If you’re like me, one of the reasons you go hiking is to try to capture some awe-inspiring digital photos of your experience. Grand vistas, sweeping mountain ranges, and … bugs?
The Digital Photography School has a great write-up on macro photography for digital cameras up right now. For those not in the know, macro is the art of eschewing the traditional mountaintop shots for super close ups of dirt, pebbles, insects, and anything else the passing hikers’ eye would normally miss.
What’s nice about this guide is that it’s for the simple, cheap, point-and-shooters that most amateur Ansel Adams’ take on the trail with ‘em. I mean, I wouldn’t mind having a nice SLR, but I’m a bit adverse to their bulkiness. And, you know, their price.
Personally, I use a Ricoh Caplio R5 I picked up when I was in Japan this year (full review forthcoming), and it’s got a fairly robust built-in macro mode. Helpful for when you want to make a swarm of ladybugs like this:
… a bit more personal. Like this:
tipped off by Hiking Ideas.
‘Ultralight’ is the big buzzword among hikers and campers, and for good reason. As soon as you get that backpack strapped to your body, you immediately start wishing you had lighter versions of everything you own.
So what do you do if you want to end your day at camp damaging a few brain cells with the wonderful liquid known as alcohol, but you don’t want to deal with the additional liquid weight?
The fine folks at Hiking Ideas have some interesting ideas involving Crystal Light, as well as a low-weight, high-gin recipe for a packable nip. And if, like me, you have a little trouble falling asleep in camp, this sounds like it would do the trick but good.
From one of this week’s Writers’ Almanacs:
“I turn for solace to rivers, rain, trees, birds, lakes, animals. If things are terrible beyond conception and I walk for 25 miles in the forest, they seem to go away for a while.â€
- Jim Harrison, author.
The EPA granted California permission to require small engines (which generally have dirtier emissions than their larger cousins) to have catalytic converters that cut smog by 40%.
The law goes into effect January 1st. Every little bit helps.
Eagle Mountain is a well-preserved, fairly recently operating ghost town. It’s privately held land just southeast of Joshua Tree National Park, surrounded on three sides by federal property. It was once a mining town. Then, when that got unprofitable, it became a prison site. Now that’s gone, so the owners are trying to turn it into a dump.
According to the Associated Press, the owners already have the rights to do so, and Los Angeles County wants to buy. The county
agreed to buy the Joshua Tree property for $41 million once the lawsuits were resolved and wants to send about 20,000 tons of garbage there each day for 100 years.
They would have started shipping my beloved county’s garbage in by 1987, if it weren’t for the shrewd legal action of the Charpieds - two jojoba farmers who’ve made it a personal mission to stop the Kaiser Company from getting into the trash transit trade. They were (rightly) concerned about the increased noise and air pollution, not to mention the trash dump leeching into water supplies in the area.And, you know, the fact that they were trying to put a landfill right outside a National Park.
The case is up for another appeal next year, and although the Charpieds have already gotten two judges to rule Kaiser’s environmental impact study incomplete, you never know.
Here’s to hoping we won’t be seeing clouds of seagulls southeast of J-Tree anytime soon.
I made the mistake of reading and believing in the National Weather Service’s reports for southern California last night. Rain was already falling in Los Angeles late Saturday night, and the reports said it would continue into Sunday afternoon, with 1-3 inches of snow in the upper elevations of the San Gabriels.
So I unset my alarm and prepared to sleep in on Sunday for a change. When I did wake up at 9:30, it was to crystal clear blue skies.
It only rains here maybe two weeks out of the year. You think they’d be able to get those days correct.
But oh well.
Because I’d feel bad if I didn’t do something at least tangentially related to the outdoors on my Sunday, I made a trip up to Griffith Park to the Autry National Center. The museum itself is a pretty comprehensive interpretive history of the American West - it’s early times, colonization, and Americanization. But of particular interest to hikers is their current exhibition, “Yosemite: Art of An American Icon.”
It’s a two-part, semi-staggered exhibition of works. The first consists of paintings, drawings, photographs, and artifacts from 1855-1969, the second from 1969 to the present. The opening gallery begins with early landscape sketches of the Valley, relatively undisturbed and pristine. Soon thereafter, the gallery is filled with promotional images intended to draw settlers and prospectors to exploit the same idyllic wilderness.
It’s also got a few paintings of early Victorian hikers. Crossing a raging river on a log while wearing a giant dress and corset? Yeah, I think we have it easier.
The first galley also has an excellent collection of early Muybridge and Ansel Adams prints, as well as some really interesting paintings. Of particular note were the works by Chiura Obata (comprehensive but infuriatingly slow Flash site here, better image gallery here), a Japanese immigrant who captured the American landscape in a traditional Japanese style:
New Moon, Eagle Peak - Chiura Obata
As the gallery progresses onward, it starts to present modern man’s impact on Yosemite. The first automobile at Glacier Point, movie cameras, and even what may be the very first instance picture of trail litter (lower left):
Yosemite Valley from Glacier Point - William Hahn
The second gallery really nails this point home, and is comprised mostly of photographs. As it’s more modern, much of the art is infused with irony and self-awareness to show off our dysfunctional relationship with the nature of Yosemite, which is both funny and slightly depressing.Perhaps the best example of the negative impact of tourism on Yosemite is an unassuming black and white photo by Rondal Partridge, called “Pave it and Paint it Green.” Thankfully, the area in this picture was restored back to its original, grassy state:
And on the flipside, there’s the iconic “Woman with Scarf at Inspiration Point” by Roger Mitnick. At first, it appears to be another comment on the oversaturation of commerce in the Yosemite Valley. But there’s something about that unnamed woman staring off into the distance …
I can remember when I first rounded a bend in the road and caught a glimpse of the Valley in full. You see it, and you’re speechless. Pictures don’t prepare you, and all you can do is pull over to the side of the road and silently take it all in. Personally, while I’m inclined to reduce accessibility of cars into National Parks, I don’t know if I could sleep soundly knowing that someone - anyone - was denied their chance to see something so majestic.
It’s a balance, I guess.
- Yosemite: Art of an American Icon runs at the Autry National Center before traveling to Reno and Indianapolis.
- Gallery One, 1855-1969 is open through January 21st. Gallery Two, 1969-Today is open through April 22nd.
- Admission is nine dollars for the museum, six and change if you’ve got your Triple A card on you. And who in L.A. doesn’t have Triple A?
- Go to freshen up your on-trail snapshot skills. And for map junkies, the permanent exhibit has some great early maps of the frontier explorations.
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