8:56 PM
Sunrise at 4:49 AM in direction 40° Northeast
Sunset at 11:02 PM in direction 319° Northwest
Duration of day: 18 hours, 12 minutes (6 minutes, 57 seconds shorter than yesterday)
| Civil twilight | ends at | 12:48 AM, | begins at | 3:07 AM |
 |
| Chugach Range and Glaciers visible from Palmer by the Fairgrounds |
If a picture is worth a thousand words, then I have 62,000 words at my disposal after the weekend. Late last night, I read Aliy's second installment of her quest for the Iditarod Championship last March on the SP Kennel Dog Log. In it she wrote:
"I spied the sky off to the east and there was a awesome red glow in the clouds on the horizon. I stared and racked my brain. What was that? It looked almost like the glow of city lights off in the distance. Then it got brighter and red. It soon was this ominous red cloud covering nearly a quarter of the sky to the east. I have never seen a sky like that. It really looked like Armageddon. Then, directly above us, a band of green aurora borealis danced toward the red glow. Finally the full moon ended the mystery as it came out of the red clouds and greeted us. The aurora topped it all and danced purple. Wow. I was in awe."
The entire trip to Palmer was wonderful and yesterday exceeded the usual wonder. Much of my day was filled with my own sense of awe. As I commented in response to Aliy's blog entry - the thing about Alaska is even when you are not looking for beauty, it finds you.
I headed for Anchorage early Thursday morning, making it on the road @ 8:00 AM. I stopped once between Nenana and Healy to take photos of the lowland fens that fill the Tanana Valley. I am not including them, even though I really like them. Then I stopped again after leaving Cantwell, but the light in my view finder was deceptive and although I was looking right at Denali's peak above the clouds, I missed it in the photo because I could not get the position exact. The clouds were white and Denali was white and I aimed at what I saw. But the camera, unfortunately, did not see the same thing.
Ah, there lies the rub. The camera angle slices and dices, taking only a portion of the meal offered. It can be like a monkey, eating only what it considers the choicest bites of the tree's fruit and throwing the rest of a perfectly good mango away.
When I got to Palmer, I decided to make an effort to capture the breath taking view around the fairgrounds where the dog show is held every year. In the foreground are houses, fences, roads, utility poles and wires, vehicles, wind socks and trees. In the back ground is a panorama that dwarfs the man made objects in the foreground. I took 23 photos of roughly the same view and although several of them are similar, they are just ever so slightly different that I have not been able to throw a single one away. The interesting thing about the camera's slicing and dicing is that it can not capture the full panorama, but it can focus really, really well on the mot it sees. The telescopic lens does a remarkably good job of clarifying detail in the distance.
 |
| The Mundane and the Sublime |
 |
| Zooming into the cirque with a persistent cloud formation |
Down on the ground next to the fairgrounds, I took several photos of the grasses blowing in the stiff wind as it pushed fronds in diverse patterns this way and that. I am not sharing any of those either, even though I like them. I also took photos of the Chugach's dramatic rise from the valley floor in the near field, only one of which I have included in this post - even though I like something about each of them.
 |
| Knik Glacier: golden, rose, and violet hues as sunset nears |
The day I left for home it had turned to rain in Anchorage. As I turned off Parks Highway, it abated and then as I began the drive up the Matanuska River Valley, it began raining steadily. I had checked the National Weather Service 7-day forecast for the Copper Basin and it was predicted as mostly sunny. As I drove through twists and turns of the narrow two-lane road in never ceasing rain, I had a hard time believing I would ever be up out of it. But, miraculously, well past Sheep Mountain and out into the Basin, it did stop raining and open up to partial sun. I took some photos of Copper Basin as I entered it from the west, but I won't be sharing those with you. The peaks of Mt Drum's, Mt. Zanetti and neighbors were shrouded in clouds, muting the colors of the peaks to grey.
I did not stop for photos again until I passed Summit Lake, the frozen surface of which I photographed for this blog in January. The lake is above tree line and I wanted to get the nearby glacier there, the velvety texture of flora - grass, shrub, and bloom. Many of the photos were only of the hillsides covered in treeless, green, but I will not be sharing any of the photos of velvet hillsides even though I like each one.
 |
| I am sharing the contrast of bare earth, glacier, and near treeline flora |
And as I passed through the soft carpet covered hills, gently easing me through the pass of the Alaska Range, this is where the transformation occurred where life as you breathe it, moment by moment, is supreme over camera and word. I could not have possibly captured the intensely rich, and varied landscape as I passed by because each moment was unique for color, angle, light, and perspective - although I tried. I really tried. But at that moment, slices could not come close to the human lens which perceives a full hemisphere, taking it all in - road, sky, tree, shrub, grass, mountain, pipeline, river and sand bar. And each moment is different, each view slightly alters the sensory response, each shift in color in the mountains brings a new depth to the experience.
I have some very special photos from Summit Lake to roughly the edge of Fort Richardson, all of which mean much to me because they will remind me of what a beautiful, grace filled life we have here on planet earth. But I won't be sharing all of them here. In fact, as I write these words, I am not sure at this moment which I will share. It is not practical to share them all, and so all I can offer is a very thin, small, and almost stingy piece of what enchanted me at each turn of the road. My apologies.
No comments:
Post a Comment
Thanks for taking time to comment.