I had expectations. That’s always my problem. Expectations.

Two weeks ago, I woke at dawn on a mirror-still morning at Lake Powell. To the northeast, a rim of dank smoke lined a sky lit orange by the slanted rays of the sun colliding with flakes of our northwestern forests. Somewhere, a fish splashed. Two ducks sliced a crisp V across the surface of the lake, making for their nest along the breakwater at Bullfrog.  Read >>

As the pandemic reduced the size of their world, one Taos family took on a hiking challenge and found a new path.  Read >>

Cli-Fi cuts too close to home. Climate Fiction isn’t exactly speculative fiction or science fiction. It is the right here, right now. Our destructiveness and carelessness already haunt us. We don’t have to look far to see that for vast chunks of the world this ‘fiction’ is all too real. Cli-Fi is both where we are and where we are going. Read >>

There is a very fine line between the creation of street photography art and poverty pornography. As a photographer, it is a difficult and delicate balance to strike. I am not always successful. Sometimes, I don’t even know if I’m successful at striking that balance or if I’ve crossed the line. But I’m always on the lookout for that line and I’m conscious of the balancing act. Read >>

A few weeks ago, I crawled into a cave. I saw a cloud carved into the soft volcanic tuft that sheltered this particular cavern and a number of others nearby. All are similar and the mountain is like an anthill, suffused with caverns and caves and tunnels. The cloud was nothing particularly special, a pyramid of six arcs at the center with staircase-like wings off to the right and to the left. Flowing lines trailing into the powdery walls hung from the underside of the wings. It was a six-hundred year old depiction of a summer thunderstorm and the virga that sweeps the arid American Southwest. Read >>

By the time I woke, my body temperature had dropped to the point that I was shivering violently. I rolled over into the fetal position and my sleeping bag squished. Someone was calling my name. I could hear rain. Then my little pup tent collapsed around me. Read >>

Vlado Vançura, volunteer wilderness ranger and member of the European Wilderness Society (EWS) pointed to lichen hanging from a spruce as evidence that things were indeed getting better. “You would have never seen that in communist days,” he said. Air pollution was such a massive problem before Slovakia joined the European Union that foresters even forgot that lichen on a tree was natural he explained to me. Read >>