Notes From the Field 2025
PLEASE NOTE: What follows is the Notes From the Field essay that appeared in my 2025 calendars, written before publication in early 2024. I've taken advantage of the unlimited space here to add a few details that, due to space constraints, were not included in the originally published version. Enjoy!
If you read last year’s essay, you know that my wife, Cindy, and I had a pretty eventful year of travel and photography in 2022. Looking back on this past year, it was also very eventful, but in very different ways. The ball was set in motion in September of 2022 while hiking in Rocky Mountain National Park. After decades of carrying a backpack with heavy camera gear, and years of suffering the physical consequences, my arthritic knees were signaling loud and clear that they had had enough. The pain was so debilitating that I made a commitment right there on the trail to finally do something about it. The journey began with visits to orthopedic doctors to determine what was wrong, how bad it was, and what could be done about it. The diagnosis was extensive arthritis, and the cure was two full knee replacements, which would put me out of commission for extended periods of time after each surgery. I didn’t want to lose an entire summer of hiking and photography, so I chose the end of summer 2023 for the first knee, with the second to follow four months later.
Considering that my impending surgeries and the reason for them would limit my ability to hike and backpack in 2023, I decided to try my hand at displaying my photos as fine art prints at art festivals around Colorado. I’ve always said that behind every great photo is the story of its creation, and I’ve always enjoyed sharing those stories. What better way to do so than while standing in front of a humongous print of the subject at hand?
I attended seven art fests that first summer, and quickly discovered that I had vastly underestimated how much work it would take to do these shows. When I devised this scheme, my initial thoughts were that we’d set up the booth, then head to the mountains to camp, shoot sunrise photos before each show day and sunset photos after. The photos rarely materialized because standing in my booth talking to visitors all day was surprisingly exhausting, but not as exhausting as setting up and tearing down with two bad knees. Given the time-consuming nature of doing the shows, we had to decide whether to continue doing them the following year. Ultimately, we decided to keep going, but with a much more limited schedule that wouldn’t impact our summer adventures nearly as much. After all, I have two new knees to play with! If you’re in Colorado during the summer, you can find a schedule of art festival appearances on the Skyline Press website. I’d love to meet you!
Despite a pared down backcountry schedule, the year was not without some excellent travel experiences. Our biggest adventure was spending spring break in Hawaii – a first for me – island hopping so we could hike, camp, and experience a variety of climates on three different islands. Being the mountain lovers we are, we spent an inordinate amount of time bundled up on top of volcanoes when we probably should have spent more time on the beach, but it was a really fun trip regardless.
In May I attended the NANPA (North American Nature Photographers Association) conference in Tucson, and it was nice to be surrounded by lots of like-minded people. Landscape photography, for me anyways, is more or less a solo artistic venture (of course, my non-photographer wife and I share the trail!), so it was fun to talk shop with others in the trade, and spare Cindy the photo widow aspect of my craft for a few days.
I did manage to do a little photography in the Tucson area, as it's surrounded by quite dramatic desert peaks. I didn't come home with a lot of images from there, as I was plagued by not-too-exciting cloudless skies, but here's one I thought was kinda nice.
On the way to the conference and on the way back I made it a point to hit a couple locations in southern New Mexico. I hiked out into White Sands and enjoyed a beautiful sunset, with the warm light of the sky contrasting sharply with the cool tones of the shadowed dunes.
I caught the moon setting behind the dramatic spires of the Organ Mountains on the return trip, and then played around with some road photography. With that S-Curve photo I might become Instagram Famous one day! (probably not...)
Also In May we headed to Grand Teton National Park in Wyoming, and after a few days there we fulfilled one of Cindy’s longtime goals and drove into Yellowstone National Park via the south entrance on the day it opened for the season. I managed to get my first photographs of a grizzly bear as she foraged along a riverbed in the Lamar Valley with her sizable cub. The trip also included encounters with black bears, a moose, a muskrat, a coyote, several pronghorn, and more bison than one could count.
We explored a fascinating area in far southeast Colorado in June, a stone’s throw from the Oklahoma border, and discovered a very primitive, beautiful landscape. Looking into the depths of Picketwire Canyon, where just over the horizon lay the most extensive dinosaur track site in North America, it was easy to imagine the mighty beasts strolling by below. The less fun part of the trip was when we got a flat tire far from civilization. After a quick tire change, we were on our way, only to get a second flat tire just as we were about to turn onto the highway. As a rancher stopped to lend us a hand with his air compressor, the skies opened up and a deluge soaked us all. Oh, and the flat tire wouldn’t hold air. Fun times!
We visited Mesa Verde, where I did my last serious hike before my knees finally had their say, and took the narrow gauge train from Durango to Silverton and back, another first for me. We also kayaked with relatives through mangrove caves in Florida.
We were able to take time between art fairs to camp and photograph comfortably around Colorado, thanks to our new adventure rig. In April we took delivery of a new slide-in, pop-up camper for my truck. Compared to what we were accustomed to – a sleeping pad and sleeping bags strewn about the bed of my truck – having a place to call home, with a sink, a two-burner stove, a fridge, a cozy bed, and above all else, a furnace, was the very definition of luxury. We did, however, narrowly avoid blowing the new rig to smithereens on a trip to Capitol Reef National Park in Utah. Despite only being nine weeks out from my first surgery, I decided I was up for the mildly challenging hike to Cassidy Arch, ignoring my surgeon’s instructions to keep my hiking choices on the “easy” side until 12 weeks post-op. Just after leaving the trailhead, I decided I should go back and get my trekking poles to help with stability on the rocky trail. As Cindy and I approached the truck, we heard a loud screeching sound. Earlier that morning while wiping down the stove after breakfast, we inadvertently turned one of the burners on, and the camper had filled up with propane gas, setting off the carbon monoxide detector. It’s hard to say what might have happened had we not come back for those trekking poles, but it could have ended very badly, for us and for fellow hikers parked nearby.
One of our longer trips of the year took place in November, when we headed west to various national parks in California, with stops at Zion National Park bookending the trip. In Zion on the way out, the fall colors were mostly gone, but a few cottonwoods were still putting on quite a show.
After a brief stop in the Alabama Hills near Lone Pine, California, we made our way to Death Valley, where severe flooding from the remnants of Hurricane Hilary in October had deposited two inches of rain over the area – not a lot by most standards, but in the parched desert landscape of Death Valley, it might as well have been two feet. The flooding closed most of the park when it happened, but in November it was finally coming back to life, although some roads were still not open, and others might never reopen. One of the benefits of the devastation was the return of Lake Manly, a lake on the salt flats of Badwater Basin, the lowest point in the U.S. at 282 feet below sea level. A very rare occurrence, at its peak the lake was seven miles long and four miles wide, and at a depth of two feet, allowed kayakers to ply the waters of this extraordinary, ephemeral body of water. When we arrived, the lake had receded somewhat, but still allowed for some very unique photo opportunities. Another atmospheric river deposited an inch and a half more rain the following February, engorging the lake once more before a dry spring and evaporation allowed the lake to recede and virtually disappear. (If you'd like to see a non-cellphone photo of Mobius Arch in the photo to the left, go here.)
While out exploring the park, I started to get a little nervous about our fuel situation, and noticed the map showed the possibility of a gas station just outside the park on a road that had literally just reopened the day before. So off we went, following the shoreline of the lake until we veered off onto some other random road, and sure enough, we popped out where the gas station was. Lo and behold, the station was open! A quick glance at the price was all I needed to convince myself not to head out with anything less than a full tank of gas in the future, the distances at Death Valley are just so vast. I needed at least a few gallons, and quickly discovered that the dollar amount on that pump was spinning A LOT faster than the gallons dispensed! There are a few stations inside the park, and both were cheaper, we just weren't anywhere near them. The next day we stopped at Stovepipe Wells, where the price per gallon was a few bucks cheaper than our sticker shock experience.
Fall colors in 2023 seemed to last forever (which you can read about here), as we chased the changing leaves from destination to destination, wrapping up in Yosemite National Park in California. At just over 12 weeks post-op, I decided to give my new left knee a real workout, so Cindy and I hiked to the top of Vernal Fall by way of the trail’s hundreds of stone steps. It was great to feel such progress, and it gave me hope for my future hiking adventures.
Speaking of Cindy, she was an absolute rock star through all the trials and travails of 2023. Neither of us knew how all-consuming the art festival circuit would be, and she quickly discovered it was not her thing. I was the one displaying my work and talking about it to the people visiting my booth, all she wanted to do was be out hiking somewhere. Yet there she was, stuck with me, and still making the best of every situation. Where she really shined, however, was during my recovery from the knee surgeries. She was the best nurse a guy could ever hope for, making sure I ate, schlepping ice packs at regular intervals from the kitchen, seeing to it that all my meds were taken when and how they were supposed to be, driving me to physical therapy until I could drive myself. As I write this, I’m less than two weeks from the twelve-week mark since my second surgery, and that’s when I can start getting back into my normal hiking routine. When I reach that milestone, I’m going to grab that girl and take her on a hike. And another. And many more after that.