The Drainpipe

My favorite area of Minnesota is easily the North Shore area with all of the state parks, rivers, waterfalls and the Superior Hiking Trail. The image below is of the Drainpipe, which is a small section of the Superior Hiking Trail and it can be found in Tettegouche State Park. I shot it fall of 2009 on a quick backpacking trip. I don't know for sure but I am guessing that it got it name because this is the main run off for water after a rain from the top of this ridge. It might not look like it here but it gets really steep really quick almost to the point of a 4th class scramble.
Shot with a D300 and a Nikon 18-35mm.

Glacier Sunset

Glacier National Park is probably my favorite park that I've been to so far. It's where I first got into photography, I went back there several times while I was in photography school and then there was one more time a few years back. It's that last trip where I got this image, it is pretty common to have overcast skies for days on end and this image was taken at the end of about three overcast days in a row.
I saw that the clouds were breaking up a little bit on the way back to camp on the Going to the Sun road so I pulled over the first place I got just as the peaks on the other side of the lake were lighting up. I had about 5 minutes to get the shot before the light disappeared. I used a Nikon N80 film body with a Nikon 80-400 racked out to 400mm, a 2 stop graduated ND filter and Fuji Velvia 50.

Hit a mile stone

In the last few days I have hit 1,000 views of this blog half of which came in just the last month. Leaving me to believe that there is something to this Adventure Bum idea of mine. Personally I think people want to read stories about an average Joe's adventures though you couldn't tell by reading most of the major magazines.
I am still currently in SoCal and planning a couple big trips yet, places like Death Valley, Bishop and a couple more trips to Joshua Tree. So stay tuned and lets see how fast I can get to 2,000 hits.

Mount Rainier

I came to the conclusion that you can't take a trip to the Seattle area without shooting at least one photo of Mount Rainier. This was actually shot from the parking lot of an REI.

About two months ago I decided that I wanted to climb this peak. I've never been all that interested in this type of climbing, it always seemed like a lot of work for the pay off. But the more I read about Rainier the more I am interested in climbing it.

This again was captured with a Nikon D300 with a 16-85mm racked out to 85mm and handheld.

A day in Seattle

This last weekend I caught a flight up to Seattle to spend a few days with my oldest friend and his family that I hadn't seen in about a year and a half. Other then a day of golf, which was only my third time playing, the only thing we got out to do was explore Pikes Place Market. It's the place where the throw fish to each other at one of the bigger seafood stalls. The rest of the trip was spent telling stories, catching up and heavy drinking. But here are my favorite shots from the market.






Everything was shot with a Nikon D300 and a 16-85mm, handheld and processed in Adobe Lightroom 3. Enjoy

Superior Hiking Trail from June 2010

I think it would be pretty safe to say that the Superior Hiking Trail (SHT) that runs along Lake Superior is by far the best backpacking in Minnesota. In a single day you can hike through fir trees and hardwoods, scramble up and down steep, rocky sections past waterfalls and lakes in the closest things we have to mountains in Minnesota (if you look on the map there is an actual mountain range that the trail runs through called the Sawtooth Mountains)
This last summer I managed to get a few days off from work and needing a break from people (I had just started a job running a cash register at a gas station) I thought it would be cool to head over to the SHT for four days. It had also been raining for about a week straight so I was jonesing to get outdoors. I got a bit of a late start the day I left, making it to the trail head at about 3pm leaving me about 5 hours to make it the 8 miles to the campsite that I wanted. I thought it would be an easy task even stopping to take photos. Everything started off great too, I was close enough to this deer to get a shot with the 16-85mm lens that I had with me.

I tend to go really light on the camera gear when I do trips like this, not just backpacking but times when photography isn't the primary objective of the trip. This trip all I brought with was a Nikon D60 with a Nikon 16-85mm lens (will be reviewing this lens in a future post)

Then things started going a little sideways, mutant two headed flowers,

leading to skull shaped lichens.

This was one of the last dry spots on the trail for the next few miles. It had been kind of muddy up to this point but it started to get a lot worse really quick.

This is what the rest of the day looked like for me, slogging through ankle deep mud and standing water. I tried to carefully pick my way through this stuff but in most places it was too brushy to get off trail and even when you could it was just about as bad as staying on the trail.

Or there were the places like this section of trail that was a solid wall of poison ivy on either side of the trail.

By the time I made it to the site that I wanted to spend the night at it was already taken leaving me 3 more miles to go before the next site in the rapidly setting sun. It took almost two hours to make it there, finally arriving after it had gotten dark. I was stumbling the whole way there because the light was making it tough to see the contour of the muck, that is one area LED headlamps kind of suck, they cast such a flat light that it seems to throw off my depth perception.

I did get to try out a new piece of gear on this trip though, I had just gotten a GoLite Shangri-La tarp tent and thought this would be a good trip to test it on. And for the most part it was great, cut my pack weight down a lot and didn't take up a lot of space but since everything was so muddy and this didn't have a floor my sleeping pad ended up getting really dirty (not a huge deal breaker, just kind of hard on it) The biggest issue I had is that this sets up with trekking poles, which I have but rarely use so I would have been better off with a dedicated set of poles for it, which I am looking into DIY options.
Since the trail wasn't getting any better I decided the next morning to just head back to the car the way I came in and use the extra time to work on projects at home rather then punishing myself for a couple more days. On my way out I ran into a group of young guys that told me they were going to try doing the whole trail (200+ miles) in six days. I told them about the conditions ahead and wished them luck, I would have liked to know how for they made it in those six days.

Watching the sunset after another long day on the Superior Hiking Trail but that is a story for another time.

A day at Echo Cliff

The best part of this whole social media craze that we are in the midst of is that I have been able to use various sites to not only make contact with people all over the country but also to be able to meet up with them during my travels. A few years back I came across Tamara Hastie and after swapping emails every now and then we were finally in the same state together, not only that we were able to get together for a day of climbing at a place called Echo Cliff which is kind of in the Malibu area.

The guidebook that I had for this place gave me great directions on how to get there but it also said that the 45 minute approach was relatively flat and it was for the first half hour then it turned kind of epic. Lots of scrambling down a step wet chute, it even got so steep that I took off my pack and had to lower it down a few steps. But it was worth the effort to get down there.

Everyone trying to keep warm between burns, when the sun dropped behind the hills on the other side of the canyon it got cold really quick. On top of it all we lost the sun at a little before 3pm.
This is the ladder that we had to use to get to the end of the cliff band.
And to get back out.