If you didn’t believe that you could be cold and lonely in Boulder, take a look at this poor Canada goose.

Cold and Lonely on the Ice

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This poor bird walked across Tantra Lake just before sunset this evening when the temperature was already down to 24 degrees. The weatherman says the temperature will drop to 15 degrees tonight.

I took this shot in part because I wanted to see if high dynamic resolution or “HDR” would improve it. But shooting at 1/350th of second, I was too slow and Photomatix Pro couldn’t stop the movement of the bird’s legs among the three images I took. So I just used the one normal exposure image here.

Now, with a little experience I’m beginning to see some of HDR limitations. In addition needing to use a fast shutter speed for even slow-moving birds like this Canada Goose, I learned another limitation from eventually reading the owner’s manual, not to use flash.

Actually, this bird isn’t as lonely as it looks. About 100 birds congregated nearby around the limited open water of the lake. And the bird probably doesn’t feel the cold as much as we do. Good thing too, since it doesn’t have a warm apartment to retreat to like we do.

In Boulder we don’t dream about a white Christmas. We experience it.

A couple of days ago we got another five inches of snow. The temperature has stayed below freezing ever since then — it never went above 23 degrees today — so we still have a solid blanket of snow. Just what I needed to experience a snowshoe adventure near home on Christmas afternoon.

All I had to do was to grab my snowshoes from the SUV in my garage. After strapping them on, I walked a few snow-covered feet to a huge expanse of undeveloped land right next to the apartment complex where I live and made a three and one-half mile loop.

In the past few days I have been enjoying walks to neighborhood coffee shops one or two or three miles from my apartment. On my walks I have been listening to meditation tapes and in the shops I have been checking my email on my iPod Touch while warming up with a cup of coffee. But destination walks to coffee shops weren’t in the cards today, since they were all closed for the holiday.

At home I have only decaf, but I got my minimal dose of caffeine at a Christmas party for lunch today. That freed me up for the snowshoe expedition that took the rest of the afternoon.

The sun never came out all day. But sometimes a dull day can produce moody images, so I made sure to take my camera with me. I especially wanted to see if a new photographic technology called “high dynamic range” or HDR would made any difference under these difficult conditions. [Read more →]

Ever since Tuesday I have been unaccountably happy. Maybe it’s because I’ve been getting out regularly or because I’ve getting a lot more long-chain omega-3 fatty acids from fish (and a lot less omega-6) or because of the 10,000 IU of vitamin D I take every day. They each are supposed to counteract depression.

My greater happiness has become a virtuous circle. Because I’m happier, I listen to my favorite music much more. When I’m home, iTunes is on almost all the time. When I’ve driving, I listen to my iPod connected to my SUV’s speakers.

Being happier, I meditate more, which makes me happier still. Months ago I bought Shinzen Young’s recording of his “Five Classic Meditations: Mantra, Vipassana, Karma Yoga, Loving Kindness, Kabbalah.” He teaches Vipassana meditation, the path that I have been following this year. But with my present good cheer I naturally gravitated this week to his teaching of Loving-Kindness or Metta meditation. As Shinzen describes it, a way to start is to envision myself smiling not only with my mouth and face but also with my whole body and smiling at everyone I see. That may bring a little happiness to them, and it certainly brings a lot of it to me.

Years ago I discovered that meditation and walking or hiking work well together. Today I discovered that meditation pairs just as well with snowshoeing. [Read more →]

Since Thanksgiving I haven’t taken a single photo. More than a year has passed since I visited the Butterfly Pavilion. Today I made up for both of these failings.

This afternoon I went back to the  Butterfly Pavilion hoping to see some color. It certainly didn’t disappoint me.

Not only were butterflies from all over the world there in all their beauty, but so too was the butterfly food — flowers. I’ll bet butterflies think flowers are as beautiful as we do.

One Butterfly, No Food

An Even More Colorful Butterfly and Matching Flower

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[Read more →]

Today’s warm weather meant that I still had time to visit Rocky Mountain National Park one more time this year in comfort.

I knew that most roads at higher elevations would already be closed because of snow and ice. But I figured on driving to the Upper Beaver Meadows Trailhead at 8400 feet and hiking up to Cub Lake at 8600. Too late; they had also closed that road for the season.

Anyway, the ranger at the entrance gate had told me that people had seen moose near Sprague Lake on the Bear Lake Road. The sightings were a week ago, “but they are still in the area,” he said.

That was enough for me to change my plans. Moose are rare in the eastern part of the park. I had seen moose only in the northern section near the Cache la Poudre River, west of Fort Collins.

While I didn’t have great hopes of seeing moose today, I like hiking around Sprague Lake and decided to give it a shot. It’s even higher than Cub Lake and part of the trail was icy. And no moose were hanging around in plain view for me to see.

No matter. This view of the mostly frozen lake with the Continental Divide as a background was my first reward.

Sprague Lake at 8,700 Feet with Hallett's Peak at 12,700 Feet (Right of Center)

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I hiked back to my SUV along the brook that feeds the lake and marveled at how clear the stream was. Just then I spotted a school of brook trout and got my second reward.

Brook Trout in a Brook

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How’s that for clarity!

Black swans may be improbable. Nassim Nicholas Taleb’s “Black Swan Theory” concerns high-impact, hard-to-predict, and rare events beyond the realm of normal expectations.

But improbable isn’t impossible. While all my life I hadn’t seen any black swans, I saw two of them yesterday. Even white swans aren’t all that common. But I saw three of them.

All five of these beautiful birds were swimming gracefully in Cheyenne Lake near Colorado Springs. The Broadmoor Hotel surrounds the lake. I went there yesterday afternoon between my first and second visits to the Garden of the Gods.

At the time I didn’t know about the improbable black swans there nor even that the Broadmoor had a lake. I just knew that the Broadmoor was one of the great hotels of the world. I remember visiting it once with my parents and my sister, but that was more than half a century ago.

The lake is just one of the hotel’s many amenities. It has 744 rooms in 30 buildings on 3000 acres of Cheyenne Mountain. The Broadmoor has 18 restaurants and cafes, seven tennis courts, three golf courses, three swimming or lap pools, three outdoor hot tubs, a fitness center, horseback riding, a movie theater, and a world-class spa.

It also has 24 speciality retail shops. Long ago in one of those shops my mother shocked me by buying a small figurine of a nude woman. No longer shocked by the beauty of the female form, I now keep it on my desk.

I thought about spending the night at the Broadmoor. But then I check the rates in my AAA TourBook. Rooms rent for $290 up — all the way up to $2500. For one person, one night.

Instead, I chose a motel. I could afford its rate, $29.99.

The Broadmoor's Main Buildings from Cheyenne Lake

Gracefully Pedaling Fast, this Swan Makes Reflections in the Lake

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Stretching Her Wings

An Improbable Black Swan and a Probable Mallard Duck

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Colorado Springs and Boulder are polar opposites in their culture.

Colorado Springs has the United States Air Force Academy and Focus on the Family.

On the other hand, Boulder is home to the main campus of the University of Colorado, the Buddhist-inspired Naropa University, more outdoors people and athletes per square mile than any other city, and Jared Polis, the first openly gay man elected to the House of Representatives (Barney Frank of Massachusetts came out after he was elected).

Boulder has a well-deserved reputation as a pocket of liberal political views within a largely conservative state. Some people call it “The People’s Republic of Boulder.”

Colorado Springs, 70 miles south of Denver, is Colorado’s second city with 360,000 residents. Boulder, 25 miles northwest of Denver, with about 95,000 people isn’t even in the state’s top 10.

In one way, however, the two cities are alike. Both have spectacular red sandstone formations. These so-call Fountain Formations stand along the Front Range with Boulder’s Flatirons and its Red Rocks at the northern pole and Colorado Springs’ Garden of the Gods at the southern.

Near Denver are two more beautiful examples of these formations. One is the Red Rocks Amphitheatre, where I was delighted to see and hear Leonard Cohen this summer. The other is Roxborough State Park, where Susan and I explored the Fountain Valley Trail a couple of weeks ago.

Twice before I briefly visited Colorado Springs. In 1953 my family drove through on our cross-control summer vacation. I vividly remember visiting the Broadmoor Hotel where my mother shocked me by buying a small figurine of a nude woman (no longer shocked, I now keep it on my desk). I’m sure that I would remember the Garden of the Gods had we visited it. On my second trip here I rushed through the city en route to nearby Pike’s Peak, where I drove to the 14,115 foot summit.

Especially this year I have concentrated on experiencing our 58 national parks. So far I have I been to exactly half of them — 29 — and visited 15 national parks this year alone. But the Garden of the Gods isn’t a national park. It isn’t even a state park. It is just a little park of the city of Colorado Springs.

In 1879 Charles Perkins, a friend of General William Jackson Palmer, who founded the city, purchased 240 acres of the Garden of the Gods, later doubling the size of the land he owned there. Exactly 100 years ago his children deeded that land to city, stipulating that, “It shall remain free to the public, where no intoxicating liquors shall be manufactured, sold, or dispensed, where no building or structure shall be erected except those necessary to properly care for, protect, and maintain the area as a public park.”

Not until yesterday and today did I explore the Garden of the Gods, figuring that, unlike many landscapes, the season wouldn’t degrade its beauty. I arrived about noon after driving straight through from home in less than an hour and one-half.

Arriving when I did might not seem to make sense for landscape photography. It’s more about light than any other photography, even nature photography. We can capture the beauty of wildlife, flowers, and insects even in the harsh light of midday. But landscapes are the most beautiful in the first hour after sunrise and the first hour before sunset.So the reason why I arrived at the Garden of the Gods just after noon was to plan my shots for yesterday evening and this morning. I needed to see where to be when.

Nevertheless, I carried my camera with me for my introductory walkabout. Just in case.

I was glad that I did, since I captured two of my favorite shots on my first visit.

Holding Steady

A Flock of Birds Circled Around and Around this Red Rock

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[Read more →]

Susan DeWind is an intrepid hiker I met in August when we hiked 132 miles together on a Sierra Club trek through the High Sierra in California. A few days ago she sent me great photos of herself and of me from that memorable journey:

Susan and Hawksbeak

An Impish Guy at Stella Lake

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[Read more →]

This afternoon I got out for a leisurely walk along the South Boulder Creek Trail. While no one else was walking the trail, plenty of people ran past me or raced by on their bicycles.

The afternoon was warm, and I was in a better mood that the past few cold days when I shut myself into my apartment. I loved the peaceful feeling of being out in nature.

As I set up my camera on a tripod and sat down to compose my pictures, I reflected that the careful photography that I have moved into is more like fishing that the other outdoor activities I see. Both photographers and fishermen take their time to soak in the environment. I certainly did today.

Using only my new 300 mm telephoto lens on my Gitzo tripod, I took 50 pictures of the three scenes below and picked the sharpest images.

Close Up of a Prairie Dog

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The Berries of Fall

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Seeding Plant Along South Boulder Creek

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My 12-day trip to Southwestern Colorado took a strange twist a week ago when I had an emergency operation in Durango, 500 miles from home. The operation went well and the hospital discharged me on Sunday.

But I was stranded in Durango. Traveling alone, I checked into a motel as I tried to figure out a way to return home.

The surgeon strongly recommended against my driving back. The main reason was that if I had to hit the brake hard, I could tear open the six inch incision in my stomach.

But the surgeon offered an inspired suggestion. “You can probably find someone on Craig’s List who wants to share a ride from Durango to the Denver area,” he told me.

In fact, I found two parties who wanted a ride from Durango to within 20 miles of my home. One of the parties was a couple, Jason and Christine, who wrote on Craig’s List that “2 of us (1 guy, 1 girl) are finishing a hike of the co trail 10/05 and need a ride from durango to denver. We each have 1 large backpack to take, willing to share all ride expenses of course. Cell 720-352-4029. Pls leave a msg, we don’t have cell or internet while hiking so we won’t be able to respond till the 5th.” [Read more →]