[ Lost in the Landscape ]

the yellowstone fires, 20 years later

It seems a lot of my recent posts have had something to do with fire. Living in Southern California during the fall, fire is a constant worry at the edges of the city. This year saw some bad examples, but we’ve got our fingers crossed that the worst is over.

When I visited Yellowstone last spring, reminders of the massive 1988 fires were everywhere, with fire-downed trees still to be seen throughout the park. But there were also signs of recovery every place you looked. Some places the fire looked like a distant memory, other places it looked like only last month, a reminder that in a land dominated by cold and snow much of the year, recovery can come slowly.

I took a lot of tourist pictures that trip. I also turned the camera on some of the acres in the park where the burns were still a strong presence. Four of the images will be part of the upcoming 2009 Juried Biennial Exhibition at the William D. Cannon Art Gallery in Carlsbad, in North-County San Diego. The jurors of this year’s show, Stephen Hepworth, Curator of the University Art Gallery at UCSD, and Sue Greenwood, Director of Greenwood Fine Art in Laguna Beach, selected forty-eight works by twenty-seven artists.

The public opening is December 13, from 5:00 to 7:00 p.m., and the show runs through February7 of next year. It’s a city-run space and is attached to the public library. Admission is free. Stop by if you’re in the neighborhood!

Here are a couple of the images that will be in the show. The first, “Burned Slope II,” features a site in the north of the park where recovery seemed just about the slowest.

A photograph can describe things clearly. You can see the slow decay of the wood, along with subtle signs of regeneration.

But I’m also interested in a photograph that can reach for things that aren’t at all about quantifying the world. I like how the slope here gives you a sense of simultaneously looking down on the scene as well as out across it, making the space—and maybe even time—seem ambiguous, like a puzzle needing to be worked out slowly.

The second, “Hoop on Burned Tree,” was shot behind the employee housing near Tower Falls. The scene made me laugh. When life give you fire and burned trees, well, why not take advantage of a difficult situation and make yourself a basketball court next to a scorched pine?

December 04 2008 | Categories: art • landscape • photography • places | Tags: basketball • Carlsbad • fire • William D. Cannon Art Gallery • Yellowstone National Park | 4 Comments »

in the garden

I’ve been working on printing some of my Yellowstone photographs. While I wait for the scanner to scan and the printer to do its thing it’s a perfect opportunity to step outside and snap some random pictures of what’s going on in the garden.

The first Cherokee Purple tomato, grown from seed saved from farmer’s market tomatoes last year: I’ve been watching it turn color for a week now, and I thought it was finally time to pick it. It’s smaller than most of the other fruits on the plant, but I’m guessing it’ll be pretty tasty…

Peruvian daffodil (Hymenocallis festalis): John’s sister sent down a little package of presents the last time she visited over ten years ago. A bulb of this plant was in that package. That one bulb has multiplied all over the place, some in places where we put it, others in places where soil with the some bulb offsets was moved to. And some are even coming in places—like the lawn—where it probably have only arrived via seed.

This plant clearly has a life wish. No problem. We like it. It’s happy with little or heavy watering, dappled shade to full sun. And it smells great.

A moth that died in the arms of Drosera dichotoma ‘Giant,’ a carnivorous sundew in the bog garden: When I first put out some carnivores I was thinking, “Ooh cool! Bug-eating plants!” Now that I’m starting to see all the carnage—this moth, plenty of gnats, and a beautiful orange dragonfly—I’m starting to worry about my ethics. I’m a vegetarian, so why can’t the plants be too? Still, I guess it’s some sort of karmic payback: I eat veggies, so some of my veggies eat meat.

The flowering stem of another carnivore, Drosera x ‘Marston Dragon.’ Droseras have a reputation for reseeding like weeds. No weeds spotted so far, but it’s early yet in the season…

This sad little lupine is the descendant of a package of seeds that were given out at a wedding we went to on the Olympic Peninsula in Washington State. There was a bare spot in the yard, so the package got emptied into it. But there was a reason the spot was bare: The area got almost no water and even weeds had a hard time getting a hold. The lupines never have attained much size—this one is less than four inches tall—but enough keep coming back to remind us of that misty summer day.

And oh yeah, here are a couple of the images I’m printing up. The first one: Undine Falls, Yellowstone National Park. The second: Tower Falls Viewpoint, Yellowstone National park.

[caption id=”attachment_557” align=”alignnone” width=”240” caption=”Tower Falls viewpoint”][/caption]

July 27 2008 | Categories: my garden | Tags: carnivorous plants • Cherokee Purple tomato • Drosera dichotoma • Drosera Marston Dragon • Hymenocallis festalis • in bloom • lupines • Peruvian daffodil • Tower Falls • Undine Falls • Yellowstone National Park | 2 Comments »

virtual vacations: now

Don’t you love it when you talk about two separate things and then something happens that forces an unexpected convergence of the two? Earlier I was doing some Google Street View sightseeing of celebrity gardens. And I’ve posted a few notes (1 2) and photos from my recent Yellowstone trip.

Thanks go to Peter, who the other day pointed out that Google now has added ten parks and recreation areas to Street View, including Yellowstone! So you want to see what the view is along Yellowstone’s Firehole Lake Drive? Just drop into Street View to find out. Of course, like all things virtual, it lacks something of the actual. How will you smell the lodgepole pines or get a whiff of the sulfur fumes rising from the springs?


While Street View is a great tool and can let you get a low-res look at places you’d never visit, it’s really just a presentation tool for canned photography. The views are updated periodically, yes, but the periods span many months. What you’re looking at today is soooo yesterday, and in some ways it feels so Web 1.0.

Web cams offer a complement to Street View and can provide an immediacy the former tool lacks. In fact, if you’re interested in the Old Faithful Geyser and Upper Geyser Basin at Yellowstone, there’s a recently installed web cam at the attraction, with images updated at intervals of less than a minute.

Street View does a nice job of conquering space, giving you the freedom to move around a map and see what there is to see from different locations, and web cams can conquer time by giving you almost-immediate, up-to-date views of things as they’re happening.

What’s the next killer app? What will conquer both space and time?

Will all cars have cameras and GPS installed and then have the images beamed to some central location for real-time descriptions available to anyone on the web so that you can see what things look like right now? And if that happens, who will be the central location serving up the images? Google? The Department of Homeland Security?

June 19 2008 | Categories: landscape • photography • places | Tags: Google Maps • Google Street Views • virtual tourism • Yellowstone National Park | No Comments »

yellowstone “wild” flowers

There were a number of spring flowers doing their thing at Yellowstone a couple weeks ago. I saw a patch of bright yellow and took this photo:

Yes, dandelions. They were all over. I talked to a ranger nearby who said that the park has a big problem with invasive species. He wasn’t a botanical expert, he said, but he thought there was a true wild dandelion, as well as the garden version. Unfortunately, this to me looks like the garden version. They were all over the park, as well as all over Idaho on the way there.

June 12 2008 | Categories: landscape • places | Tags: dandelions • invasive species • weeds • Yellowstone National Park | No Comments »

soil problems

So you think you have problems with uncooperative garden soil? Here’s a juniper trying to hold on to life at Mammoth Hot Springs, in Yellowstone:

June 11 2008 | Categories: gardening • rambles | Tags: bad soil • Mammoth Hot Springs • Yellowstone National Park | No Comments »

on the road–part 2

Late on the night of Day 2 I roll into Idaho’s Craters of the Moon National Monument. Like Yellowstone it showcases some striking volcanic feature, in this case recent eruptions along the local rift zone in the Earth’s crust. Here are a couple shots from Day 3, images of an intense wildflower bloom and of residual ice in Indian Tunnel, a lava tube you can explore.

Then it was on to Yellowstone. Here are some of the pics from there, in no real order.

Upper Falls of the Yellowstone River:

Tourists at Artist’s Point overlooking the Lower Falls of the Yellowstone River. The artist in question is Thomas Moran, who used this vantage point for his famous image of the Grand Canyon of the Yellowstone River.

Spring thaw beginning on Yellowstone Lake:

Clouds and ice, Yellowstone Lake:

Sunset Lake, Black Sand Basin, Yellowstone:

A couple shots from Midway Geyser Basin, from the brink or Excelsior Geyser:

The Jeep didn’t care for the cold, wet weather, and took its own vacation by the side of Yellowstone Lake.

Viewpoint at Ledge Geyser, Black Sand Basin, Yellowstone, with some of the only sunshine all trip:

The worst of the trip’s bison jams, this one when a herd of about five dozen was moving from their breakfast to lunch grazing locations:

Algae in the geyser runoff at Norris Geyser Basin:

What? No pictures of Old Faithful? Sorry. There’s a couple hundred more of these tourist pictures but I’ll spare you. Once I start printing up some of my more “serious” photographic work and have something to show I’ll post a few more images.

June 08 2008 | Categories: landscape • photography • places | Tags: geysers • hot springs • tourists • Valley of the Moon National Monument • viewpoints • Yellowstone National Park | 2 Comments »