Still moving, so more non-Minnesota

Well, still in the early stages of unpacking, but hopefully soon I'll be able to take my camera and do some walking around Northeast. I've got a few ideas lined up already.

Here's a HDR from Colorado, on the gondola from the Village hotel to the ski area. Of course, it doesn't actually take you to the ski area, instead setting you down about a quarter of a mile from the closest lift. Because that's just what you want at the end of a exhausting day of skiing: walking a quarter mile in ski boots.

I made an HDR of this and since it was shot at a fairly high ISO it was noisy as hell. The gondola cars looked like checker boards, spotted with white and red noise. Not owning any fancy noise-reducing software, I made do with the poor man's noise reduction: made a red background and sloppily blended it with the red of the cars

Non-Minnesota: Utah

Moving to a new apartment this weekend, so this post will be short and sweet. This is from Canyonlands, Utah. It's one of my favorite places, with vast expanses of canyons and desert. The whole area is covered in a living bacterial soil, which is the only soil available to plants living there. This is the area around Big Springs, one of the backpacking areas.

Fort Snelling Winter

There comes a time every year for all Minnesotans when the horrors of winter have slowly been forgotten, washed away by pleasant weather, sunshine, and temperatures suitable for sustaining human existence. At such a time, a Minnesotan can start to think about winter in the past tense, instead of having terribly vivid flashbacks of feet upon feet of snow, miserable driving conditions, and cold so chilling it causes your testicles to hibernate. We get to thinking "Well, winter here isn't that bad. Sure, I haven't been warm for 6 months, but was it really so terrible?" This collective amnesia is the only reason anyone actually lives here.

On this note, I can finally post a picture I took this winter without hating the climate it was taken in. This is just off a ski trail in Fort Snelling State Park, done as a hand-held HDR that actually turned out pretty decent.

This photo was also snagged off my flickr photostream to be part of a website about Minneapolis and Fort Snelling

Afton camping

The backpacking area at Afton State Park is one of the greatest places to camp in the state, certainly the best near the Twin Cities. A mile and a half is all you have to hike to get to this gorgeous area with its restored prairie and wide, open campsites. The only catch is THE HILL. The hill is the final obstacle to overcome before you can claim a campsite here, and while you're climbing it you wonder if maybe you should have hired some Sherpas to carry your gear. You wonder if you need to be more concerned with altitude sickness, or at least the heart attack that seems imminent. I've seen a man reach the summit, only to vomit up the port wine he drank for breakfast.

It's well worth the climb, however. In late July/August all the prairie flowers are in bloom, like the yellow coneflowers seen here

Non-Minnesota: Colorado

Shot out in Winter Park, Colorado. Fleeing the harsh Minnesota winters, @julielyda and I took a ski vacation in hopes that the weather would be warm. Warm being a relative Minnesotan term, meaning that we hoped for temperatures in the neighborhood of 30 degrees.

Once we got there, I noticed quite a few of the trees in the mountains were dead or dying, with some areas being completely killed off. Apparentely, pine beetle has been able to expand its range due to global warming. Typically, mountain tops were too cold in the winter for pine beetle to survive, but warmer and warmer winters allowed the pine beetle to move to higher elevations, where the trees that did exist were almost all susceptable to their tiny, gnawing jaws. This shot, I believe, does a good job at giving a sense of the desolation

People Post

It's the fabulous @punsultant, staring hauntingly into the distance. Is it a brighter tomorrow that he sees, or storm clouds on the horizon? Perhaps he is about to unleash the pervy-est old man wink you've ever seen?

On a side note, my landscape-oriented pictured are getting cut off. Any way to resolve this?

Camp on Fall Lake

Since we just booked a trip to the Boundary Waters this week, I'm feeling BWCA nostalgia pretty hard. This was shot on our trip last year on Fall Lake. We took a close, easy campsite on Mile Island that looked cool on our map. When we got there, we found the campsite was on a thin strip of land between two long gorgeous beaches, maybe 40 yards wide. We left this site the next morning to travel up Basswood Lake

I shot this right after sunset, with Big Blue the trusty canoe pulled up on shore.

Afton hiking

Went out hiking in Afton State Park this weekend, which has always been one of my favorite places to go. After a pretty uninspiring attempt at some trail running (drinking tasty beer the night before apparently doesn't count as carbo-loading) we did a quick little hike before taking this shot of my favorite ecosystem, the prairie.

This is a photoblog. From time to time, I will add photos upon it.

This was shot in the Superior National Forest on the Bass Lake Trail. When I was living in Ely, I never got sick of hiking this trail, and about a mile into it you run into this fella.

Bass Lake is really cool, because it used to be a waterway used by loggers in the early 1900's. There was a canal connecting it to a nearby lake, so loggers could float lumber from Bass Lake downstream. This canal was poorly made (as is the lumberjack wont) which caused the sluice way to break causing Bass Lake to drain 55 feet or so. This also prompted a headline in the local paper declaring (I kid you not) "Bass Lake disappears, as if by magic!" edging out the popular theory that the water was stolen by immigrants.

The result of this is a trail that exists in an area that was formerly underwater, and a lot of the Bass Lake trail follows the former shore line. White cedars, like the one pictured here, have a tendency to grow out over the water several feet when they live near the shore, leaving these bent cedars as a reminder of how the lake used to be