Category Archive

Sunset over the Teklanika River valley, Denali National Park, Alaska.

This was a wonderful, long lasting sunset last Friday night in Denali!

For those of you familiar with the movie or the book Into the Wild (Great book and movie by the way) this is the river that Chris McCandless wasn’t able to cross  to escape from the bus – this spot is maybe 15 miles upstream from his location.

A couple of bull moose in front of Mt McKinley, Denali National Park, Alaska.

It seems weird to call it Mt McKinley since no one, including myself ever calls it that in conversation, but I guess that is the official name.

Anyone who has hiked on tundra can tell you how hard and slow it is to move on such soft, uneven ground.  Well, now I can tell you it is even harder to run on the tundra, especially in Xtra tuffs boots, but that is what I had to do to keep “The Mountain” directly behind these massive moose.  They would take 10 steps to the right, I would have to take 50!

I knew the moose would still be in velvet during this trip.  That initially was disappointing, but in hindsight it did make exposing for them much easier as I didn’t have to worry about blowing out the exposure on the racks which is so easy to do.

Normally I would use a two or 3 stop hard edge graduated neutral density filter here, but I had left mine back in the truck.  So I auto bracketed exposure, and I used Photo shop to manually combine two images captured two stops apart after I returned to the office.

Wild lynx, Denali National Park, Alaska.

I love these rare animals!  The crazy hare population boom in Denali has definitely crashed, and from all I have read, the lynx population will follow a similar trend with a year lag – so I thought this might be one of my best chances to get more photos of a lynx at least for many years to come – so I was thrilled to spend about a half hour with two of them in Denali last week.  I have a similar image with it looking right at me, but I think I prefer this version with it looking off into the brush.

I had an awesome trip to Denali.  Along with lynx, I had wonderful close up experiences with wolves at least every day, saw huge moose, great sheep, bears, nice sunsets and sunrises, and even had the mountain out a couple of times!

Grizzly bear sow and cub, Denali National Park, Alaska.

This is a photo from my trip to Denali earlier this summer.  It was a great trip -lots of bears and wolves, two of my favorites as you probably know by now.

I pre-scheduled this as I headed out the door early yesterday morning to make the long drive back up there for more photography.  I’m not taking a laptop, so this will be the last post until Tuesday.

A bull moose takes a peak at me earlier this summer, Denali National Park, Alaska.

Friday our dedicated server was hacked – someone took down our website including my photo blog and our main photo website.  It is very frustrating, but after a lot of hard work by our web-host (more on that later this week) we were back in action by Saturday.

Once the dust settled all that was lost my Anza-Borrego blog post from last Friday.  That wasn’t a big deal, it was a short one, but I was bummed to lose the comment that went along with it.  I greatly appreciate it when anyone takes time from their busy day to leave a comment but this one was extra special as it was written by David Leland Hyde, the son of the late Philip Hyde.  Philip Hyde was a famous pioneer landscape photographer who was the photographer for many books including Alaska:  The Great Land in 1974, so I thought it was pretty neat to hear from his son.

While I will never understand why really smart people spend their time trying to disrupt other peoples lives by hacking their computers and website, I’m grateful that the damage was minimal.  If anyone else left comments on Friday, I’m sorry I didn’t get to see them.

This is the second time I have been hacked.  You might remember this post:    https://my-photo-blog.com/visitor-stats-and-double-crossing-porn-scammers-and-hackers

Polychrome Pass, Denali National Park, Alaska

Polychrome Pass – one of my favorite areas in Denali.

Hoary Marmot, Denali National Park, Alaska.

While I was photographing this Dall Sheep recently in Denali, I heard a bunch of rocks sliding down the scree hillside next to me.  I looked over, and this Hoary Marmot came running down the hill and right up to me!  He stopped long enough to stare at me while I grabbed then photo, then it turned and ran off.  Really cool experience.

I’m not sure why he came up to me like that, I’m thinking it was just curious.  He acted like he was used to being feed, but it is very early in the season in an area few visitors are going to be walking, so I don’t think he was feed.  Plus, I don’t think they would like most hand outs.  So, I’m sticking with the curious story.

A wild wolf with an arctic ground squirrel, Denali National Park, Alaska.

We were fortunate to see wild wolves everyday during our time in Denali last week, but they were often hunting or resting too far away for decent photography.   The exception was this one who shared this squirrel with another wolf just out of sight, and then came back for another look as you see below.

Wolves have long been a favorite subject for me – here are more wild wolf photos.

Wild wolf, Denali National Park, Alaska.