera pointed in the right direction could a shot be obtained while the moose was in the open.  Fortunately, my camera and I were looking where the moose appeared and was able to get an image of the adult and calf trotting along the edge of the lake.

OLYMPUS DIGITAL CAMERA

We arrived in the early morning for our second visit to Fishcap Lake.  It was a gorgeous sunny morning with brilliant reflections in the lake water, just the kind of morning you would love to have a moose walk into the lake.  Well that did not happen.  I waited and waited for more than three hours before my patience ran out.  Jane had the good sense to leave long before I did to relax at the Lodge.  The only distraction that occurred while waiting for a moose to appear was that a large spotted frog had jumped into the lake right in front of us.  It had been startled by a hiker passing by and offered some photographic relief during an otherwise boring morning.

OLYMPUS DIGITAL CAMERA OLYMPUS DIGITAL CAMERA

OLYMPUS DIGITAL CAMERA OLYMPUS DIGITAL CAMERA

Glacier National Park is a special place and we enjoy every visit.  This July visit was unique.  Most of our visits to the park have been in late September.  Turned out that one of our neighbors also has a time-share at Glacier Wilderness Resort and we traded our time in September for their time in July.  This visit provided us a different view of the park with colorful wildflowers, instead of the golden aspen trees of fall, and young baby animals, instead of the larger grown up animals intent on bulking up for the winter hibernation.  I would be remiss, however, if not mentioning that this visit in July was hampered by extremely smoky conditions from the many wildfires in the west.  We felt sorry for first time park visitors who were not being able to clearly see the grandeur of the peaks and valleys of the great Rocky Mountains.

Other images from this trip have been added to the Glacier National Park sub-gallery in the National Parks and Monuments main gallery.

OLYMPUS DIGITAL CAMERA OLYMPUS DIGITAL CAMERA

Crested Butte, established in 1878, was historically a coal mining town.  With the decline in the need for coal, mining operations closed down in the early 1950’s and in the 1960’s Crested Butte re-emerged as a ski destination.  During the summer, Crested Butte is a haven for dirt bike enthusiast with dozens of bike trails through the Gunnison National Forest.  Of course, we were there for the wildflowers and were not disappointed.

OLYMPUS DIGITAL CAMERA OLYMPUS DIGITAL CAMERA

OLYMPUS DIGITAL CAMERA OLYMPUS DIGITAL CAMERA

Colorado Highway 135 dead ends at Crested Butte and from Crested Butte there are only dirt roads leading west and north.  I had consulted a guide book to Colorado’s best wildflower photography locations around Crested Butte by Andy Cook, a well known Colorado photographer.   So, Jane and I traversed all these roads in our quest to locate wildflowers locations mentioned in the guide book.  Each day we selected a different track to explore and we discovered the vast aspen forests and scenic backcountry of the Rocky Mountains around Crested Butte.  Jane’s favorite was the Ohio Creek Road with its stunning vistas and majestic mountains.  My favorite was Gothic Road that yielded vast alpine fields of wildflowers.

OLYMPUS DIGITAL CAMERA OLYMPUS DIGITAL CAMERA

OLYMPUS DIGITAL CAMERA OLYMPUS DIGITAL CAMERA

OLYMPUS DIGITAL CAMERA OLYMPUS DIGITAL CAMERA

In addition to the colorful displays of wildflowers, we also encountered a variety of wildlife, including mule deer, yellow bellied marmots, the ubiquitous golden mantled ground squirrel, a lone sandhill crane, and a fox.  Since my selection of camera equipment was based on flower photography, some of the wildlife, particularly birds, was too far away for my shorter focal distance lenses.  Nevertheless, some good images were acquired.  I will place the photos from this trip in a new gallery titled “Crested Butte, Colorado”.

OLYMPUS DIGITAL CAMERA OLYMPUS DIGITAL CAMERA

OLYMPUS DIGITAL CAMERA OLYMPUS DIGITAL CAMERA

Jane and I so enjoyed the beauty of these high alpine mountain settings that we are committed to returning to Crested Butte for a future fall foliage photography expedition.

The adventure began with our drive to Page through the Navajo Nation.  At more than 27,400 square miles, it is the largest reservation in the U.S. and bigger than ten states. We stopped at Window Rock, the capitol city of the Navajo Nation, and made a short visit to the Window Rock Tribal Park and Veteran’s Memorial.  We then followed Highway 264, the Navajo Code Talkers Highway, past the Hubbell Trading Post where Jane and I had stopped in 2008.  It is now a National Historic Site and, unfortunately, we found it closed due to covid restrictions.  Highway 264 changed to the Hopi Code Talkers Highway as we entered the Hopi reservation.  The Hopi reservation is totally surrounded by the Navajo reservation and only about a tenth its size.  In 2008 we had toured Second Mesa, the center of Hopi culture, with a Hopi guide.  This time we merely reminisced as we drove through the reservation.

Our destination for this first travel day was the Cliff Dwellers Lodge near Marble Canyon in Arizona.  The Cliff Dwellers Lodge was the launching place for a three day photo tour of White Pocket in the Vermilion Cliffs National Monument.  This was no run-of-the-mill photo tour.  To reach White Pocket, there was a two hour ride from the Cliff Dwellers Lodge with at least half of that on unimproved House Rock Valley Road and other 4-wheel drive dirt tracks with deep sand sandstone slick rock.  When Jane and I were at White Pocket in 2008 it was only for a few hours.  This time it was two whole days and that meant camping out on the remote Paria Plateau.

OLYMPUS DIGITAL CAMERA OLYMPUS DIGITAL CAMERA

The photo tour was sponsored by Arizona Highways PhotoScapes and the camp outfitter was Kanab, Utah, based Dreamland Safari Tours.  They set up our camp, provided tents, sleeping bags, mats and meals.  It had been literally decades since either of us had slept on the ground in a tent.  In anticipation of this adventure, camping out under the stars far from civilization was expected to be an incredibly exciting experience.  In real time, however, we found it to be a struggle squirming into sleeping bags in the confinement of a small tent.  Mother Nature also dealt us a nasty blow by offering night time temperatures well below normal.  We were pretty uncomfortable that first night.  The second night was much better because Dreamland had communicated with their office in Kanab to dispatch extra blankets to the camp.  All in all, however, camp life was enjoyable and we had seven other good-natured photographers to share the ambiance of camp life.

OLYMPUS DIGITAL CAMERA

OLYMPUS DIGITAL CAMERA OLYMPUS DIGITAL CAMERA

White Pocket is an intriguing photographic destination of multicolored Navajo sandstone formations.  A grayish white sandstone layer covers red sandstone creating cross-bedded, twisted, swirling, multicolored formations creating a fantasy landscape. The whole colorful outcropping is only a couple of miles long and the sandstone provides a gritty surface for boots to cling to making traction easy on the undulating terrain.  Camping out provided the opportunity to photograph the fascinating White Pocket formation at sunrise and sunset.  As a bonus, I was also able to practice some night sky photography, with mixed results however.

Images of White Pocket are located in the National Parks and Monuments Gallery under Vermilion Cliffs National Monument.

OLYMPUS DIGITAL CAMERA

The photo tour ended at the Cliff Dwellers Lodge where it has started.  After gathering our gear and bidding adieu to our fellow photographers, Jane and I headed to Page for a good long shower and a much needed nap.  I had scheduled three nights in Page and Jane had made reservations for a king room at the Hyatt Place hotel, a smart, modern, new facility.  We thoroughly enjoyed the space of a king room after two nights in a small tent.  The next morning was a sleep-in and the day was set aside for some shopping in Page.  The pandemic, however, had caused many shops to close or go out of business.  We did manage to do some browsing and found the same Mexican restaurant, Fiesta Mexicana, where we had dined thirteen years ago.

OLYMPUS DIGITAL CAMERA

That evening, around sunset, I had scheduled a scenic flight over Lake Powell with American Aviation Air Tours in Page.  A scenic flight was something we had not done on our previous trip to Page and something new to look forward to.  It was an old, well worn, Cessna that transported us upward and around Lake Powell.  Covid protocol imposed by American Aviation prevented Jane from occupying the co-pilot seat and required both of us to sit in the narrow back seats.  That meant that I could not move back and forth between windows in order to have the sun at my back for proper photographic lighting.  For this flight, however, photography was a secondary consideration and enjoying a scenic flight over an extremely scenic lake was the prime objective.

Images from the scenic flight can be found in the National Parks and Monuments Gallery under Glen Canyon National Recreation Area.

OLYMPUS DIGITAL CAMERA

My diverse itinerary had us up early the next morning for a hike into Buckskin Gulch, reportedly the longest and deepest slot canyon on the Colorado Plateau.  I had arranged for a guide with Seeking Treasure Adventures, out of Kanab, to lead us to the slot canyon.  There are two primary trails to Buckskin Gulch, the Middle Route and the Wire Pass trail that was described as the moderate approach.  We met our guide, Hunter Bell, at Big Water, Utah, and he drove us to the trail head.  I had assured Jane that the Wire Pass trail would be easy and that we could always turn back when we had reached our hiking limit.  What I failed to understand was that the two trail heads do not start at the same location and that Hunter, not realizing that we had opted for the easy route, had taken us to the Middle Route trail head.

OLYMPUS DIGITAL CAMERA

After some discussion about the difficulty of the Middle Route, Hunter assured us that we were in good enough condition to take on this more challenging approach.  Of course how Hunter could tell we were in good enough shape, I don’t know.  In the end, we trusted his instinct as a guide and proceeded toward Buckskin Gulch.  In actuality there is no defined “trail” and Hunter guided us across open desert terrain.  The Utah tourist office web site describes the middle route as “a short, no-nonsense approach to the lower reaches of Buckskin Gulch – a cross-country and wash route - good route finding ability required - very strenuous - Class 3 and Class 4 down-climbing to enter Buckskin Gulch”.

After about an hour and half of hiking cross country we reached Buckskin Gulch.  The slot canyon appeared right in front of us one hundred feet below.  This is where all of Hunter’s encouragement, enthusiasm and guiding skill was needed to get the two of us down that last, extremely steep, one hundred feet.  He helped us find hand and foot holds carved into the sandstone centuries before by indigenous people that had used this exit from the slot canyon as an ancient trade route.  I don’t know how we managed, but with adrenaline flowing Jane and I both made it to the bottom and into Buckskin Gulch.  After spending some time exploring and photographing the slot canyon we returned to the dreaded one hundred foot cliff to start our ascent back up.  Our hearts were still beating by the time we returned to Hyatt Place.  We were full of excitement about what we had accomplished and surprised that we had the stamina and courage to do it.  Hunter had been correct that we were in good enough shape.

Images from this adventure can be found in the Buckskin Gulch Gallery.

OLYMPUS DIGITAL CAMERA OLYMPUS DIGITAL CAMERA

OLYMPUS DIGITAL CAMERA OLYMPUS DIGITAL CAMERA

Fortunately my itinerary called for a late start the next day and we savored relaxing as we packed our bags.  Early that afternoon, the plan was to meet guides from Action Photo Tours at Big Water for an overnight trip to Alstrom Point on the north shore of Lake Powell.  In 2008 Jane and I had driven the 4Runner to Alstrom Point but only stayed a few hours.  We did not want to traverse the four-wheel drive track to return to Page in the dark.  This photo tour would allow us to be at this popular scenic location overlooking Lake Powell at both sunset and sunrise.  The downside was another night in a small tent.  We were rewarded, however, with the classic panoramic view of Gunsight Butte and Navajo Mountain at sunset.  I also got some good tips from the guides about night sky photography.  All I have to do now is learn Photoshop, not an easy task.

Images from Alstrom Point can be found in the National Parks and Monuments Gallery under Glen Canyon National Recreation Area.

OLYMPUS DIGITAL CAMERA

OLYMPUS DIGITAL CAMERA

OLYMPUS DIGITAL CAMERA OLYMPUS DIGITAL CAMERA OLYMPUS DIGITAL CAMERA

The Alstrom Point photo tour returned us to Big Water mid-morning the next day. From Big Water we drove back to Hyatt Place to retrieved our stored bags, had lunch at our now favorite Mexican restaurant, and started our way back home.  On the way home, just before reaching Farmington, New Mexico, we achieved yet one more significant travel milestone.  To be correct it was the always faithful and dependable Toyota 4Runner that achieved this milestone as it clocked 225,000 miles on the odometer.  Since 2004 the 4Runner has been our companion on many memorable adventures.

The primary destination for this exploration was Silver City in Grant County.  During my research I had learned about several rock art sites in the Silver City area that I wanted to photograph.  However, I was unable to find any specific directions on the internet to locate these sites.  The general information I did find would have me searching a vast area of desert terrain without any assurance of success.  Eventually I stumbled upon the web site for the Grant County Archaeological Society and contacted them to see if one of their members would be willing to guide me to the rock art sites.

In a favorable response, Kyle Meredith, the Society’s president, indicated that he would be willing to guide me.  After several email communications, Kyle and I had decided on an itinerary and time frame to visit several rock art sites.  Best of all, it turned out that Kyle had a guest house where we could stay during our Silver City tour.  We arranged to lodge in Kyle's guest house for five nights giving us four whole days for exploration.

On our way to Silver City, Jane and I first stopped at The Very Large Array, the National Radio Astronomy Observatory, located on the Plains of San Agustin, about 50 miles west of Socorro in central New Mexico.  This astronomical observatory consists of 27 radio antennas, each 82 feet in diameter.  The science about this facility is way, way over my head, but suffice it to say that the radio antennas can look into deep space and have enabled scientists to make many profound discoveries about the universe and our own Milky Way galaxy.  Due to covid the visitor center was closed but we could drive up to the gate and observe the antennas from the entrance road.

OLYMPUS DIGITAL CAMERA

OLYMPUS DIGITAL CAMERA

From The Very Large Array, we traversed along U.S. Highway 60 to New Mexico Highway 12 and on to U.S. Highway 180, the long way to Silver City.  We made a slight detour to check out an alleged ghost town.  In the late 1800’s rich gold and silver veins were discovered in the area leading to the establishment Mogollon (pronounced mo-gie-yon), a wild-west mining town.  In its heyday, Mogollon hosted a population of several thousand.  Today only a handful of people reside in Mogollon and most of its wooden and adobe buildings stand abandoned.  We did not linger long and continued to our next objective, the Catwalk National Recreational Trail.

OLYMPUS DIGITAL CAMERA

OLYMPUS DIGITAL CAMERA

The Catwalk was something we just had to see since our route to Silver City went right by it.  In the 1890’s an ore processing mill was constructed at the head of Whitewater Canyon.  To generate power and operate the mill a water pipeline was constructed down Whitewater Canyon and a wooden-plank boardwalk, was constructed over the pipeline.  That was the original catwalk.  As the mines ran out and the mill fell into ruin, the catwalk also disintegrated.  In the 1930’s the Civilian Conservation Corps was assigned the task of rebuilding the catwalk as a recreational attraction for the Gila National Forest.  The CCC catwalk was destroyed by a major flood down Whitewater Canyon in 2012.  Today’s catwalk is a modern, structurally sound, steel reconstruction that is cantilevered out from the steep canyon cliffs over Whitewater Creek.

OLYMPUS DIGITAL CAMERA OLYMPUS DIGITAL CAMERA

As we hiked back down Whitewater Canyon we noticed some lady birders with field glasses searching the distant trees for birds.  I could not help but ask what they had in their sights.  At the moment they were observing a yellow warbler but had recently seen an American dipper just downstream.  After getting directions to where the dipper had been seen Jane and I searched for it without success.  As we headed back to the parking lot, one of the birders called after us to say that the dipper was back.  We followed her back but I could not see the bird until she let me look through her binoculars.   Then I saw it but could not believe than an American dipper would be in this desert environment.  But there it was and I took several pictures.  Later, I checked the distribution of this bird and found that it is a year round resident in a few higher mountain locations in southern New Mexico.

OLYMPUS DIGITAL CAMERA

We arrived in Silver City around 5:00 PM where we met Kyle and were introduced to the guest house, Casa Otra, and to Kyle’s partner Josh.  Casa Otra was a comfortable, extensively modified, mobile home jam packed with a vast variety of knickknacks accumulated by Kyle and Josh over many years.  To welcome us, Kyle had prepared a chicken curry dish that the four of us enjoyed while getting to know each other. What a great way to start a four day exploration of the Silver City area. 

Our first outing was a day long trip to rock art locations in Frying Pan Canyon and Pony Hills in the remote China Draw area north of Deming.  Kyle and Josh had been out in these areas a number of times and they scouted ahead locating the best petroglyph panels for me to photograph.  It was at Pony Hills that Josh got the surprise of his life.  Leaning over one of several deep mortar holes ground into the bedrock by ancient people, he came face to face with a hissing rattle snake.  With an instant startled reaction, Josh bounded backward, high into the air, landing on a boulder several feet away.  Lucky for Josh he kept his balance but he was physically shaken by sight of the rattler.

OLYMPUS DIGITAL CAMERA

The next day was very windy so we decided to head north forty miles on Highway 15 to the Gila Cliff Dwellings National Monument.  These cliff dwellings were built in naturally eroded alcoves around 700 years ago by the Tularosa Mogollon people.  Due to covid social distancing restrictions, we could not enter the dwellings and could only photograph them from the trail below.  That was a bit disappointing but gives us reason to return post-covid.  I did not add any images from the Gila Cliff Dwellings National Monument to my galleries.

OLYMPUS DIGITAL CAMERA

OLYMPUS DIGITAL CAMERA

The following day was still windy and we decided to spend the morning roaming the galleries of Silver City’s Historic District.  Most galleries were open, with capacity restrictions, and we enjoyed the variety of arts and crafts displayed.  Of course, you can’t view all this creative work without some temptation to purchase and, needless to say, we gave in to that temptation.  Later in the afternoon we headed south on Highway 180 to New Mexico’s City of Rocks State Park.  The “city” is a geologic formation made up of large, eroded volcanic rock columns separated by trails mimicking city streets. Millions of years in the making, the City of Rocks was a fascinating place to visit and photograph.  Images from this “city” can be found in the State Parks gallery.

OLYMPUS DIGITAL CAMERA OLYMPUS DIGITAL CAMERA

Our last day in Silver City was again devoted to rock art photography.  This time Kyle and Josh guided us to Apache Flats and Apache Tank north of Interstate 10 along Doña Ana County Road 001.  Although there are some historic Apache petroglyphs, most are attributed to the Mogollon culture, one of the major prehistoric cultures, who occupied this region of New Mexico for over twelve hundred years.  Jane and I concluded that without Kyle and Josh’s knowledge about where to find the petroglyph panels we would not have found them by ourselves.  We treated our hosts to a farewell dinner at the Little Toad Creek Brewery & Distillery where we savored some locally crafted brews.  The rock art images from this trip can be found in the Rock Art gallery.

OLYMPUS DIGITAL CAMERA OLYMPUS DIGITAL CAMERA

Carlsbad Cavern National Park was our next objective.  From Silver City, the drive to Carlsbad is a reasonable six hours.  We chose to break up the drive with lunch in Cloudcroft, a small pioneer village nestled in the pine trees of the Sacramento Mountains at an elevation of 8,700 feet.  Dave’s Café was the only choice in Cloudcroft, so we munched on a tasty lunch there and then browsed some of the gift stores where Jane was able to replenish her supply of bulk teas.

Historically, the city of Carlsbad had an agricultural economy with the Pecos River providing needed irrigation water.  Today, the city’s economy is boosted by oil and natural gas production from the Permian Basin that underlies southeastern New Mexico.  The famous Carlsbad Caverns are located about thirty minutes south of town and provide a substantial tourist trade.  Much of what you see driving the main drag into Carlsbad has an older, industrial look.  So, Jane and I decided to take a spin off the main highway and discovered some affluent neighborhoods with very large, beautiful homes along the Pecos River frontage.

The caverns are spectacular and worthy of national park status. Current restrictions required that time specific entrance tickets be obtained on a first come first served basis.  I got our timed tickets in advance, on line, before leaving home.  To ensure sufficient time for photography in the cave, I had purchased tickets for two separate days.  Jane joined me for the first day but opted out to relax instead in our Candlewood Suites hotel room the second day.  I had plenty of time to photograph because once in the cave you could stay as long as you wanted, up to closing time.  Getting good images in the dark cavern with only scattered accent lighting was difficult.  Fortunately, tripods were permitted in the cave and that allowed me to take long exposure as well as HDR (High Dynamic Range) shots.  Still, the results were not great.  You can see images from Carlsbad Caverns in the National Parks & Monuments gallery.

OLYMPUS DIGITAL CAMERA OLYMPUS DIGITAL CAMERA