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Autumn in the High Sierra (Come Walk with Me…)

I am often asked what it is like, out there, photographing in beautiful places. As someone who has spent a lifetime in wild places, it can be difficult to answer the question, to communicate with any amount of coherent sincerity the wholesale commitment of body and spirit to being there. Perhaps, "You have to be there", comes closest.

You have to experience sublime landscapes and wildest nature with the cold wind on your sleepy face as the dawning sun crests a distant ridge, be annointed by stinging hail on your bonnet as you trudge to new vistas, laboring under a shoulder squeezing load, gasping for life affirming breath in oxygen starved air, all the while dodging blood starved mosquitoes intent on bringing you home for supper. You must also experience the silvery majesty of a full moon lighting up snow laced granite peaks like a second sun at midnight, taste exquisitely cold water as your cup dips directly from its pure snowmelt source, feel the warmth of the sun on your bare skin after a chilly stream crossing, and know the well earned rest of a day well spent.

While my monochrome fine art prints communicate light in its simplest and most direct form, most derived from large film based camera systems, the use of ever diminutive and eminently portable digital recording devices enables me to explore other, more extemporaneous realms of the experience. To that end, I have been using a GoPro POV style camera to record adventures over the last couple of years. My first attempt was of my 2012 Middle Fork of the Salmon River solo kayak, the video of which is only now in production. I followed that with a playfully tongue–in–cheek video of a friend's missed weekend on the Kings River of the western Sierra Nevada, "Kings River 2013, (The Dream)". More to the point, I hope you will discover in my most recent production, a 4 day hike into the fall high country of the John Muir Wilderness over Mono Pass into Pioneer Basin, the Mono Recesses, and Golden Lake, some feeling of what it is like to be "out there". Come walk with me...

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