April in Minnesota

This is what I woke up to this morning, easily 4 inches of new snow. Last year by this time I had already put a hundred miles on my bike but this year I haven't even aired up the tires because we keep getting weather like this. I'm not really bothered by it as much as a lot of people are around here since I have missed all but the tail end of winter, at the same time though I am getting a little anxious to start the biking, backpacking and fishing season (which actually opened today for stream trout). I shot this in my yard this morning with a Nikon P7000, turned into a pano in Photoshop and then processed in Lightroom.

One thing I missed out on while in California....

Living in northern Minnesota in the winter can really wear on a person so much so that we sit in small shacks on the ice to get a fishing fix. I was actually going to build one of these shacks last fall but got asked to house sit in Los Angeles. This was the first winter in about five years that I actually missed out on the whole ice fishing season. You would have thought I would have quit a few years ago when I almost died in one of these fish houses.

About two years ago I was on Lake of the woods, the very northern tip of Minnesota, with a couple of buddies. It was the second year that I had gone up there to rent an ice house that actually has beds in it so you can spend the night. My friend Lance had done it a couple more time as he got in the habit of bringing a carbon monoxide detector with since every year there is at least one person that dies from CO2 poisoning up there.

Since the fishing dies off at night there we hit the sack pretty early only to wake up at 2 in the morning to the alarm going off and two of us feeling really sick. The only thing we could think to do was to open the door about 6 inches and let the place air out. Luckily we all woke up in the morning though we were kind of upset by the lack of interest from the guy we rented the house from when we got picked up.

Now the ice is too thin to get out and fish the lakes but in one more week trout season opens around here and I think I can wait that long to get a fishing fix in.

The Boundary Waters Canoe Area Wilderness

Last labor day weekend I went to the BWCAW with my dad for a few days of fishing and camping. We decided on Wind Lake for our destination since it is only one portage in, though a long portage, and it is full of smallmouth bass.

We got up there about mid afternoon not counting on it being too busy since a lot of people pass through Wind on their way to other lakes. Once we got to Wind we took our time getting to a campsite fishing along the way and checking every site on the map but one and by that point it was almost dark. With the last site on the map on the other side of the lake we didn't have time to get there safely so we had to scramble to find a place to set up the tent for the night.

It didn't take long to find a rock big enough to set up the tent but thats about all that there was room for. We got set up and started cooking dinner when the wolves started howling and they were close which was really cool. But then they started getting closer and closer until we started hear them in the brush and then we could hear them on the rocks along the shore. I shined my headlamp towards the noise and saw two sets of eyes shining back at me from about 40 yards away. We must have camped right along one of their trails and they were curious as to what was going on.

The rest of the night went by without incident and in the morning we packed up quick and began looking for a campsite. The only site that was available was the one that we didn't make it to the night before and just our luck it looked like it hadn't been used in a week.

The next couple days were filled with the best smallmouth fishing I have ever had and we each managed to land a nice 8 lbs Northern Pike.

Top Photo: the view from our campsite on day two.

Bottom Photo: campsite at night.

Undisclosed new climbing area in the Eastern Sierra's

This past weekend I got invited to Bishop, CA to go climbing with my friends Matt and Tamara and I couldn't pass up an excuse to get out of LA. Saturday was a pretty typical day at major bouldering area. By 10am the place was swarming with climbers. We spent most of our time on the fringe of the main area where everyone was at since we weren't really digging the crowd. Matt kept talking about how we should go to a place that they that knew about it the next day were we wouldn't see another climber all day. A new climbing area that they were some of the few to know about it, that sounded like my kind of place.

When we got together Sunday morning I jumped in their van for the ride out the the boulders and it wasn't till we got half way out there that I realized I was riding in the back of a van with blacked out windows on my way to a somewhat secret area and that kind of added to the excitement. When we got there you could see some of the boulders around the parking area had chalk on them but as we headed up the canyon we were walking past 10-15 ft tall boulders that were completely untouched. Every time we would see something that looked really cool Matt kept pushing for us to continue on to the top where he thought the climbing would be even better, this went on for at least an hour till we reached an area I would like to call "The Rock Garden" where the landings were flat and sandy and the boulders were tall.

This was one of the first things that caught our attention in "The Rock Garden" area, when we first saw it I would have guessed it to be about 20ft tall but when we got closer it was more in the realm of 40ft. While it is visually cool it didn't look like there was much for climbing on it.
Now this boulder on the other hand was dubbed the "Heller" boulder by Tamara since I had been the one to point it out when we first entered the Garden area. There are at least 5 problems on this one boulder and Matt is sending the first one in this image.
Matt on top of the "Heller" boulder which sits in the middle of the Garden area and comes in at around 20ft tall.
Tamara working on a project in an area we called "Easter Island". From what Matt and Tamara told me the rock here is a lot like what you would find in Hueco Tanks but everything here needs a lot of cleaning since about 98% of the area has never been climbed.
This is the "Easter Island" area, we named it that since the boulders were all kind of leaning the same way and kind of shaped like the heads on Easter Island, its kind of hard to tell in this photo though.

Out of all of my climbing adventures I have had over the years this one I think will stand out the most since it was the first time I had ever been to such a virgin area. I am really looking forward to making it back out here with Tamara and Matt to work on establishing this area.

For another take on this adventure check out Tamara Hastie's blog

Mountain Biking

I shot this on a popular riding area in Los Angeles. Shot with a Nikon D300 and a 10.5mm fisheye.

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.