Skolai Images

Hey Folks,

I read yesterday afternoon of a couple of pieces of legislation currently under consideration in Alaska that concern me greatly. Bill SB 176 and bill HB 348 are proposals by the Alaska Board of Game that prepare for a mandate by the Board of Game to pursue what they call “aerial predator control programs” of wolves, brown bears and wolverines. SB 176 is an attempt to give the Board of Game free reign over the decision making process, with no requisite consideration of input from the scientific community - i.e., if the folks on the Board feel like mandating aerial shooting, or den killings of wolf pups, they need show no concern or evidence of supporting scientific study. HB 348 is a proposal to shift wildlife to a category they call “public assets”, which includes minerals, oil, and so forth, effectively removing them from public voice. This means the Board of Game can then make decisions such as aerial shooting with no input from or responsibility to the people of Alaska. I’ve written to local legislators here in Alaska on this issue, and I thought I’d post an amalgam of my letters here. (more…)

Hey Folks,

OK, I’ll stop with the photos from Chile, taken a year ago. Here’s another image from this past summer, of a Dall sheep ewe we saw on the Skolai to Wolverine trip. We saw numerous Dall sheep along the way, but this one I was able to get close to and make some decent photos. It took me quite a while, as it usually does shooting Dall sheep in Wrangell - St. Elias National Park and Preserve, because they’re pretty skittish. Hunting is allowed in the preserve, and is allowed in the park by subsistence permit only - meaning locals are allowed to hunt pretty much wherever they choose, provided they don’t use motorized transport to get there - so they can’t fly in via bushplane to a place like this and hunt, but they can come in and hunt here if they travel on foot - not very likely. However, even though hunters don’t get in to a place like this very much, the sheep are still very wary - I guess word gets around. Also, so few wildlife photographers spend any time in the park, the animals don’t learn to trust people, so the remain pretty skittish.

One more post for 2007!

Cheers

Carl

Hey Folks,

A few more posts before the electricity goes and I scrounge around in the eternal darkness of the Alaskan winter. This one is a bighorn ram that I photographed on my first trip to Jasper National Park a few years back. I recently rescanned it, and am spending some downtime now getting caught up on editing and processing images. It’s funny looking at scans of slides these days, after shooting digital for just a few years. Pretty amazing the difference - though I think that’s a function of scanning more than film versus digital quality.

Well, it’s insanely past my bedtime, and I’ve had a big day, so this will be short and I’ll head to my room. You all have a good one and enjoy it while you got it - whatever it is.

Oh wow - just as I’m ready to hit “publish”, one of the dogs upstairs goes insanely off her head. At this time of night that means one thing: I looked outside and there’s 2 moose in the front yard. How cool is that? A cow moose and her calf under the street lights wandering through the front yard. Awesome!

Cheers

Carl

Hey Folks

Hey Folks,

So what have I been up to all this time, if I wasn’t pushing my van around Alaska in the winter? Well, I’ve been updating my website/s, giving them some new content and a slight aesthetic overhaul as well. Nothing too major, but learning a few things about design and tweaking some little things. One of things I’ve been working on is integrating a coding technique called “Flash” into the web pages. It’s pretty cool, though I know some web users are averse to Flash stuff.

For all you “non-web-design” people (i.e., my dad) “Flash” is (more…)

Hey Folks

I’m still in Glennallen. Bummer!

The library has reasonable access to the internet, meaning, at least it works. So I figured I may as well post a note here.

This image is from my recent trip. I was walking along the edge of the lake here, on the ice, and following this set of snowshoe hare tracks. Out of nowhere they venture out on to the ice and do this really cool little loop, then back on course. I thought it was awesome. I know the photo’s hardly wall-hanger, but the scene caught my eye - it just seemed to interesting to wonder why the little rabbit walked a perfect circle like this .. maybe he was just exuberant about it being winter, and such a lovely day. Maybe he had just had his van fixed and was in a good mood. Maybe he just felt like walking in a circle. Whatever the reason, I thought it was pretty cool, so I took this photo.

I’m not sure when I’ll get internet access again, hopefully it won’t be too long, and I’ll post another from the winter here in Alaska (don’t go giving me this ‘it’s still fall nonsense, neither!!!)

Cheers

Carl

WARNING: - The following journal was sent to me (Carl) from my dad. Read on at your own risk - he does tend to ‘go on’ a little.

JOTTINGS ON OUR TRIP TO ALASKA AND THE NORTH AMERICAN ROCKIES

Dear Blog,

I’m not sure whether that’s the correct way to address a blog, but it’ll have to do for now.

Sorry for the delay in penning these brief notes on our trip to Alaska and the North American Rockies. I had to wait till the ice melted in my veins and the blood started flowing again.

After a very pleasant stay of two days in the lovely city of Vancouver, made all the more pleasant by catching up with an old Aussie mate and his partner, we embarked on our Cruise up the Inside Passage to Alaska. (more…)

Hey Folks

Few animals reign a landscape like the grizzly bear does the tundra, in my opinion. Grizzlies are absolutely awesome, in every sense of the word. Seeing one can be an amazing experience, even for those of us who’ve been fortunate enough to see quite a number of bears in our lives. Photographing in Katmai National Park is beyond words. I took my parents there this September; though reluctant to make that trip part of their journey, I was finally able to talk them into it. They both say how glad they are that we went, and how that was probably the highlight of their trip. We were also fortunate enough to see a few grizzlies in Denali National Park, even up relatively close (when we were in a shuttle bus, not hiking on the ground). This grizzly bear photo I shot on my earlier trip to Denali, with my buddy Doug from Atlanta. Doug’s an old country boy from Georgia (”born ‘n raised!”), so seeing a grizzly bear was quite a thrill for him. (more…)

Hey Folks

I promise I’m winding down my photos from Denali this year. One more after this one. This is a cross fox, a color phase of the more commonly seen red fox. The black stripe down the back, with another one across the shoulders forms a cross, hence the name we give it “cross fox”. The animal is, for all intents and purposes, a red fox. In the wild, it’s not unsual for various color phases. They can be the typical orange-red, silver, grey, black, or a combination (like the cross fox). All red foxes have a litte tell-tale marking, regardless of their overall coloring - they all have (more…)

Hey Folks,

It’s WAY too late for me here in Anchorage - I just walked in a little while ago from this little blues bar, called Blue Central. They have an open mic night every sunday, and I was fortunate to get to play this evening for an hour or more - nice finish to my week.It was tons of fun, and the folks I played with did a bunch of different styles of music, so it was interesting. There’s nothing quite like sitting in with people you’ve never met before, and making music together. It’s all the more fun when they start playing tunes you have no idea what they are, how they go, what key they’re in, or anything else. You just have to listen closely. (more…)

Hey Folks

This year seems to be the year for snowshoe hares - they’re all over Denali National Park. What was interesting is that I made 2 relatively short trips to Denali National Park this year, one in late August and one in mid-September, and both trips I saw numerous snowshoe hares, but they weren’t at all in the same areas. In August I saw an awful lot of hares in the first 15 miles of the road into the park, particularly near Savage River. In September, we didn’t see any bunnies there, despite my assurances to my parents that would - well, we did see one, he was (more…)