Tag Archives: Wrangell-St. Elias National Park

Wrangell-St. Elias National Park and the Northern Lights

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Wrangell-St. Elias National Park and the northern lights, Alaska.
Wrangell-St. Elias National Park and the aurora borealis photo, or northern lights, Alaska. Please click on the image above to view a larger version of this photo.

Here’s a shot of the northern lights, or aurora borealis, I took from just near McCarthy, in Wrangell St. Elias National Park, Alaska.

I was guiding a photo tour into the park, and we were late leaving Anchorage, due to delays with one of the guest’s flight to Alaska.

What Are the Northern Lights?

Wikipedia says this about the northern lights:

“Auroras are now known to be caused by the collision of charged particles (e.g. electrons), found in the magnetosphere, with atoms in the Earth’s upper atmosphere (at altitudes above 80 km). These charged particles are typically energized to levels between 1 thousand and 15 thousand electronvolts and, as they collide with atoms of gases in the atmosphere, the atoms become energized. Shortly afterwards, the atoms emit their gained energy as light. Light emitted by the Aurora tends to be dominated by emissions from atomic oxygen, resulting in a greenish glow (at a wavelength of 557.7 nm) and – especially at lower energy levels and at higher altitudes – the dark-red glow (at 630.0 nm of wavelength). “

Make sense? There you have it folks – the northern lights are tiny little things in the air, like dust, so small we can’t even see them, that glow because they crash into other tiny little things we can’t see. How cool is that?

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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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A landscape for while I’m away – Nik Efex Pro 2 Review

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Mt Jarvis at sunrise, Wrangell-St. Elias National Park, Alaska.
Mt Jarvis at sunrise, Wrangell-St. Elias National Park, Alaska.

Hey Folks,

Catching up on some photo editing and processing and deleting and keywording and updating and blah blah blah. Just as boring as that stuff is looking at new (for me) software programs to assist with that stuff. One I ran across, that I’d heard about for a while now is Nik HDR Efex Pro 2; I gave it a whirl the other day, and so far, I like it. A very streamlined hdr process is exactly what I’ve been looking for. Something easy and intuitive, to ease the pain of processing hdr images.

For those of you unfamiliar with the term, hdr is an acronym for High Dynamic Range; most of the time, we simply mean we take multiple exposures of the same frame, and then blend those exposures together to best present the wide range of contrast in the scene.

So this image is a blend of 7 different exposures, taken one stop apart. I converted the original nikon RAW files to tif files, via Nikon Capture NX2. Efex Pro 2 quickly processed the images and then offers a variety of presets for different modes of compression and toning, etc. I found the program pretty easy and intuitive, which was something that is rapidly becoming a real priority when I look at new software programs.

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Mount Sanford Photos

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Mount Sanford reflection

Mount Sanford and reflection, Wrangell St. Elias National Park and Preserve, Alaska.
Mount Sanford and reflection, Wrangell St. Elias National Park and Preserve, Alaska.

Here’s a shot from my trip this last week to Wrangell-St. Elias National Park and Preserve. I’m so wanting this shot to come together – as many times as I’ve been here, and waited for the right light, it hasn’t happened yet. This particular morning the air was calm, so the reflection was nice, and the mist added a nice touch, but the alpenglow, earlier in the morning, didn’t happen.

What’s the longest hour of a landscape photographer’s day? That hour between when the light first touches the clouds/mountain tops and when the sun actually rises high enough to light up the valley floor. Standing around, wet and cold, for an hour waiting to see if “Stage II” of the morning light happened, is a tough choice. But, then the light comes up, and it’s all forgotten. What fickle creatures we can be.

I’m pressed for time folks, but I’ll try to schedule another post or 2 for this next week. I just got in this evening and am heading out again sunday morning for 10 days. See ya soon.

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The Hubbard Glacier and Mt. Seattle

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Hubbard Glacier and Gilbert Point, Wrangell-St. Elias National Park and Preserve, Alaska.
Gilbert Point, the Hubbard Glacier and Mt Seattle, Disenchantment Bay, Wrangell-St. Elias National Park and Preserve, Alaska. Aerial photo.

Hey Folks,

Here’s an image from the first night of my most recent trip, a month long adventure down around the coastline of Wrangell-St. Elias National Park and Preserve. This photo was taken on the air taxi flight out to the coast; we departed a little from the scheduled route and I shot some images of the Hubbard Glacier and surrounding area.

The points of interest here start with the Hubbard Glacier itself, generally regarded as the largest tidewater glacier in the world. At over 70 miles long, it’s quite a chunk of ice (given part of our trip was to look at the Malaspina Glacier and it caving into a tidal lagoon, the Hubbard’s claim to fame may be short-lived; the Malaspina is much bigger, and most definitely reaches the ocean).

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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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Iceberg Lake photo, Wrangell-St. Elias National Park

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Alaska Cotton, and glacier, Wrangell-St. Elias National Park and Preserve, Alaska.
Alaska Cotton, and glacier, near Iceberg Lake, Wrangell-St. Elias National Park and Preserve, Alaska. Please click on the image above to view a larger version of this photo.

Hey Folks,

We just got off a great hike in the Chugach Mountain Range, Wrangell-St. Elias National Park; the Iceberg Lake to Bremner Mines route, a popular hike I’ve done a number of times now. This trip was an exciting adventure, as always, with a mixture of weather, some great folks to hike with, tons of cool stuff to see.

We actually took what is for me a new route part of the way, and skipped one of the climbs; heading straight for a glacier moraine and on to the ice instead. That was kinda cool, and I did find a great spot to camp that I hadn’t been to before, which is always a treat.

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Waterfall and sunset at Skolai Pass

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Waterfall and sunset, Wrangell-St. Elias National Park and Preserve, Alaska.
A waterfall, known as Roane Falls, glows in the light of a colorful sunset. Near Chitistone Pass, looking toward Skolai Pass, Wrangell-St. Elias National Park and Preserve, Alaska.

Hey Folks,

Roane Falls near Chitistone Pass, is a little known, and even less photographed, waterfall in Wrangell-St. Elias National Park and Preserve. I’ll post a horizontal format of this area below

We were on a hiking trip in the area last week, and were treated to some gorgeous weather (along with the obligatory nasty weather as well);  The days were well spent walking, talking, eating, and tooling around on the tundra, exploring a glacier, watching wildlife and enjoying this spectacular place. Skolai Pass in the summer is about as grand a place as I know of.

So you won’t find Roane Waterfall on a map, but longtime readers of this blog might remember how it got it’s name. If not, use the search function in the sidebar here and dig around a little. 🙂 This waterfall has appeared on this blog before!

I shot this with multiple exposures, then blended them together in the computer using a combination of the automated HDR tool in Photoshop (CS4) and also manually masking layers of the original frames. I find the HDR program often adds a funky look to the colors, particularly in the foreground, that I can’t seem to properly correct.

I added very little saturation to the sky at all; in fact, I left the waterfalls a little earlier than I should’ve because the sky got even more intense after I moved up the hillside to the location of the previous photo linked above.

Folks often ask whether I bring a tripod on my backpacking trips for photography, due the extra weight and ‘stuff’ factor; I can’t remember the last time I did not bring a tripod on a backpacking trip. Though I don’t always use it for every photo I take, it’s a critical part of my photography; when the light and moments provide the most spectacular opportunities, they almost always require a tripod. There’s be no way I could’ve made an image like this one without the three-legged camera holder.

Sunset, Skolai Pass, Wrangell-St. Elias National Park and Preserve, Alaska.
Sunset over Skolai Pass and the Wrangell Mountains, Wrangell-St. Elias National Park and Preserve, Alaska.

Cheers

Carl