Tundra Swan Photos, Arctic National Wildlife Refuge, Alaska.

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Tundra swan, Arctic National Wildlife Refuge, Alaska.

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On my last evening in the Arctic National Wildlife Refuge, camped out on the edge of the coastal plain by the Beaufort Sea, I hiked countless hours trying to find subjects to photograph. The light was magical, from about 10:00pm until I went to bed at 4:30am. Unfortunately, I had a tough time finding subjects to shoot. I saw a few foxes, but didn’t get close enough to any for photos. I saw my first ever snowy owl, an unbelievably beautiful, yet extremely skittish bird that I never got close to. Continue reading →

Red fox photos, Arctic National Wildlife Refuge, Alaska.

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Red fox kit silhouette, Arctic National wildlife refuge, alaska

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Wildlife in the Arctic National Wildlife refuge. This is a red fox kit, taken just a hundred yards or so from where we camped along the Canning river on the coastal plain. This photo was taken around 3am. It was pretty cloudy and overcast, but the clouds didn’t go all the way to northern horizon, so eventually there was a little break, where the sun dipped just below the cloudline towards the horizon, Continue reading →

Rafting on the Canning River, ANWR, Alaska

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Rafting the Canning River, ANWR

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Here’s a photo of us rafting down the Upper Marsh Fork of the Canning River – essentially the headwaters of the Canning in the Brooks Range, close to the continental divide. The river here has eroded its way through the layers of bedrock to form this really neat little mini-canyon. I hopped out of the boat to take some photos of the run. Actually, we ran it several times, and I shot each time, some horizontals, a few verticals, some wider, some tighter, trying to get different compositions of essentially the same scene. Continue reading →

Coastal Plain, Section 1002, ANWR, Alaska.

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Arctic wildflowers, coastal plain, ANWR, Alaska

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Here’s a photo of the arctic coastal plain, near the Canning River, ANWR, Alaska. This is the now infamous ‘coastal plain’, known as Section 1002, the area that is so frequently proposed be open for oil drilling. One of the big arguments made in favor of opening the area to drilling is that the coastal plain is ‘boring’, or ’empty’, or ‘nothing’. I disagree that it’s boring. I found it stimulating – the place simply feels alive, vibrant. There’s an energy here Continue reading →

Double Rainbow, Brooks Range, ANWR, Alaska

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Rainbow over Brooks range, ANWR, Alaska

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This is another photo from my series of photos from ANWR. This particuar evening I was returning back to camp about midnight when this rainbow appeared. It had been a pretty long day, and I was actually ready to hit the sack. At first the rainbow wasn’t that special, and I kept trying to convince myself it was ‘just a rainbow’, and not worth heading over to photograph it. As I got nearer my camp, the rainbow started to glow stronger, and then a second rainbow appeared behind it. I grabbed my polariser (filter)and started looking around for Continue reading →

Brooks Mountains, ANWR, Alaska

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Valleys and ridges, Brooks Mountain Range, ANWR, Alaska

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Here’s another image from my trip to ANWR in 2006. This particular afternoon was early in the trip, and we hiked up around some ridgelines, not far from the Upper Marsh Fork river. It was an awesome afternoon, and we spent several hours clambering around the hillsides. The wind picked up pretty strongly, after a while. I had carried a tiny little gitzo tripod with me, and it really wasn’t up to the task of holding up my camera gear in wind this strong. So I kept hiking around, Continue reading →

Brooks Range, ANWR, Alaska.

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Arctic Lupine and an unnamed mountain, ANWR, Alaska

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Here’s the second photo from this series on ANWR. This photo was taken in the middle of the night. It doesn’t get any darker than this in the arctic north during the summer months, unless there’s serious cloud cover. I had camped near the junction of the Marsh Fork and Canning River, just north of the Continental Divide in the Brooks Range, ANWR. After dinner I set out on a walk to look around and to maybe make a few photos. I hadn’t gone far when the mosquitoes starting driving me crazy. My hiking buddy said he’d “had enough” and returned to the safety of his tent. I trooped on, Continue reading →

Coastal plain photo, Arctic National Wildlife Refuge, Alaska.

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Coastal plain, Canning River, Sec 1002, ANWR, Alaska

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Next I’m going to do a short series on the Arctic National Wildlife Refuge, known as ANWR, in Alaska. I’m sure most of the readers here are reasonably well versed in the situation in the Arctic National Wildlife Refuge, with the seemingly constant proposals to open the coastal plain to oil drilling. For those of you who aren’t familiar with it, a quick summary would go like this:

The Arctic National Wildlife Refuge sits in Alaska’s far northeast, extending from south of the Continental Divide in the Brooks Mountain Range, north over the Divide, stretching across the coastal plain to the Beaufort Sea and the Arctic Ocean. Continue reading →

Website Wonders

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Gift Store, McCarthy, Wrangell-St. Elias National Park, Alaska.

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I’m a Mac user. Tried and true, a bonafide Mac user. As such my efforts at web design are often in vain because of the difference between the Apple and the Windows platforms. Often there’s some discrepancies between how they display certain code. Part of what my recent post about Web Validation had to do with this subject, though it was less specific to the PC/Apple scenario. The Web Validator is basically a way of setting a standard so that browsers and platforms will display coded websites as they’re intended to be displayed. Continue reading →

Mt. Blackburn, Willow Lake, Wrangell St. Elias, Alaska

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Mt. Blackburn and Willow Lake, Wrangell St. Elias National Park, Alaska.

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This image will be my last one from Wrangell St. Elias for a little while. Well, that’s the plan, anyway – that’s highly likely to change as I get even more excited about heading back to the park this coming summer. This photo was taken from the Richardson highway, looking east towards Wrangell St. Elias National Park, at Mt. Blackburn. There’s a pull off on Richardson highway that affords a view of Mt. Blackburn (16,390 feet = 4,996 m), Mt Sanford (16,237 ft = 4,949 m), Mt. Drum (12,010 ft = 3,661 m), and Mt. Wrangell (14,163 ft = 4,317 m) in the early fall, September 2006. Continue reading →