Tag Archives: Gates of the Arctic National Park

That Mountain Feeling – Backpacking Arrigetch Peaks

4 Replies
A backpacker walking in the Aquarius valley, Gates of the Arctic National Park, Alaska.
A backpacker walking in the Aquarius Valley, Gates of the Arctic National Park, Alaska. Few of the visitors here ever get this far back up in the valley; it’s a bit of a mission to get way back here.

Hey Folks,

Looking over a few old Image folders on my hard drive I found this photo (among others) that I hadn’t yet processed. This one I took on a hike in Gates of the Arctic National Park. We backpacked up into the subalpine area with 5 people, and did a combination of basecamping/dayhiking and backpacking. It’s rugged, steep country, and can be challenging underfoot.

This dayhike, we started out with myself plus 4 people, and by mid-afternoon were down to just myself and one other; Jodee V, who’ll walk just about anywhere! The rest of the group had stopped along the day, each person reaching their own threshold of how many rocks they wanted to walk over.

What struck me about this photo is how, for me, it perfectly evokes the exact feeling that walking in the mountains gives me. It’s infinitely vast and expansive, yet also confined and defined. It’s a feeling of being both everything and nothing, all at once. It’s an amazingly “alive” feeling.

Continue reading →

Photographs are making us richer

5 Replies
Arrigetch Peaks, Gates of the Arctic National Park, Alaska.
View up Arrigetch Creek toward the Arrigetch Peaks, Xanadu, Ariel and Caliban, from left to right. A popular rock climbing and backpacking destination, the Arrigecth Peaks lie in the heart of Alaska’s Gates of the Arctic National Park and Preserve, right near the Continental Divide. Arrigetch Peaks, Gates of the Arctic National Park, Alaska.

Hey Folks,

You perhaps saw this recent story in the news about our ‘drowning in a sea of images’. It’s an interesting view, and, I believe, a very valid point. Any kind of inundation makes staying afloat a difficult task. And sometimes it’s impossible.

A photographer and artist I admire, Chase Jarvis, recently posted a response to this on his blog, about how we’re not drowning, but getting richer with this unabating torrent of images. That’s kind of a weird take on it. What kind of flood can we swim through?

Chase argues “shouldn’t it be said that we’re not drowning in photography at all, that we’re perhaps getting metaphorically rich off more and more of these veins of gold?”

“veins of gold”?

Gold has value because it’s rare. And because it’s durable. If gold were produced quite as readily as iphone “pics” seem to be, and had a similar lifespan of any digital file, it wouldn’t cost eighteen hundred dollars an ounce right now. I’d suggest a better chemical analogy might be carbon dioxide. CO2 seems to be pretty prevalent right now, becoming ever more so, and, contrary to what the s(k)eptics tell ya, it’s not enriching our world.

Continue reading →

Fall colors; Backpacking the Arrigetch Peaks

Leave a reply
Arrigetch Creek, fall color, Gates of the Arctic National Park, Alaska.
Fall colors along Arrigetch Creek in Gates of the Arctic National Park, Sunrise over the Brooks Mountains, Alaska. Please click on the image above to view a larger version of this photo.

Hey Folks,

Here’s an image I took in August on a trip to the Arrigetch Peaks, in Alaska’s Gates of the Arctic National Park and Preserve. We’d had a great early morning hike up in to and around the Maidens Valley for sunrise, and I shot a few nice images of the peaks catching early light. Afterward we hiked back to camp to catch an hour or so of sleep before breakfast, but I took a few shots along the creek before my nap.

Continue reading →