Bisti/De-Na-Zin

After our daytime scouting trip the day before, I used my knowledge of the lay of the land to go take some Milky Way photos.

I am still learning on that front - I would have centered the hoodoos in the foreground a bit better, if I had known. Not only is it quite the process to bring all these photos together (the stars are 8-shots each, stacked and 7 shots across; the foreground was another 7 shots across that all had to be mooshed together in Photoshop, but I had to "find" them in the pitch black.

Getting to the location was not terribly difficult since we had scouted the area the day before. That said, this area is REMOTE and DARK. I have a pretty good idea of where I was, but there is no chance I'd be able to get back to this same spot in the dark - I'd be lucky to find this in the daylight!

Cheers,

Marc

Los Poblanos Inn & Bisti/De-Na-Zin Badlands

We're on another road trip. This time we hit the road as soon as Leah got back from school on Friday and made our way to Los Poblanos Inn in Albuquerque. We stayed there on our way home from the Grand Canyon back in 2014. We remembered it as very comfortable - and we weren't wrong.

We started Saturday with a nice brunch at the farmhouse at the Inn, did a bit of shopping, then hit the road for Bisti/De-Na-Zin, a remote little corner in the middle of nowhere northern New Mexico.

It was a 1.5 mile hike or so from the parking lot to the Alien Egg Hatchery with no real trail to follow.

It was a mostly level hike, not too strenuous. I am really glad Catherine and the kids came with me.

Cheers,

Marc

Dog Canyon Camp

Catherine took Leah to Albuquerque for an academic competition this past weekend. Leah took second in the state!

Since the girls were gone, I hopped on the motorcycle and made the trip to Guadalupe Mountains National Park - on the north side, just across the state line there is a remote (very) campground. 

It was a nice enough get away, but I was actually under the weather and should have stayed home. Oh well, this is what I got.

For those of you wondering - that is my tent down low towards the left. That thing has served me well, that is the tent I bought when Catherine and I first got married so we could camp up in Nicolet, Wisconsin.

Cheers,

Marc

Happy Easter!

Happy Easter everybody!

We made our way home from Payson, Arizona today. We drove through the Tonto National Forest. The wildflowers were blooming, so we stopped a couple of times along the way to snap some photos. This one was a random pull out that I think captures the juxtaposition of dry/wet, desert/succulent that was so prevalent on our trip. This one was a hillside covered in yellow flowers with saguaro cacti; other hills were covered in blue flowers with the saguaros. It was quite the sight to see!

Cheers,

Marc

Saguaro sunrise

I got up a bit earlier than normal to go check out the west unit of the Saguaro National Park for a sunrise - the east unit (closer to where we stayed) was tucked up pretty tight against the Rincon Mountains, I knew it would be a challenge to get direct light early enough. 

Sadly, no one wanted to come with me. It was a nice little trip from the hotel, 30-40 minutes along a twisty road. The photo above and the one below are just a couple of feet from each other, but pointed in the opposite direction. Since we had basically a full moon, I tried to capture that between the arms of a saguaro cactus. The light to the east was also very pretty!

I drove the remainder of the loop after the first two photos. Earlier on the sun was quite low, so it produced some great backlighting effects.

It didn't take too long for the sun to climb high enough to make the light uninteresting on the close-up scale, but I found this little hill overlooking the road that I thought turned out pretty nice.

We just finished dinner at Flagstaff. The mountains still have snow here, it should dip well below freezing tonight. We'll do some local exploring - I had thought about going to Sedona, but we got detoured today and dealing with traffic does not appeal...NM might have ruined me!

Cheers,

Marc

Saguaro National Park

With the Bataan Memorial Death March out of the way and a move in the very near future, we decided to get out to see what Arizona had to offer. 

We picked up the kids after school and hustled over to Tucson. We got there pretty much just in time to catch a sunset at Saguaro National Park.

I think everyone enjoyed the sights - they all broke their phones out to snap some photos.

Leah found a nice little perch here at Javelina Rocks (below - her site was hidden just to the right of the photo).

We were treated with a pretty little sunset - literally minutes after we arrived.

We'll start making our way north tomorrow to do some more exploring. Cheers!

Marc