During the previous two days I got my best shots at the Petrified Forest National Park in northern Arizona. But I also visited three national monuments, the best preserved meteor impact site on Earth, and the neat town of Winslow, Arizona. I started yesterday in Flagstaff, Arizona, and ended it very late at night in Albuquerque, New Mexico.

As I drove down from the Grand Canyon to Flagstaff I took a little detour through Wupakti and Sunset Crater Volcano National Monument. Around the year 1100 the Sinagua people, who probably were assimilated into the Hopi culture, begin building pueblos:
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Sometimes to get better photographs you need to move just a few steps to the left or right. Sometimes you need to take more drastic action, like lying down in the dirt where the mushrooms and flowers are. And sometimes you need to climb above it all to see its sweeping beauty.

That’s what I had to do today to capture digital images of the Grand Canyon that are good enough to do it justice. I flew over its spectacular scenery for an hour in a helicopter. As soon as I found out that I could take a helicopter flight over the Grand Canyon I knew that I had to do it.

My one previous helicopter flight over Kauai showed me incredible scenery that I never could have seen on the ground. Today’s flight was just as special.
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Yesterday I returned to the Grand Canyon after an absence of more than 40 years. I came here the first time when I was on home leave between assignments in Kenya and Malawi for the American foreign aid program. Even after all that time, the Grand Canyon looked familiar.

It is, of course, the most famous, most beautiful, and most spectacular hole in the ground anywhere. The Grand Canyon is also one of the most photographed places on earth. It would probably rate high on any list of the “Seven Natural Wonders of the World.”

Like all landscapes, photographing the Grand Canyon is a matter of timing. It looks best the first thing in the morning and the last thing in the evening. But even then it is a difficult subject to pose because of the shadows of the canyon walls often block the sun from the river.
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Photography is about contrast, light, color, form, and line, because those characteristics are a good way to describe life itself. My life today emphasized contrast.

My day started socially by meeting my friend Tom Schulte. He is vice president of research and director of clinical studies for Pelikan Technologies, the company that makes the best blood glucose lancing device:

Tom Schulte

Today I couldn’t decide whether I wanted to see more of the coast or the coast redwoods. So I compromised — and saw both.

But my compromise was also between photography and hiking. And photography came out ahead, because I did that first.

Scott Creek Lagoon

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Today I hunted whales with my camera. About 150 years ago my grandfather hunted them with a harpoon. He emigrated from the Azores to the U.S. on a whaling schooner. When he arrived in Northern California in the 1860s, he worked as a logger in the redwood forests and in the sawmills. We’ve changed.

Today John and I took a whale watching cruise up the coast from Santa Cruz to off the shore at Davenport following pods of gray whales on an appropriately gray day. The whales are at the height of their 7,000 mile annual migration from Mexico to the Arctic. It’s the longest mammal migration in the world.
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Whenever I visit John we hike our favorite trail in Henry Cowell Redwoods State Park, which is just a couple of miles from his home. We hike along Fall Creek through dense stands of coastal redwoods, ferns, and moss. The trail itself is soft and quiet from its bed of redwood duff.

But we have never hiked here as far as we did yesterday, 8.2 miles. We hiked a huge loop through the center of the park’s Fall Creek area, climbing up and down about 1,760 feet.

The picturesque creek itself and the glorious stands of redwoods are the twin attractions:
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Sunset and low tide came together on the Santa Cruz beaches yesterday. That combination called out to me to join them. John had prior plans, so I was on my own.

I chose Seacliff State Beach in Aptos for my expedition. The lay of the beach is one of the best for sunset shots, it is the beach I know best from living in Aptos, and it has one of the strangest ships ever built.

The S.S Palo Alto, generally known as the cement ship (but actually a concrete ship), sits in three or four pieces on the ocean floor at the end of the Aptos pier:
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John and I hiked 12 fast miles yesterday with our friend Becky. We hadn’t intended such a long hike.

John and Becky both love waterfalls. We were headed toward Maple Falls, which none of us had ever seen. But we missed a trail junction and just kept hiking up the “wrong” trail.

Consequently, we had a great time. If we had found the trail that we were looking for, we would have had to wade across the creek several times. At this season the water runs high, and we would have had very wet and cold feet.
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As I drove from Southern to Northern California yesterday, I could have driven the 300 miles between Santa Barbara and Santa Cruz in 5 hours if I had taken the fast and boring inland route. Instead I came up Highway 1 — the Pacific Coast Highway — which Google Maps says is a 6 hour drive. With all my stops for the scenic beauty en route the drive took me 9 hours.

I arrived at my friend John’s home at dusk, and since my butt was tired from so much sitting, John suggested that we first go out for a stroll. While I have stayed several times with him and we hiked often together, this was the first time that we have walked in his neighborhood.
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