Category: Travel

The Grand Gulch II (25 Years Ago)

A little while ago I posted a few pictures from the Grand Gulch in Utah. This year, almost to the day, it is 25 years ago that I went there with a few hiking friends from Berkeley.

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One of them is now Math Professor in Utah. I don’t know the fate of the others in the picture. I see him occasionally at conferences.

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Pictures like the ones above are misleading. The gulch is mostly a narrow canyon, and if you think there is an exit just around the corner, it is a dead end.

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There is water, but not much. Seeing a stream like the one below is rare and means you better fill your water bottles.

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The week long hike leaves ample time to contemplate the beauty of natural walls.

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Teotihuacan (25 Years Ago)

The first three days of my Winter Break excursion to Mexico in 1993 I spent in Mexico City, and one of them in Teotihuacan.

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By bus it takes about an hour to get there. I should have arrived much earlier, to beat the crowds and have better light. One of the most fascinating aspects of this place is how little we know about it.

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It had been abandoned by about 700 CE, reaching a population well over 100,000 before. The reasons? We don’t know. Who lived there? We don’t know. Of course there are speculations and theories. 

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What fascinates me is the discrepancy between the longevity of what’s preserved and the fragility of what is gone. Did they care what would survive? If we knew we’d be gone in a century, would we care to leave something behind?

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Would it be art, pomp, or an attempt of a message?

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Perhaps it should just be a vision: This is how we liked it to be. This was us. 

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Fern Canyon 2 (Not Ferns 4)

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The canyonesque nature of the Fern Canyon State Park makes one forget that this place is next to the coast, which empasizes the contrast between the complexity of the ferns and the simplicity of the beachscape.

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This is a place to enjoy the lack of presence, which has dissolved into a beautiful grainy gray.

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Time passes gently,2018 06 11 11 01 29 NIKON CORPORATION NIKON D750

and allows for modest reflection.

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Fern Canyon (Ferns 2)

After the modest ferns from last week, let’s indulge. One of the places to be is the Fern Canyon in the Prairie Creek Redwoods State Park, which lies, alas, in Northern California.

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Most people who make it into the coastal redwoods that far north don’t bother to take the windy detour to that state park and trail head. Here is what they miss.2018 06 11 10 22 12 NIKON CORPORATION NIKON D750

The vertical walls of the short canyon are packed with ferns.

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Their gentle motion is impossible to capture in a photograph.

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At some places, they appear to float before a darker background.

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After seeing this, you will keep dreaming of a house with walls like this.

Leadville (Colorado V)

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That little town you can maybe make out to the left and behind the lake up above is Leadville. At just over 10,000 feet, it is the highest incorporated city in the US, and used to be a bustling mining town, as the name hints at.

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There are attempts to cash in on the town’s history, like in charming Jerome.

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But while the drive-through city center is well kept eye-candy, the mining area tells another story.

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It doesn’t take long until things fall apart beyond repair…, but fortunately, sometimes they do this in style.

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The aesthetic appeal is enormous, maybe because a true relic conveys a stronger message than a fake facade. 

 

Green is a Difficult Color (Treescapes III / Colorado IV)

Getting to higher elevation in late spring is a problem in Colorado, not so much because of snow, but because of the streams with hip deep and ice cold water that one has to cross. DSC 8735

After a while one resigns into not reaching that peak or lake, and finds consolation in the contemplation of the trees on the other side of the stream.

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I have written twice about treescapes: First about the fall at Red River Gorge State Park in Kentucky, and then about the winter in Brown County State Park. So now it is time for a spring version.

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Green is a difficult color. When I make 2-colored surface images, I usually have a hard time picking a second color that complements any sort of green nicely. On the other hand, I find the natural shades of green in these landscapes positively overwhelming. My theory is that green goes well only with more green, or shades of gray.

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These images are from an attempt to reach the Flat Tops Wilderness. There will be another time.

Crossings (Colorado III)

You need to cross the stream three times until you reach Bridge One…

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Crossing a stream is a well-worn pattern, at least in Western culture: we think of Hades, Lethe, and all that. This post is about the pattern of multiple crossings.

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I was hiking No Name Trail (near Hanging Lake), when I met the hiker who informed me as above. She continued:

 Bridge One is awesome. You should go there. 

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And so I went, crossing the stream three times. A single crossing is like a terminal step, irreversible. Multiple crossings are like a dialogue: Hey, here we meet. We both have changed. Let’s meet again.

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When switching from one side to the other, we accept a change. On No Name Trail, this might be perceived as a change from pine and oak to birch.

…From Bridge One you can go on to Bridge Two…

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At Bridge Two, there is a violent waterfall. Bridge Two itself, broken.

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…You can go even further, to a place I call The Top of the World…

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Will I ever get there?

Hanging Lake (Colorado II)

Last week’s post was a bit of a cliff hanger, and so is Hanging Lake.

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It is precariously sitting on top of a cliff, with waterfalls in the back as a bonus.

 

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The emerald green water creates an eery play between underwater world and the reflections of the upper world behind.

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What more could one wish for? Well, there is more. A very short hike up above is Spouting Rock, a single, taller waterfall that by itself is worth a visit.

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Long time exposure doesn’t do it much good.

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In this case, I like the dramatic spattering or the quiet drip-dropping much better.

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It is a wondrous place. Remember, come early.

Hanging Lake Trail (Colorado I)

Hanging Lake is one of the most popular hikes in Colorado. In the summer, the daily 1000+ visitors don’t hike the trail anymore, but stand in line all the way up and down.DSC 8523

I avoided all this by getting there at 7am, which gave me time to enjoy the trail itself.

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It climbs up steeply among trees and rock cliffs. On a crowded day, it would be impossible not to overlook perfect sceneries like this one.

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The semi-vandalized hut below hints at how much work it must be to maintain the trail and keep it in its almost pristine condition.

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What to do with an incessant stream of visitors? Let it grow, or cut?

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It all depends, of course, what is at the end of the hike. We’ll learn that next week…

First Times (California ’93)

My little series with  pictures from 25 years ago continues with my first hiking trip in California. The idea was to drive up to the trail head of White Mountain Peak, and hike the dirt road to the peak.

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We drove through Yosemite at night (which I hadn’t seen before) and camped at my first hot spring in Owen’s Valley. Soaking in warm water while around you everything freezes and the sky is full of shooting stars convinced me that this had been a good idea. We made it past the Bristlecone Pine Trees, but the car didn’t make it to the trail head (my first car break down).

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We didn’t give up though but continued on foot. The landscape up there (above 10,000 feet) is high elevation desert. 

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After two hours or so we reached the observatory and the actual trailhead. Hiking appears very easy: You just follow the dirt road.

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What is not so easy, however, is the high elevation. Two of use got altitude sickness, including myself (first time!). That was interesting. It started off with gradually worsening headache.

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After a while, my vision got blurry, and me and the other victim turned back to the observatory. While we waited for the two others to return from the summit, we chatted with the friendly personnel. By 10pm, the two other hikers had returned, and we were lucky to hitch a ride on a pickup truck back to our car.

The next morning we stopped for my first visit at Mono Lake.

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