Mount Hood wilderness

Looking back at images from a late summer visit in 2012 to the Mount Hood wilderness. I have fond memories of this trip. We hiked from the Timberline Lodge across Zigzag canyon to reach the meadows in the Paradise Park area. The wildflower display there was the best I’ve ever seen.

Wildflowers at Paradise Park

Hiking back to the lodge the sunset light on Mount Hood was good.

Sunset

Mount Hood from the Timberline trail

After main years of being closed due to a washout, the Timberline trail that circumnavigates the mountain is now open again. It’s a tempting prospect!

Hiking Upper Muley Twist

Upper Muley Twist is my favorite hike in Capitol Reef National Park. I’ve done it three times now, most recently earlier this year with my brother. The video is a mix of Canon 5D3, Sony RX100 II and DJI Osmo shots. Some color balance issues aside, the Osmo really worked remarkably well despite my almost complete lack of practice ahead of time!

Update: I’ve put up a new Capitol Reef hiking page, with images from three or four trips over the years that I’d never gotten around to processing. There are still hikes in the park I haven’t done, including Hall Creek Narrows (though that’s tough to reach on a day hike) and the slot canyons on the east side.

Deserts in black and white

Experimenting with monochrome versions of images from the Namib desert and Death Valley. Cropped of the sky, sand dunes lend themselves to somewhat abstract and highly textured images, and I think these ones work better in black and white than in color.

Namibia

The Namib desert

Death Valley

Views of the Namib desert

Looking back through the catalog of Namibia photos, trying to find images that better capture some of the vastness and barren beauty of the place. These four are from the Namib desert.

Before sunrise

Early morning

Noon

Afternoon

Utah 2017

Took a short break last week with my brother to go hiking in Utah. We based ourselves out of Torrey and Boulder, exploring a few of the canyons in Capitol Reef and the Box-Death Hollow wilderness. I rented a Fuji GFX 50S medium format camera for the trip, and shot a mixture of stills and video (the latter with my usual Canon 5D3, supplemented with a DJI Osmo gimbal). More about all that gear later, but the short version is that it was tremendous fun and, although I’m not yet a convert to mirrorless, I’m open to being proselytized! For now a few images from the trip, all captured using the Fuji with a 63mm f/2.8 lens.

Chimney Rock Canyon, Capitol Reef National Park

Lower Calf Creek Falls, Utah

Canyon walls, Utah

Green River overlook sunset, Canyonlands

Visiting Etosha National Park

The second leg of our wildlife viewing trip to southern Africa last September took us to Namibia’s Etosha National Park. This was toward the end of the southern hemisphere’s winter dry season, and Etosha at that time is very dry. White dust blows everywhere and the already sparse vegetation looks as if it’s dead. It’s a stark landscape.

Namibia’s Etosha National Park

Etosha is not always like this. In the summer rainy season it’s lush and green, and the park website warns you to be careful in case the roads are flooded. Wildlife viewing though is best in the winter, when the arid conditions force the game to visit the park’s widely separated waterholes.

Afternoon near the Andersson gate

What we did. We flew to the capital Windhoek and drove north to the park. It’s about 300 miles to the entrance, all on paved roads, all of which are good. The final stretch north of Outjo is almost deserted. We stayed for four nights at the Etosha Safari Lodge Gondwana, 10km outside the park’s Andersson gate. There are a number of accommodation options in the same general area but there’s nothing in the way of a town – each lodge is self-contained.

Mid-day at Okaukuejo

It’s also possible to stay at rest camps inside the park. We visited Okaukuejo, accessible from the Andersson gate by paved road, which is built next to a large natural waterhole that’s floodlit at night. The wildlife here comes to you! From our base outside we instead spent three days driving into the park when the gates opened (at dawn), twice on guided trips in safari vehicles and once in our decidedly non-safari VW Polo. Unlike in Kruger the wildlife in Etosha is strongly concentrated around the waterholes, and although you’ll certainly see giraffe, zebra and the like from the road the main strategy for game viewing is to wait at the waterholes and see what happens. One of the highlights of our trip was a morning spent at Nebrownii, where four lions had taken up residence for the day. The lions weren’t really doing very much, but their presence on one side of the waterhole led to a stand off with large numbers of springbok, oryx, and the odd giraffe on the other side.

Late morning at Nebrownii waterhole

Later a group of elephants appeared to drink and bathe in the mud.

Early afternoon at Nebrownii, Etosha National Park

The nearest waterhole to the Andersson gate is Ombika, and it’s a good spot to visit immediately after the gate opens in case predators are still around. On our second guided trip two lionesses were just finishing drinking as the sun rose. They left the waterhole and headed past us back into the bush.

Sunrise at Ombika waterhole

A luckier sighting came along the dirt road between Ombika and Gaseb. Driving the road in the early morning a trail of blood pointed to a fresh kudu carcass beneath a small tree. We waited, but of the killer there was no sign. Returning in the afternoon, though, a cheetah lay casually guarding its kill. The environment didn’t make for a great image, but it was wonderful to see.

Cheetah seen along a rough road near the Andersson gate

Thoughts on visiting Etosha. Etosha is Namibia’s best known national park, but it’s nowhere near as famous as South Africa’s Kruger and information on the park is thinner on the ground. I must admit that prior to planning our trip I’d never even heard of it! With that in mind here follows a few random thoughts…

Where to stay. The easiest option would be to stay at one of the rest camps overlooking a waterhole (some of the accommodation units even have views of the action). One could have a relaxing vacation and see quite a lot of wildlife without having to drive anywhere. The accommodation within Etosha books up quite quickly, so if you want to stay in the park it’s essential to plan ahead. Staying outside the park, as we did, has merits too. You probably get slightly better / cheaper accommodation, and we were very happy with the quality of the guides employed by our lodge.

Entering the park. Getting into the park is easy, but you do need your passport. On arrival at the gate the ranger fills in a form, but you don’t pay on the spot. Instead you take the form to the visitors’ center (in our case at Okaukuejo) and pay there, in return for which you get an exit permit that you show on leaving.

Getting around. The only paved road within the park is the short stretch between the Andersson gate and Okaukuejo. From there, we only drove a handful of the main and secondary dirt roads east of Okaukuejo, but the ones we tried were in good condition. We encountered no real problems in our VW Polo, and certainly any vehicle with even a bit more ground clearance would work well. You do, of course, get a better view with the extra height and open sides of the safari vehicles used on guided tours.

Photography. We found Etosha to be easier for photography than Kruger. The environment is more open and distinctive, and the focus on waterholes means you’re not scrambling to capture fleeting scenes seen from the road. Notable wildlife moments in real life are measured out much more sparingly than in nature documentaries, but three days in Etosha was enough for us to have some truly memorable encounters.

A visit to Kruger National Park

In September my wife and I spent two weeks in southern Africa visiting South Africa and Namibia. It was our first visit to the region and we followed a well-trodden tourist itinerary, spending most of our time in South Africa’s Kruger National Park and in Namibia’s Etosha National Park. It was a wonderful trip! Now that the dust has settled here are a few photos and impressions of our experience.

Kruger National Park covers about 7,500 square miles in the north-east of South Africa. It’s a large region – more than twice the size of Yellowstone in the US – that stretches more than 200 miles north to south. The basic setup for visiting is pretty simple. Paved roads connect the various entrance gates to a network of “rest camps”, which offer various levels of accommodation, camping, supplies and services. There are also unpaved roads, which you can avoid if you just want to travel between the entrance gates and most of the rest camps, but which access locations (along rivers for example) that might be good locations for wildlife viewing. You can drive both paved and unpaved roads in your own vehicle, but only between the hours of dawn and dusk. At night you have to be either inside a rest camp (which are gated and fenced) or outside the park. The larger rest camps also offer various activities, primarily game drives in the morning, afternoon or early evening, and walks with rangers in the morning and afternoon. There are a limited number of more specialized activities offered by the National Park, such as longer walking trips with overnight stays in the bush. Some private camps are situated within the park proper, though the main area for private game lodges is the adjacent Sabi Sands. These are much more expensive than the National park accommodation.

What we did. We flew to Kruger Mpumalanga International Airport (MQP), which has scheduled commuter service from elsewhere in South Africa, rented a car, and drove into the park via the Kruger Gate. We stayed for the first two nights at Skukuza rest camp, which is sprawling but beautifully situated. One evening we ate dinner outside at the camp restaurant watching hippo and buffalo grazing in the river below. At Skukuza we booked night and sunset game drives, the highlights of which were sightings of lion and leopard.

Lioness at night, Skukuza rest camp

Twilight on a sunset drive along unpaved roads near Skukuza

A very relaxed leopard seen on a sunset drive from Skukuza

The lights on Kruger game vehicles are not very powerful – you’ll need very high ISO to get anything in the way of photos after dark.

We also went on a morning walk from Skukuza. The game walks in the Kruger bush are organized as small groups – in our case there were just four of us – accompanied by two armed rangers who lead the group at a moderate pace along game trails for three or so hours, stopping for wildlife and signs of wildlife. It’s much harder to find wildlife on foot than from a vehicle, but we got to see a pair of rhino at close range.

Even without the rhinos, the experience of walking in the bush and hearing from rangers who know what to look for was incredible… a highlight of the trip.

During the day between the organized activities we had good luck driving the S1 toward the Phabeni gate.

Along the S1, Kruger National Park

From Skukuza we spent the better part of a day driving the 150km slowly north to Olifants rest camp. The scenery changes from the dense bush around Skukuza to something closer to my vision of the savanna, before entering hillier terrain around the Olifants river.

North of Lower Sabie rest camp

On the road north to Olifants rest camp

Olifants is a smaller camp than Skukuza, with a wonderful situation atop a hill overlooking the river. You’re too far up to get a close view of the wildlife but it’s a great view.

Olifants rest camp, Kruger National Park

View from Olifants rest camp, Kruger National Park

Visiting at the end of the dry season the weather turned against us at Olifants. A morning walk was cancelled and we spent a cold evening on a sunset drive with the rain lashing through our open-sided safari vehicle. We had moderate success seeing wildlife on a loop along paved and unpaved roads north of the camp. Traffic north of Olifants is pretty sparse.

North of Olifants rest camp

After two nights in Olifants we drove south, stopping only for lions, in time to catch an afternoon flight out of Kruger airport.

Advice for visiting Kruger. Four nights in Kruger does not an expert make, even on the internet, but I did learn a few things that weren’t obvious (to me) in advance.

Choosing Kruger rest camps. At busy times you need to book accommodation at Kruger rest camps in advance, and if you leave it too late – as we did – the choice is limited. Reading advice on the web we worried that we’d screwed up because the “best” camps (often suggested to be Satara and Lower Sabie) weren’t available. We worried too much. At least for a first visit Skukuza and Olifants made great places to stay.

Distances. The speed limit in Kruger is 50 km/h. If you’re driving to get somewhere and stop only for lions it’s OK to plan on averaging 40-50 km/h. If you’re driving while actively trying to spot wildlife, 20-30 km/h is more like it. We didn’t have noticeably better luck on unpaved versus paved roads, perhaps because on an unpaved road the driver has to devote most of their attention to the road.

Seeing wildlife. In Kruger the wildlife is pretty spread out, and at least in the south of the park the bush is dense and visibility is limited. The name of the game is covering miles while keeping a close watch for anything within sight of the road. You win on an organized tour because the vehicles are higher off the ground, the driver can spot wildlife you’d miss, and you can be out later in the day and into the night, but it’s perfectly possible to see most of the wildlife on your own.

Seeing predators. The big cats are easiest to find at night. During the day you might still see a lion, but it will likely be asleep and hard to photograph if it’s in the bush. We saw a hyena near the road, but only because its kill was nearby.

Hyena by the road north of Skukuza

Other wildlife. We saw one snake – basking on the road after sundown – and countless birds both beautiful and big and ugly.

Lilac-breasted roller

Kruger wifi. As of September 2016 very limited wi-fi was available at the Skukuza coffee shop, but not anywhere else. Cell phone service was available in most but not all places along the roads we drove.

Kruger accommodation. The cottages in the rest camps are rustic rather than luxurious… expect to share rooms with a healthy contingent of spiders and the odd lizard. By European or north American standards, however, they’re very reasonably priced.

Organizing an independent trip to Kruger. We booked everything ourselves, using the normal travel websites for cars and flights and the official SANParks for activities and accommodation within Kruger. It was pretty easy. The setup is a bit different from the US National Parks, but it’s a straightforward and professional operation.

Would I recommend Kruger? Absolutely. We took better photographs in Etosha, but for a first experience of wildlife in southern Africa Kruger did not disappoint in any way.