So Long 2025

When cottonwood leaves along the Rio Grande turn yellow it is a sure sign we are approaching the end of the year.  The color change also triggers the need to close the year with a final Blog.  Here’s what we have been up to since our trip to the Wichita Mountains Wildlife Refuge in September.

Let me start by saying that the U.S. Government shutdown resulted in some cancelled photo ops.  Both the Valles Caldera National Preserve and the Salinas Pueblo Missions National Monument offered night sky photography opportunities that I had signed up for but were cancelled due to the shutdown.  As an alternative, I arranged for a Milky Way photo shoot at Shiprock with Kialo Winter.  Kialo is the owner of Navajo Tours USA and provides guided excursion into the San Juan Basin Badlands in northern New Mexico.  That was in October and that late in the year the Milky Way is not at it’s brightest, but Jane and I had a good time experiencing the dark, night sky and the Milky Way rising above Shiprock.

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Our next trip requires a bit of explanation.  For years now, I have been making coffee table books featuring my photographs.  My current project is a coffee table book about the ancient rock art of the southwest.  This new book highlights rock art of the Archaic, Hohokam, Mogollon, Ancestral Pueblo, and Fremont cultures that occupied the southwest in prehistoric times.  I was lacking photographs of Hohokam rock art, so our next journey was a week-long exploration of Hohokam rock art sites in Arizona.  As usual, Jane had selected very nice places for us to stay in Phoenix and Tucson. With such exceptional accommodations, the trip was almost a relaxing vacation, had it not been for the steep rocky trail we had to navigate to reach various rock art sites.

Dia de los Muertos (Day of the Dear) is a Mexican holiday that is celebrated by Hispanic people throughout the U.S.  The event honors deceased family members and is highlighted with face painting.  Jane and I ventured to Old Town Plaza, in Albuquerque, to join the celebration.  In addition to the Day of the Dead celebration, there was also a dance group performing a traditional and historic Matachine dance honoring the Virgin of San Juan.

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Then, to close our travel year, we made a journey to Churchill, Canada, to photograph polar bears.  Churchill is the polar bear capitol of North America and we were not disappointed, spotting around 20 polar bears on each of out four days on the tundra.  Four nights we lodged at the Tundra Lodge and four days we roamed the Churchill Wildlife Management Area and tundra buggies scouting for bears.  The timing of our trip was fortuitous as ice had started to form on the edges of Hudson Bay and bears were active and energetic in the cold weather.  We watched them rolling in the snow and play fighting as they anticipated returning to the sea ice on Hudson Bay to hunt seals.

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To see a collection of polar bear photos, go to the "Wildlife Refuges and Preserves" gallery and then find the "Churchill Wildlife Management Area" gallery.