Category Archive

Seward Mountain Sunrise.

No matter how much fun a trip is, it is always nice to be home.  The one thing that always strikes me when stepping out of the Anchorage Airport is the crisp, freshness of the air.  It is hard to describe, but I find it invigorating!

Now the one thing that takes a bit of getting used to this time of year is the short days.  I captured this image just a short time ago at about 9:15 in the morning.  As you can see the sun isn’t up yet!

Clouds in the mountains of the Chugach National Forest surrounding Seward, Alaska.  This was last (Wednesday) night.

This is the first time I have seen the tops of the mountains in more than a week.  I figure, if we are going to have stormy weather, it might as well be really stormy!  And it has – we have been getting almost an inch of rain a day, with almost 2 inches falling on Saturday.  I noticed yesterday that the airport was flooded.  

This weather isn’t that unusual for this time of year, September is our wettest month. On average we receive 10.36 inches for the month of September. 

It has made it easy to be in the office!

I didn’t see any bears yesterday, but I enjoyed watching this Common Merganser family.  The chicks are almost as big as the adults!  This is another photo captured using a my Pocket Wizards and a 24mm wide angle lens – the ducks were about two feet from my lens!

 Tomorrow we are heading to Lake Clark National Park for 4 days.  It is kind of funny, when I booked this earlier in the summer, I was thinking it would be fun to concentrate on bears because I really haven’t focused on them before.  Of course, that was long before finding such great bears near Seward!  I’m also really hoping to photograph puffins.  There is an outside chance I will have internet access, otherwise there won’t be in activity here for a few days.

On a much sadder note, I think the bear in the last blog post was killed yesterday morning, and possibly the sow and cub as well.  I hate to say too much because there seems to be more rumors then facts, but at least one bear was killed for sure – and it was about the same size, age and in the same area where I photographed it the night before.  Supposedly it chased a dog.  It may explain why I never did saw any bears yesterday. 🙁

When I saw this dead salmon in the creek, I was so sure I would be able to get my wide angle close-up that I decided I would wait as long as it took for a bear to show up.  Well, along with a break for dinner, I had to wait 7 hours before this young adults showed up! 

I placed my camera a couple feet from the fish with a 24mm lens, and focused on the salmon.  I had a vision of the bear pulling the fish out of the water and practically filling the frame with his face!  Unfortunately, the bear never saw the dead fish and managed to stay out of my focus range!  These near misses keep me coming back day after day. 

I checked back this a.m., and sure enough, the fish was gone.

 The bears didn’t show up Saturday morning, but a family of Mergansers swam within inches of my camera as I waited.  I wish the camera was pointed down more, but I was expecting a much larger subject!  I usually don’t crop my images, but decided I would crop this one for the blog.