Hey Folks,
The boreal forest, winter. Spruce trees covered in snow, near McCarthy, Wrangell-St. Elias National Park, Alaska.
Cheers
Carl
Boreal Forest
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The Wolf Song
Hey Folks,
I was really, really hoping to get some wolf photos on this last trip. Just one would’ve been fine. Wolves aren’t as common in the southern reaches of the park, though they’re certainly around, so I was hoping to get lucky enough to maybe see, perchance to photograph, one on the north side of the park. The habitat on the south side isn’t (generally) as wolf friendly – more heavily forested, and lots of alpine mountain country, snow and ice.
Dall sheep and moose are the main prey for wolves in that part of the park, and though there are a lot of sheep, the numbers are smaller than the herds of caribou that wander through the north part of the park in the fall and late winter/early spring. Continue reading
Snowboarding Wrangell-St. Elias National Park
Hey Folks,
I’ve been practicing this one a bit. Trying to get a snowboarder’s eye view of snowboarding. It’s pretty hard. Well, I’ll be honest – for me, it’s really hard. Really, REALLY hard. I fell over more times than I want to admit. Certainly more times than I wanted to fall over. And the slope is a good bit steeper than the image appears, so I was moving pretty fast.
What’s hard is lifting the camera to the eye without making a turn.
On a snowboard, like a skateboard or surfboard, one turns the board by turning the head and torso.
Every time I’d lift the camera up, I’d unconsciously turn my torso a bit, and the board would go with it, doing a ‘heelside turn’ effectively. Then I’d realize I was turning too far left, turn back the other way, doing a ‘toe-side turn’, over-correct, catch an edge and bust my ass.
Trying to hold my camera so it wouldn’t hit the ground as I wiped out was a bit of a mission, but I’ve so far managed to do it OK.
I practiced a bit on some gentler slopes, but there’s no substitute for the real deal. I’m rippin’ along here at probably close to 75 miles an hour or so.
Maybe. 🙂
Cheers
Carl
Sartorial Snowboarding
Hey Folks,
Do I look just wicked bad in my orange jacket, or what? You need sartorial advice, you ask me, OK?
Cheers
Carl
Snowboarding
Hey Folks,
Don’t look down. Snowboard champion, Carl Donohue, self-portrait. Or maybe that should be ‘Snow Bored Champion’?
Either way, I set about trying to get some photos of myself riding my snowboard. You can see how steep this run was.
One way to tell how good a snowboarder someone is in photos is how much snow is on their pants .. from this clean pair of Marmot Liquid Steel Gore-Tex XCR pants, you get an impression of someone who doesn’t fall down much.
Well, you might get that impression .. then again, you weren’t out there watching me, were ya? 🙂
Cheers
Carl
Young Bull Moose, Wrangell-St. Elias
Hey Folks,
Here’s a young bull moose, a yearling, trundling through the snow. Moose have disproportionately longer legs than other members of the deer family, and it really helps them get through deep snow.
This is a helpful advantage as they seek out food in the winter, and also in evading their main predator, the wolf pack.
But the real secret they employ is a kind of double-jointed hip or knee that allows them to lift their legs higher than most ungulates, and high-step their way to safety. When I first saw this fellow, he stepped into a deeper drift that was right up to his belly, yet he managed to clamber his way through, regather, and then set about finding himself some browse for dinner.
The word ‘moose’ comes from a North American Indian Tribe, the Abenaki, and it translates roughly as ‘he trims or cuts off’, a reference to how the Moose browses twigs and bark from trees.
Cheers
Carl
Wrangell Mountains – Drum, Wrangell, Zanetti and Sanford
Hey Folks
Here’s what fifty five thousand feet of mountains looks like. From right to left: Mount Drum (12 010′), Mount Wrangell (14 163′), Mount Zanetti (13 009′), and Mount Sanford (16 237′). This photo is from the northern edge of Wrangell-St. Elias National Park, overlooking the Copper River basin. The Wrangell mountains come to life as the sun sinks beneath the horizon. Here’s another photo I took of these mountains a year ago, from much further south and west.
Cheers
Carl
Mount Sanford, Wrangell-St. Elias National Park
Hey Folks,
This is a photo of Mt Sanford, in winter, taken early one morning. In 2 weeks I had 3 mornings with some alpenglow. The first one I didn’t shoot because it was so socked in with cloud an hour before dawn that I didn’t figure the light was going to happen – and being tired, I slept in. I awoke, looked over, and saw a nice magenta glow on the face of Sanford, but there wasn’t really any kind of way to shoot it from where I was. Such is my life, it seems. I did enjoy a hot coffee and Continue reading
Twin Lakes, Wrangell-St. Elias National Park
Hey Folks,
I must admit; I really like shooting the patterns the windblown snow makes on the ground in the winter. They can be some pretty cool patterns. This frozen lake, covered in over 3′ of snow (deeper in some places, with drifts) was a nice place to wander around on and look for images.
The setting sun faded slowly across the lake, and I chased it’s light from shore to shore as it slipped into the night. Continue reading
Snowshoe hare and lynx population cycles
Hey Folks,
Here’s a REAL snowshoe hare photo, taken on my recent sojourn to the northern side of Wrangell-St. Elias National Park. I was very surprised at how little sign of snowshoe hares there was in this area – negligible. Everywhere else, it seems, the woods are crawling with them. This is at, or close to, the peak of the cycle for snowshoe hares; a 10 year population fluctuation that seems to be pretty consistent.
Sometimes the cycle might be 9 years, or 11, but it’s not usually far off. The population rises steadily, then faster, peaks, and falls drastically, almost completely, in a single year. Ecologists aren’t sure as to what causes the drop in numbers, Continue reading