Desert Solitaire

 

I don't think it's any big secret that I love to go to the desert in search of solitude. Probably the thing I enjoy the most about my southwest trips is getting away from people and all the "noise"... in the seemingly endless forms that it can come in. Our health, both mental and physical, is challenged each and every day and every one of us needs a way to recover from those challenges. For me, recovery has always come in the from of escape... escape for a morning, afternoon or a full day into the woods on foot or on a bike, or onto the water in a canoe or kayak. Or, on longer multi-week trips to the desert. Getaways, both big and small, are essential to maintain our health. It is on these outings where I am able to escape the noise and reground/recenter myself. 

As Edward Abbey wrote in his book Desert Solitaire:

"But for the time being, around my place at least, the air is untroubled, and I become aware for the first time today of the immense silence in which I am lost. Not a silence so much as a great stillness - for there are few sounds: the croak of some bird in a juniper tree, an eddy of wind which passes and fades like a sigh, the ticking of the watch on my wrist - slight noises which break the sensation of absolute silence but at the same time exaggerate my sense of the surrounding, overwhelming peace. A suspension of time, a continuous present. If I look at the small device strapped to my wrist the numbers, even the sweeping second hand, seem meaningless, almost ridiculous. No travelers, no campers, no wanderers have come to this part of the desert today and for a few moments I feel and realize that I am very much alone."

"... I watch the sky and the desert dissolve slowly into mystery under the chemistry of twilight. Dark clouds come sailing overhead across the fields of the stars. Stars which are unusually bold and close, with an icy glitter in their light - glints of blue, emerald, gold."

"...the mighty stillness embraces and includes me; I can see the stars again and the world of starlight. I am twenty miles or more from the nearest fellow human, but instead of loneliness I feel loveliness. Loveliness and a quiet exultation." 

I couldn't have said it better myself... 

My new favorite way to camp!

 

I truly love this setup. Jeep Gladiator Rubicon with a James Baroud "Space" rooftop tent. I gave it a good test on my November trip to the southwest, and I have to say that it is so nice to not be sleeping in a tent on the ground anymore. Yeah, its a little bit of a pain to have to climb up and down the ladder to access the tent. But that is a minor thing compared to the benefits. 

I love waking up in the morning and opening the tent windows to a nice elevated view of the landscape around me. Never again do I have to worry about the tent being level... the off-road pitch-and-roll gauges in the Jeep's instrument cluster make leveling super easy. Never again do I have to deal with the tent getting dirty by being set up on wet/muddy ground. Perhaps the best thing, though, is how easy and fast it is to set up. It literally takes less than a minute to have the tent popped up and ready for use. Closing it up takes a little more time, but nowhere near as long as taking down and packing a ground tent. 

Being that its mounted to a Jeep Gladiator Rubicon, I can get to some pretty rugged, remote and awesome places that many other vehicles would struggle to get to, if they can get there at all. As I enter my 50th year of life on this planet, I never would have guessed that I would have so much fun discovering a new way to camp! Here's to many more adventures with the Jeep, James Baroud tent, and my camera gear. 

Ice Sandwich

 

Another ice photo from February, 2015, this one taken on Lake Superior near Hovland, MN. The layers and lines within this slab of ice made me thing of a sandwich. And the pyramid shape on top quite random and intriguing. Ice is endlessly fascinating.

Happy New Year!

 

Happy New Year everyone!  Here's to hoping that your year is packed full of adventures!

Moody Morning in the Frozen Forest

 

I'm working on a major overhaul of my image library, attempting to clean it up and simplify it, getting rid of redundant images, etc. In the process I'm finding a lot of photos that I never worked on and never did anything with, and this time around they're striking me in a way that they didn't before. This is the first of those. It's a photo from February 2015, taken at Tettegouche State Park on the Minnesota shoreline of Lake Superior. Tettegouche has large cliffs right next to the lake and when the conditions are right, high winds and large waves can throw spray well up over the top of the cliffs into the forest, coating every inch of every tree in a thick layer of ice. It's one of the most fascinating things, in my opinion, that occurs on Lake Superior. 

Utah Aurora!

 

From my November trip to the Moab, Utah area... the night of November 11th yielded some surrealistic skies over my campsite along the Colorado River. An incredibly strong aurora storm filled the sky with some super intense colors, colors unlike just about anything I'd ever seen before. I spent a few hours watching and photographing the sky... it was very hard to pull myself away to go to bed in the rooftop tent, but eventually I had to call it a night. This was at the start of my time in the southwest on this trip, and I couldn't have imagined a better beginning to what would become two weeks of awesome adventures!

My Favorite Morning - Autumn 2025

These photos are from my favorite morning of the 2025 autumn season. Fog blanketed the landscape on the morning of September 23rd, and boy did it sure make for some awesome images! There was also a brisk north wind, which meant the fog was rolling through rather quickly. The conditions made for an ever changing palette of photographic opportunity. The 2025 fall color season was an interesting one, as most are, and this day was definitely the high point of the season.