Carved Bear, Denali National Park, Alaska, originally uploaded by jsevier14.
A friend of mine once asked “What will you do with all the pictures?” It seemed like an odd question at the time. What does anyone do with pictures? I think he thought I was just shooting for the sake of shooting, to consume the image, then hoard it for eternity culminating in a gigantic waste of time. I do have to admit, I often wonder what will become of them generations from now. Another friend of mine inherited an old camera rig with glass negatives. Now that’s longevity. Wonder what will happen to these?
Since I started shooting, I’ve taken tens of thousands of images. That number is greatly enhanced by my Rollerderby shooting of course, where on a given doubleheader night I may bring back as many as 3800 images to sort through. Otherwise, I still have an enormous backlog of images I have not even seen, and they sit untouched, waiting for me to make them into something interesting to look at.
Photography history knows a man named Gary Winogrand, who was a street photographer in the 1960’s of some renown. Now, I won’t presume to compare myself to one of the greats. But, if I’ve been influenced by Ansel Adams (the sharp landscape), Robert Frank (the outsider’s view) and Henri Cartier-Bresson (the photojournalistic candid), then I have to add Gary Winogrand to that list. Missy will sympathize with this.
Winogrand’s style was to walk around the streets of New York shooting everything in sight. I remember watching a film of him in my Baker-Hunt photography class. Sometimes he didn’t even look through the viewfinder. When he passed away prematurely in 1984, he left behind over 300,000 unedited images, and over 2,500 undeveloped rolls of film.
I’m not quite that prolific. And I don’t want to leave behind 300,000 images that have never been touched. There are some, mainly the early film images I shot with my original Minolta rig, that will likely never see the light of day. But in an effort to get through the backlog I came up with this plan to release just a few of them so I could get them done faster. I actually cooked it up after I’d completed the processing of the whole set, and this release plan has been an experiment of sorts. Well, that plan has been a failure. The rules are too confining, and although I’ll follow through and finish up this publishing project the way I started it, I’m moving on to plan B next time around for my San Francisco 2010 set.
Day 11 is probably the most diverse in terms of photographic subject matter, and the predefined limitation I set was simply not adequate. I left some good pictures behind this time around. They’ll make their appearance soon, but for now, editing this set down to the 14 I wanted to represent the day was brutal.
We started out the day packing up at the lodge, then headed out for breakfast at the Alaska Salmon Bake. The place was about as Alaska as it gets, with all sorts of Alaska chotzkies hanging all over the walls, hardwood floors, exposed log beams in the cieling. I’m not much for chotskies, but I do have a few. I saw another of the miniaturized George Parks Highway Alaska Route 3 signs hanging on the wall. I’d seen them in several of our stops, and had taken to hunting high and low for one in gift shops we had visited. They just weren’t for sale anywhere. It seemed like this sign was the perfect little do-dad to go with all the pictures I still plan to print and hang in my house. On the way home it occurred to me that I might be able to find one on ebay. It took several attempts and several weeks after we got back, but I finally did find one sold by a guy in Michigan.
The night before we had walked through a cluster of shops on the lodge grounds on our way to dinner. We came upon this woodcarving place that had dozens of these wooden carved bears out front. They were about 2 feet high, stained exquisitely, and each of them held a wooden sign with one of a several messages that can be swapped out. The one that got me was “Go Away.” Brilliant! I immediately regretted leaving my camera behind. But there would be no sprinting back to the room this time. Photographers, take the shot while you’re there. It may not come again. Although this time for me, it did. That usually doesn’t happen. See the bear pictured above...
Then it was off for our last tour of the day before hopping a train for Fairbanks. Today, a gloriously warm and crystal clear Alaska summer day, we visited the Park’s sled dog kennel, where we found a yard full of real live Alaskan sled dogs lounging around in the summer heat. Now, I love puppies. I’m a total sucker for them, and Alaskan huskies are a personal favorite. I’d happily have one here in Ohio, but it seems unfair to me to have a doggie bred for the sole purpose of hauling sleds around in the frigid Alaskan climate. These dogs are naturally cold-weather dogs, and even though my weather station occasionally tells me it’s colder here than it is in Alaska, it’s not cold here long enough for them. These dogs certainly weren’t suffering, but they definitely weren’t particularly frisky on this day.
Shortly we were herded over to a seating area where a sled awaited. And the next thing we knew those formerly lounging sled dogs were barking and yelping like crazy. Sled dogs are the preferred mode of transport when the Alaskan winter hits, because they’re exquisitely adapted to the purpose. They are bred to run, and to pull sleds. A team of 8 or so dogs also has the benefit of redundancy, which is another reason they’re superior to more mechanized modes of transport, which have a tendency to fail when the weather gets really rough. The question was posed, “If you’re out on a trail in several feet of snow, which would you rather have? A snow machine, with a single motor that might stop, or a full team of barking sled dogs?” The noise back by the kennel made the answer obvious.
The driver could hardly contain them once they were hooked up. With a whistle, the sled took off like a rocket, disappearing around a bend behind a cluster of trees, kicking up dust and gravel in its wake. The mad barking kept on as the dogs pulled the sled around the trail. You could hear its blades scraping along the ground as it came back into view, where a ranger caught up with the lead dogs to bring them to a stop in a cloud of Alaskan dust.
And as the dogs cooled down, I watched the rangers interaction with the dogs. The symbiotic relationship is amazing, really. Just for a little bone and a scratch on the head these dogs would literally run through hell in a gasoline suit (nod to Pete Rose) for the Denali National Park Rangers. You leave the demo with a real respect for these beautiful animals, and their role in all our lives.
Really now, who doesn’t love puppies?
And so that was that. We piled back on the bus back to the visitor’s center, which was an easy walk from the train station where shortly we’d board our last train of the trip. With just a few minutes before the train was to arrive, I had precious little time to peruse what I was missing, which was a lot. There were several hiking trails that started from this point, and a very nice museum facility where there were specimens of Alaskan wildlife on display, namely a full sized adult moose, and some Dall sheep. Too bad we only had time just to walk through it before we had to be at the depot.
When we got there, the train hadn’t arrived yet. Shortly people started buzzing about a delay. Seems a tree had fallen across the tracks some miles out, and it ended up being about a 2 hour delay before departure.
Our crew made its way back to a snack bar, where I toyed with the idea of scarfing an ice cream while the group decided what to do. The toying stopped almost immediately when Missy suggested we sit down to play cards. Now, I’d been fairly patient this entire trip. I realize the camera can be obnoxious, and I have to hand it to my companions because they were very understanding of my obsession through the whole thing. But this was just too much. I blurted out completely without thinking, “You have to be kidding.”
“What? The train’s not coming for two hours. What else would you like to do?”
After a moment of stunned silence, me standing there with 35 pounds of camera gear strapped to my back, I blurted again. “You have to be kidding me. Here we are 3,800 miles away from home in one of the most beautiful spots on the North American Continent, with some unplanned extra time, and you want to play cards?” I really did say “...North American Continent.”
My lovely wife is very understanding. Her next words were “Go, just don’t be late because we’re leaving without you if you’re not on the train on time.”
I think I heard that last part as I was leaving. I’m pretty sure she said it. By now we were down to just over 90 minutes or so, and by the time I got done fooling around the museum I ended up at the McKinley Station Trail head with just over an hour to walk it. I figured I’d hike out 30 minutes, set by my iPhone’s timer, then I’d turn about and head back.
And I made it no problem. The last thing I wanted was to be left behind in Denali National Park. It was a nice walk, and I am glad I did it, but, as usual, I was left wanting more. Schedules. Oy.
The train ride turned out to be way more intense than I’d anticipated. The scenery was spectacular, and perching myself on the back of the train gave me angles on the Nenana River as we chugged past it. This span of track is nice and curvy too, so I was able to shoot back toward the train’s engine as it turned curves well ahead of us.
And on the way as we got closer to Fairbanks the guide pointed out one of the windows where billowing smoke raging forest fires could be seen.
They’d been burning for most of a month. The Anchorage Daily News reported 70 fires were burning all over the state, and I believe based on what I read I was shooting the largest at Minto Flats, about 15 miles away from our position. By the time we moved closer to Fairbanks, the smoke began to block out the sun, making for some spectacular images that looked a lot like the sunset I shot from the bow of the Sapphire Princess the first day of the trip.
But, we pulled into the station about 10pm, right on 24 hours before we’d board our plane headed back to Cincinnati. I wasn’t done shooting though. When we got to our room, the sun was just setting behind some very dense cloud cover on the horizon, and camera came back out for one last sunset, shot through the trees just off our room’s tiny balcony.
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