A Willing Subject

By August, my various doctor's appointments and other obligations were complete, and my feet had healed enough to do more than cursory hiking. There was a large part of me, an inner voice seeded by a lifetime of encounters with authorial figures, that said I should and must find employment again. This voice would continue to make me feel guilty for the rest of the year; but being without my ability to walk for so much of the winter and spring had made me realize how much of a gift the ability to walk was, and how easily it could be lost again. So I decided I would set out for a few months to see many of the things I wanted to see before I died—guilt or no.

The main destination of August was to be Olympic National Park. This was because I'd recently read two different articles that ranked Olympic as one of the country's best parks, judging on such metrics as scenery, crowds, and accessibility. I'd never been to Olympic. Plus, I could check out Mount Rainier and North Cascades national parks while I was up there. Plus, I'd heard that if you wanted good weather in the Pacific Northwest, August was the time to go.

Since it was a long way to Washington, I planned to spend a night each at Grand Teton and Yellowstone national parks to add some interest to the drive. My first night would be dispersed camping at a wildlife area in Wyoming, a couple hours from Grand Teton. And I would be there near the peak of the Perseid meteor shower.

I pulled into the wildlife area after dark and found a spot along the lakeshore. The mosquitoes had gone to bed, and I made tomato and cheese wraps in the warm darkness. I seemed to be the only one there. Slowly, the stars came out.

I've seen meteor showers before, including the Perseids, but have never had an experience like that night. The meteorites were so big, so bright, they made midgets of the stars as they streamed over the lake in front of me. Just before I went to bed, a giant one streaked directly overhead for a full two seconds. Just as it vanished, I heard a couple seconds' worth of distant roar, somewhat like an airplane. I'd heard the meteorite. I didn't even know that was possible.

The next morning, I opened my eyes just as the sun was rising outside my car window—see photo above. Then I drove to my intended campground outside Grand Teton (I had planned my trip too late to get reservations in the park), grabbed a site, and went to explore.

The photo above looks like something I ripped out of a calendar called "America the Beautiful 2006," but it's real. And all I had to do to get it was drive into the park and stop at the first overlook.

Then I went for a hike, which turned out to be the longest since I'd injured my foot, something like six miles. Incredible—feeling recovered, that is, though the scenery was incredible too.

I did discover that my feet still couldn't handle steep inclines well, and they were pretty sore by the time I got down. Also, while on the hike I crossed paths with another hiker who said there was a grizzly bear that could be seen from the area of the next junction. I went to see (carefully, with bear spray) but it was gone. I have never seen a grizzly bear.

This sign reports how many animals had been hit by cars in the previous week. Sadly, it didn't seem to keep people from driving too fast on the park roads.

That evening I had dinner at a picnic area, where a path turned out to lead to a beach. There were a couple guys floating in tubes. They seemed to be enjoying themselves. I stooped to feel the water; it was surprisingly warm. So I decided to go back up and get my suit.

What a beautiful experience. The water was so refreshing, a cool contrast to the 80 degree sun on my shoulders, and it was crystal clear. I could see all the way down to the multicolored pebbles on the bottom.

I walked and swam about exhilarating in the feel of it, enjoying the mountain views and the deep sense of peace. It was one of the best things I've ever done in a national park.

I only got out once I was nearly shivering. It turned out that the guys in tubes belonged to a group that was up from a music conference in Jackson. Some of them had only met that day. They had a picnic laid out, and approached me to take a photo of the group. Then they invited me to partake. I was full from my dinner but I had to take a homemade pop tart someone had made. Who would have thought of making pop tarts at home?

I'd just had one of the most beautiful, peaceful evenings of my life. Now I wanted to spend more time in Grand Teton, but I was all too aware that I had a reservation outside the far end of Yellowstone the next night. Oh, well, I told myself. Some moments are just meant to be enjoyed while they last, and then set free. If we try to manipulate events to preserve them indefinitely, we are likely to be disappointed.

Somewhere around 10pm, I decided this was silly and struggled through 1 bar of cell service to log in and modify my Yellowstone reservation, delaying it for two days. The decision was made easier by something I'd recently discovered: North Cascades National Park, in Washington, was now closed due to a forest fire. Unless they put out the fire soon—and they weren't projected to until October—I wouldn't be able to visit the park at all, and either way it messed up my planned itinerary enough that I was okay messing it up further. 

Now I had more time to explore the Tetons. I launched into a routine that would see me rising in the dark so I could do some sunrise photography, then hiking until it got too hot, having lunch and a nap, then swimming, having dinner in the park, and driving in the evening darkness back to my campsite outside it.

The camping and napping was made more pleasant by a new piece of gear: "window socks," mesh covers that slipped over the car doors.

The days were 80 degrees, brilliantly clear at first and then partly cloudy, increasingly hazy from wildfires to the west. And unlike Black Canyon, the last national park I'd visited—a park known for being difficult to photograph—Grand Teton was a willing subject. There were dozens of easy-to-get-to places from which amazing photographs could be taken. After two more days of great hikes and great beauty, I decided I needed even more, so I bumped my Yellowstone reservation out yet another two days. It was the right choice, and I have the pictures to prove it.

On previous trips within the past couple years, I'd done a mix of writing and exploring each day, but the results had been frustrating. I didn't feel fully invested in either; when I was writing, being surrounded by all that beauty just made me want to go hiking. When I was hiking, I kept thinking how I needed to hurry up so I could get back to the campsite with time to write. I felt adrift, purposeless. So I decided that for the next few months, I was only going to travel and explore; no writing. I hoped that would cure the sense of purposelessness.

It did. I felt present, fully engaged, and able to enjoy what I was doing without always feeling like I needed to be somewhere else. Well, mostly. I did still apply for jobs one day a week, and I dealt constantly with my nagging inner Puritan telling me I didn't deserve to have fun if I wasn't working.

But let's not focus on such things. Here's an extended shoot with some very fat ground squirrels that were used to being fed by people. I would lower my phone down and they would come investigate, thinking I was going to feed them. (Note: do not feed animals. It turns them into pests who will steal anything you turn your back on, chew their way into packs, sneak into cars and destroy your snacks, bite fingers, etc.)

Moving on...

This mother bear and her two cubs crossed a trail not far in front of me, and were foraging for berries in the woods. (I, too, had been pulling berries off and eating them as I hiked: thimbleberries, huckleberries, raspberries, black currants, until my fingers were stained red.) Soon a whole group of hikers was gathered to watch the bears. It was nice to be able to see these animals doing their animal things; usually you just get a glimpse before they run away. The baby bears had a cute call.

I stayed watching the bears so long, I made myself late for Yellowstone. Yes, it was time to move on; I'd been at Grand Teton almost a week, and while the weather had been near-perfect, cold and rain was moving in. Still, it was hard to go. I'd fallen in love with the Tetons: not just the photography opportunities, but the general lack of crowds (at least, compared to many parks I've visited), the number of flat trails for my healing feet, the swimming, the fact that I could get internet within the park and keep up with applying for jobs and paying bills. It was a wonderful, welcoming place. I would definitely be back.

I took a final shower at Colter Bay, washing some choice clothing items in the spray as I did so, and headed toward Yellowstone, where clouds were already rolling in...

Tune in next time!

A Shy Subject

Welcome to another adventure. In June, I decided to get to know another national park. Preferably one that wasn't too far away, so I'd have time to get there between doctors' appointments, and one that would be the perfect temperature—not too hot or too cold—and that would have a first-come, first-serve campground, since it was too late to get a reservation most places. I googled a bit and settled on Black Canyon of the Gunnison National Park in western Colorado.

I was planning on not just exploring, but doing some photography while continuing to hunt for jobs. However, Black Canyon is known for being one of the hardest national parks to photograph. It's a shy subject. It's so deep and narrow that a lot of it can't even be seen, and its depths are only lit in the middle of the day, exactly when the light is ugliest for photography. I was looking forward to the challenge.

Meanwhile, I continued to optimize my camping setup.

I put these wind deflectors on the Prius, thinking I could now sleep in the back with windows cracked during a rainstorm. Unfortunately, I failed to notice how the angled part of the window, at left, would remain unsheltered, and had to cut some pieces of foam to stick in there for added protection.

I was also trying to make better use of all the nooks and crannies in the car. Here, the "trunk" space in the hatch area has been filled in with foods, making a pantry. Not an easy-to-access space, since all my gear would be piled on top of it, but most of these items are just backup foods for when I didn't feel like cooking.

It was a pretty drive.

The forecast showed sunny, 80-degree days ahead. But I'd need to get through one very cold night to get there.

Since I don't like driving more than four hours in a day, and since arriving at a campground after noon decreases the chances of getting a first come, first serve site, I planned to camp at Curecanti National Recreation Area my first night. But I was late leaving, as usual—I never seem to get out of Denver before 4pm—and by the time the sun was setting, I was still far from Curecanti and very tired. I began looking for nearby public land to camp on. I saw pretty rocks and headed toward them, and soon passed a sign saying I was on Forest Service land. Perfect.

But I couldn't find anywhere to pull off the dirt road and camp. The land was marshier than it looked, and I couldn't find an existing pulloff. I didn't want to pull off onto virgin land, both because of the marshiness and because you're really only supposed to camp in pre-impacted areas.

After an hour of bumping down one side road after another, I gave up and turned around. It was when I was almost to the area boundary that I finally saw a pulloff. It hadn't been used much: it was flattened, sad-looking grass rather than dirt, but it was impacted enough I was comfortable adding my own impact to it.

As soon as the sun set, the temperature plummeted and the wind rose. I struggled to do my PT exercises, holding onto the car for balance. Then I cracked a window and put the "window sock" (a mosquito mesh that goes over the door) onto it, got into my warm sleeping bag, and slept very well.

In the morning, I was surprised to see frost on the car. I tried to get the window sock off the door, but it was cemented with frozen dew. I had to start driving toward the park with it stuck on.

So. One of my criteria for camping was that my destination would have a first-come, first-serve (FF) campground. Black Canyon NP turned out to have three loops in their campground, one of which was FF. I was aiming to arrive by 8 or 9am and grab a spot.

When I rolled in there were 4 sites open, one of them quite good, with a mix of sun and shade and a big flat area for a tent. No views, but it looked like 99% of the sites in the campground had no views. What was really great was that another of the loops had electric hookups, and the rule was that if that loop was open, no one in any loop could use a generator. It would turn out to be the quietest large campground I've ever stayed in.

I set up a tarp for shade, my hammock stand, and the big orange tent, which was beautiful inside with the dappled light falling on it.

Then I went out to look around. My first attempts at photographing the canyon weren't so spectacular:

But on an evening hike, I came upon some subjects that were much easier to shoot. The park was filled with little red cicadas.

Their ceaseless clicking made a sound oddly like applause as I wandered through groves of short trees down to an overlook.

Now, that's a little bit better of a shot. You can even see the Gunnison River far below.

Black Canyon is a funny little park. The canyon itself isn't the deepest or the narrowest in the country; rather, it's the combination of deep + narrow that makes it special. Parts of it only get about half an hour of sunlight per day. And despite not being the deepest canyon out there, it's still pretty deep.

Here, you can see how the 2,700-foot Burj Khalifa would very nearly fit within the canyon. And it's not just the black depths that make the canyon so weird and a dread-inspiring; it's the tortured bands of pink pegmatite writhing on the walls, and the roar of the frothing Gunnison River below as it makes one of the steepest descents of any river in North America. The Gunnison drops 34 feet per mile through the canyon. (Compare that to the Colorado River's 7.5 feet per mile through the Grand Canyon.) If all that seems like some kind of fantasy-scape, you'd be right: author Ursula Le Guin apparently based the site of the city in City of Illusions on the Black Canyon.

Another, less awe-inspiring thing I discovered about the park is that June sees it hosting maddening amount of both caterpillars and catkins, the latter being those little strings of tiny flowers that dangle off some kinds of tree. Anytime the breeze so much as threatened to blow, catkins flung themselves down by the dozen into whatever part of my car was open, upon which their little tiny flowers fell off and got everywhere. Also, they or something else in the area gave me the worst pollen allergies I've ever experienced in my life. I could not stop sneezing. Sometimes my eyes and nose would be literally streaming.

And the caterpillars! There were several types that dangled about the campsite waiting to get into my hair. They colonized the outside of my tent with a passion. Inevitably, as I was getting ready for bed, I would find two or three that had gotten inside the tent. While the park and the weather were wonderful, the catkins and caterpillars were extremely annoying, and if you have a severe dislike for either of these things I would suggest coming at a different time of year.

I continued trying to figure out what locations, times of day, and camera settings would make for a good pic, assisted in part by the internet. While there was no cell service in the park, it turned out that the forest service land just outside its boundaries got great signal. There was also (dusty, uneven) dispersed camping there, which made me debate abandoning my campsite after the nights I'd already paid for and moving to the dispersed area. I decided against it, which was probably for the best... I don't need to be distracted by Reddit when I'm supposed to be writing... and instead just made the five-minute "commute" each day to do job hunting.

I was also hiking. Just little hikes to overlooks, at first, but it did seem my feet were continuing to get better. It was a thing of hope and joy, after having been stagnant so long.

Now we're getting somewhere.

And there were other things to photograph than the canyon.

Not to mention areas to explore outside the park. One day, I took a little "vacation" from my job hunting and went to explore the mountain town of Ouray, where I had never been. It was glorious. I love desert environments, but my day trip reminded me of how much I love the mountains, too. The San Juan range, Colorado's largest, was still capped with snow though the day was hot.

Waterfalls thundered from cliffs or through chasms. Box Canyon Falls (not shown—it's hard to photograph) is definitely a must-visit.

Ouray is known to as the "Switzerland of America." By whom, I'm not sure, but the town enjoys putting this on signs. Having never been to Switzerland, I cannot confirm the veracity of the nickname.

After visiting Box Canyon Falls falls, I sat at a picnic table by the parking lot and a man struck up a conversation for me. He was visiting the area with his friend, who was dealing cancer. The friend, he said, figured their jaunt would be the final trip of his life. His friend was currently resting in their RV, too sick to feel like visiting the falls.

After a while the friend felt better and came out to visit us, bearing freshly-made pulled pork sandwiches. The two offered me a sandwich. It's always humbling to receive kindness from strangers, but all the moreso when the strangers have not been so kindly treated by life themselves.

After hiking around as much as my foot was able (above, the Baby Bathtubs), I decided to go for a scenic drive up the Million Dollar Highway.

It was quite scenic, with snowy mountains and glistening waterfalls and lakes. There was also this oddity:

I don't know exactly why this is here. At first glance it seems to allow the stream to bypass the road, but why not just use a culvert? So maybe it's a snow shed, to protect the road from rockfalls or avalanches, but it seems too small for one.

The area was once a big mining district. In its heyday, over thirty million dollars in silver, lead, zinc, copper, and gold were extracted here worth about a quarter of a billion in today's money.

I visited a couple of lakes.

This car, presumably belonging to one of the paddleboarders above, invites musings on the personality of the owner.

The paddleboarders must have been chilly. Though it had been hot in Ouray, it was quite a bit colder up here. By the time I finished, it was 40-something and very windy.

I drove all the way to Silverton, another little mining town.

My drive "home" afterward was just as pretty as the drive in.

The next day, it was back to trying to get a good shot of the canyon.

Nope.

It was hard to be bothered, because my feet were feeling better and better. Finally I was able to do a two-hour hike, a huge triumph in my recovery.

One quirk of this recovery, however, is that shoes continued to hurt my feet. So I wore an old pair of leather Sketchers sandals, which among all the footwear I'd tried since my injury were the ones that felt the best. While reasonably grippy, they are pretty unstable compared to sneakers and not very good for hiking. But given how much pain shoes still put me in, it was sandals or nothing.

I was getting better at figuring out times and places to get good photos:

Well. Overall my favorite pic I took of the canyon is this, above, of the Painted Wall.

Before I left the park, it played a couple pranks on me. I was deep asleep in my tent when I was woken by a car alarm. I grumbled and tried to go back to sleep. The alarm went on and on and on. Finally I woke up enough to think, "Wait—is that my alarm?" I fumbled for the key fob and pressed the button, and the alarm went off.

Oops.

My first thought was that a bear had been trying to get into the car. This is because there were signs warning against bears everywhere at Black Canyon. Then I thought perhaps it was someone trying to steal my stuff; I've become even more paranoid now that I travel with goodies like a fridge. But my grogginess soon convinced me that everything was fine and what I really needed was not to check on the car but go back to sleep. (Indeed, the car was fine in the morning.)

When I went to pack up the tent, however, I discovered it had a hundred or more caterpillars hiding in it: within the folds, beneath the fly and window flaps, between the tent and footprint, etc. It was a frankly disgusting. It took me an hour to get all their flabby, wriggling bodies out and get the tent packed up. I'm sure some managed to escape my notice and I'll find a dozen dead moths next time I open the tent up. I packed up the car and tried to forget the whole sordid thing.

On my way home I stopped at the East Portal area of Curecanti—still in the Black Canyon, but not in the National Park—where they displayed the remnants of an old rail line and locomotive.

The narrow-gauge railroad through this part of the canyon was built in the 1880s to take advantage of traffic to the many booming mining areas. The build was a dangerous job. Workers met their death from explosives and being swept away in the river. It was marketed as "the scenic line of the world." Rudyard Kipling apparently took a trip through the canyon, writing, "...we entered the gorge, remote from the sun, where the rocks were 2,000 feet sheer... There was a glory and a wonder and a mystery about that mad ride which I felt keenly, until I had to offer prayers for the safety of the train."

That night I camped at a nice recreation area, where I cooked up a chicken breast and some rice and tomatoes while the sun set. I am really coming to appreciate having the fridge and being able to make real meals with real food whenever I feel. And save the leftovers!

It was a warm night, so I left the fridge hooked up to the battery while I slept. Since I wouldn't be here but the one night, I slept in the car, my head pillowed on the fridge. I half-woke a couple times as it turned on, but it was doable. In fact, I know many people who sleep in their priuses have the same setup, since 12 volt fridges fit so nicely behind the passenger seat, and help extend the platform of the folded-down rear seats.

So far, sleeping in my car was something I hadn't loved, but which had helped save time on one-night stops. But I'd been experimenting with different configurations and placements of my folding plastic chair and table beneath my sleeping mat under my legs, to help mitigate the fact that the folded-down back seats make a slight slope under my torso. That night, it seemed I'd finally hit on a really comfortable placement. It had me actually looking forward to sleeping in the "Prius hotel" again, rather than dreading it.

So, that was my trip to perhaps America's hardest-to-photograph park. I didn't know it yet, but I was soon to visit what might just be America's easiest-to-photograph park. Stay tuned!