Tag Archives: Aerial Photos

What’s a blog

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An aerial photo from the St. Elias Mountain Range, converted to B&W in photoshop. Wrangell-St. Elias National Park and Preserve, Alaska.
An aerial photo from the St. Elias Mountain Range, converted to B&W in photoshop. Wrangell-St. Elias National Park and Preserve, Alaska. Please click on the image above to view a larger version of the photo.

Hey Folks,

Someone asked me recently, “What’s a blog?” And after  I got over the initial shock and wonder, repeatedly asking myself “is he (yes, he) for real?”, I tried my best to answer.

Seriously, what IS a blog? I guess it’s a journal or diary. Or a news outlet. Or a discussion forum. Or about a million other things.

Technically, the root of the term comes from the longer word “weblog”, meaning a log, on the web. Log like a record of some kind.

But what IS it? For me, it’s a double edged sword; a chore and a hobby. It’s work, sometimes, and sometimes it’s great fun. And sometimes it’s a pain in the a&&; especially when I have nothing of interest to write about, or when my blogging platform, wordpress, causes me no end of headaches and pain and grief as I try to solve some problem I’m having with the site. A site without a dynamic component, like wordpress, can be MUCH easier to handle than a blogging platform. If you folks out there had any idea how much of my life has been wasted as I’ve sat and stared at a screen wondering ‘now why the hell doesn’t it work’, you’d send money. Or drugs. Or money and drugs. Or, well, something. It’s ridiculous.

But I digress. Which is fine, of course, because it’s a blog, and it’s my blog, and I’m allowed to digress.

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Wrangell-St. Elias aerial photo – Erie Mine

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Wrangell Mountains, Wrangell-St. Elias National Park and Preserve, Alaska.
Wrangell mountains, fall colors, sedimentation rock layers ad striations, aerial photo, Wrangell-St. Elias National Park and Preserve, Alaska. Please click on the image above to view a larger version of this photo.

Hey Folks,

An abstract aerial shot of the Wrangell Mountains, with a little fall color thrown in. Wrangell-St. Elias National Park and Preserve, Alaska.

I’d actually asked the pilot to fly us up in this area in the hope to find a particular glacial scene I wanted to reshoot, but the great patterns and colors along the ridges above the glacier were more interesting; in part because we didn’t find what I was looking for anyway.

Aerial photography is an exciting challenge; trying to see compositions that work in camera from such an unusual perspective is harder than one might imagine. The sensory overload of flying through such magnificent scenery,

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Glacial Stream, Root Glacier, Wrangell-St. Elias National Park

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Glacial Stream, Root Glacier, Wrangell-St. Elias National Park and Preserve, Alaska.
Glacial Stream and ogives, Root Glacier, Wrangell-St. Elias National Park and Preserve, Alaska.

Hey Folks,

From my most recent trip to Wrangell-St. Elias National Park and beyond. This is an aerial photo from above the Root Glacier, near Kennecott and McCarthy, Wrangell-St. Elias National Park and Preserve. The small stream is made up largely of runoff water from Stairway Icefall, a massive 7000′ vertical wall of ice that effectively form the “headwaters” of the Root Glacier.

This is an image I’ve wanted to capture for sometime now; I’ve seen various similar images of this same stream from a few photographers, including my friend Ron Niebrugge, and often thought it would be a cool subject to shoot. Indeed it is. 

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The Vertical World of the St. Elias Mountains

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Vertical frame of a steep wall of the St. Elias mountain Range, Wrangell-St. Elias National Park and Preserve, Alaska.
Fluting and deep power on the St. Elias mountains. Wrangell-St. Elias National Park and Preserve, Alaska.

Hey Folks,

Few people realize just how special these mountains are. Everyone knows Denali, of course, and the Himalayas, but the St. Elias Mountains just don’t seem to have caught the public eye like those others. I suspect it’s because they’re full of “seconds.” Mount St. Elias is the second highest mountain in both the US and Canada. Mount Logan is the second highest mountain in North America. We live in a culture of competition where there often isn’t a prize for second place, but that suits me fine. It just means when I go visit, there’s hardly anyone around.

From Sea Level to Eighteen Thousand Feet

Part of what makes Mount St. Elias so commanding is its proximity to the coast. The mountain rises right from the beach to over 18,000 feet. From shore to summit, it is only 2,000 feet shy of its more well-known brother in the Alaska Range, Denali. Because the summit is only 10 miles from the tidewater of Icy Bay, it has as great a vertical relief as any mountain on earth, including the highest peaks in the Himalayas.

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Tana Glacier, Wrangell-St. Elias National Park, Alaska

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Broken calving ice at the terminus of the Tana Glacier, near the Bagley Icefield, Wrangell-St. Elias National Park, Alaska.

Hey Folks,

Here’s another aerial photo I took, right before we landed at Ross Green Lake. This is the terminus of the Tana Glacier. This glacier sits just northwest of Mount St. Elias.

It used to be possible to hike from Ross Green Lake, east of here (to the left) across the glacier, and around to Iceberg Lake. As you can see from this photo, the Tana Glacier has become an array of crevasses – not something one can easily, or safely, hike across.

The route hasn’t been hiked in a few years. I wish I had an opportunity this trip to explore it a little more, and possibly find a new route across. It looked to me, from the air, like it was possible slightly to the north of here, but I can’t say without hiking it first, or at least a good look from the ground – from the air, in a place as vast as this, perspective is everything, and things are often not as they appear to be; the scale is so hard to gauge.

I like the story this photo tells – of the place of ice and water on rock, and how this stuff works. Look at the rock in the foreground, and the debris surrounding it, torn, cracked, splintered and shattered by power of the ice and a little gravity. In the background, you can clearly see a medial moraine, running down between the seam of 2 glaciers that run together off the great Bagley Icefield to create the Tana Glacier.

I did get to hike, one afternoon, down from our camp to the Tana Glacier and walk around it a bit. it’s amazing being on the ice. I’ll post some photos from that hike later.

Cheers

Carl

Mt. St. Elias Photo, Wrangell St. Elias National Park, Alaska

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Aerial photos, Mt. St. Elias photo, Wrangell St. Elias National Park, Alaska.
Aerial photos, Mt. St. Elias photo, Wrangell St. Elias National Park, Alaska.

Hey Folks,

Here’s another photo of Mt. St. Elias, taken from the same flight as my previous 2 posts. I’ll post a couple more on this series of aerial photos of Wrangell St. Elias National Park over the next few days. Mt. St. Elias stands 18,008 feet (5,489 metres), and rises almost from the coastal shoreline of Taan Fjord in Icy Bay.

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