Photography – Page 46 – On the road with Jim

Orange Boulders Picture of the Week

A this week’s featured image shows, the trails of Granite Dells City Park provide diversity you wouldn’t expect to find in a massive formation of slow-cooled lava. This week’s featured image shows a small example of that. It comes from one of the Flume Trail’s spurs. Instead of walking around a ridge, this option climbed over it, before it descends and rejoins the main path on the other side. I’d call it a shortcut, but since it added a climb, it didn’t save any time.

On the ridge, the view opens, and since the granite pile tops were exposed to weathering longer than below, so more of the car-sized boulders lay scattered on the ground. If you’ve only driven by The Dells, you’d get the idea that the rocks are nothing but dirt. As you can see in this image, they’re actually covered with lichen of various colors. Here an orange species grows next to a green varietal. Up close, they give the rocks a velvety texture.

I stopped along the trail to capture this image because this tumbled pile of rocks stood apart from assembled puzzle stacks surrounding them. The distinct orange color caught my attention too. There are other colors that you’ll see as you walk along the trails. We’ll bee seeing some of those in other photos this month. Finally, I included a bit of the trail in this image to add a leading line and some perspective to the image.

You can see a larger version of Orange Boulders on its Web Page by clicking here. I hope you enjoy viewing my newest entry and come back next week when we show another photo from Granite Dells.

Until next time — jw

Owl See You Later Life in Congress

We’ve never lived in a house that was previously owned before and after living here for a couple of years, I’m convinced that this one is haunted—or at the very least it has a poltergeist. Our house constantly talks to us. The doors squeak, the floors creak, and there are strange noises coming from inside the walls. We’ve put rocks at all the doors to keep them from opening or closing on their own. It gets worse at night after we turn off the TV and the house goes dark. For the first couple of months, one of us would be startled awake and shout, “What was that?” After getting out of bed to investigate—and I’m always the designated detective—I hopelessly search for the noise’s source. We’ve gotten used to much of it now and mostly ignore the strange sounds.

That was until the other night when I woke to what sounded like scuffling on the other side of the headboard. As I laid there trying to decide if the noise was real or if it was part of my dreams, it happened again, and I thought, “There’s something going on outside.” It was 3:00 am and my brain began cataloging all the possible causes for a noise like that. Could it be a coyote cornering a rabbit against the house? Was there a javelina rooting in the dirt? What if it’s a mountain lion? By the time I listed all the scenarios, the hooting started. I suspected that the cause of the racket was an owl. Now that I was pretty sure it wasn’t a lion, I could be brave enough to get up and take a look.

I’ve been on recon missions like this before. I know that I can’t see anything in the dark; especially on a moonless night. That’s why we have dozens of Pelican flashlights all over the house. I also know that if you turn the light on while inside the screen door, all you get is a well-lit close-up of the screen. Finally, I know that you have to wait to turn on the light until you’re ready for it, otherwise your prey will see you moving and they run-off. You get bits of wisdom like this from experience; lots and lots of experience.

I sat up and grabbed a flashlight from my nightstand drawer and tiptoed to the front door. Since the nights are very quiet out here, I purposefully opened the front door and gingerly slipped through the screen door. If there was an owl, the first place to look would be on the TV antenna, and there is only one spot on the front porch where you can see it. That spot is the outmost right corner, so I cautiously slipped into place and looked toward the aerial and then turned on the flashlight. Staring back at me were two pterodactyl sized great horned owls sitting at opposite ends of the antenna like it was a teeter-totter. To my surprise, they didn’t fly away. Instead, they stared at the light while shifting their heads in a circular motion. They were trying to figure out the light.

“Oh! Anne has to see this,” I thought and slipped back into the house to wake her. Now, this is the dangerous part because if I’m not careful, I could lose a limb … or worse. Because it’s summer, she was sleeping without covers in all of her natural beauty. I grasped her ankle which was beyond the reach of her claws and gently squeezed while I hushed her. “Huh … what?” she uttered as she woke. I whispered about the owls and how she should come and see. Her sleepiness turned to excitement as she followed me outside. I guided her into the spot and then turned on the flashlight. The owls were gone. They must have flown away when I went inside. I assured her that they were real and they were huge and they made a racket when they landed on the pole. She was disappointed that she didn’t get to see them. Then from my neighbor’s front porch, I heard John’s voice ask, “Hey! What’s all the commotion about?”

Until next time — jw

Dells Scrub Oak Picture of the Week

This week’s featured image is one that I took while exploring the Flume trail that parallels Granite Creek below the Watson Lake dam. State Route 89 divides Granite Dells Park as it heads north out-of-town, with the Willow Lake complex on the west side and the Watson Lake facilities on the east. Each division has trails that meander through the maze of boulders. The main series of trails around Willow Lake is called the Constellation Trails. I’ve only had a taste of that trail system, but I want to hike there some more. I have hiked a couple of the trails around Watson Lake and I’ve completed the Flume Trail twice.

The trailhead is located along the north park boundary. Access to the parking area is via East Granite Dells Road. The trail is almost a mile long in each direction and has a couple of moderate climbs over a couple of ridges, but a lot of it is flat. At its start, it runs between private properties so you’ll see signs warning you to stay on the path. After the first hill, the trail drops into a wide grassy area where you walk creekside under a growth of Cottonwoods. There is a second ridge you must traverse before the trail returns to Granite Creek and stays there up to the dam. When water is high, excess water rushes out of a flume—sort of an artificial waterfall. The water has been low for several years, so the flume is rarely used.

We visited the Dells on our June Costco run, but I wasn’t ready and made a stupid mistake. We left home early so I could go shooting before the warehouse opened. I wanted to photograph with a low sun for the color and it was around half past eight when we got to the parking area, but the day was going to be hot—even in Prescott. While Anne waited in the shade, I grabbed my camera and a second lens and then headed up the trail without water. It was going to be a hit-and-run shoot lasting an hour, tops. I hiked this trail five years ago without problem when we spent the 4th in Prescott. This time I underestimated the strenuousness of the climb, the morning’s heat, and the extra two-thousand feet of altitude. By the time I stumbled back to the car, I was in such bad shape that I made Anne drive us to breakfast while I downed a quart of water. When we got to Costco, we bought a small backpack that I can carry camera equipment and a couple of bottles of water in. Live and learn, eh?

I came upon this scene at the trail’s beginning. After leaving the parking area and making my way over the first hill, I saw this scrub oak—a rather large and nicely shaped one at that—growing in the rock cracks. The green of its leaves stood out against the tan of the granite boulders towering over it. The wispy clouds made the blue sky interesting, so I included them in my composition.

You can see a larger version of Dells Scrub Oak on its Web Page by clicking here. I hope you enjoy viewing my newest entry and come back next week when we present another photo of the Granite Dells.

Until next time — jw

La Dolce Vita

I’m living a dream and I don’t mean that I’m Back in the Highlife Again. That would never happen. I have too much bad Karma. The dream I’m talking about is the one that everybody has. The details change, but in it, you’re trying to get something accomplished and things keep happening to thwart you. If you overcome one obstacle, another one takes its place and it’s usually worse. The dream goes on and on until you finally get to school and realize that you’re not wearing pants. I’m sure my dilemma isn’t a dream because I can remember what happened yesterday and it continues after I wake-up.

I’ve had my current photo printer for three years and it’s the second one that I bought. I got this unit because the printing heads on its predecessor clogged and nothing I did would clear them, including a fresh round of ink cartridges. Of course, I discovered the problem when I urgently needed to make a set of prints for a reason that’s now escaped me, so I panicked and ordered the second printer, and even paying for two-day delivery. I salvaged all the new cartridges from printer #1 so that I could use them in printer # 2. It’s been a couple of years and I haven’t needed to replace the entire set yet.

The new printer is off most of the time. I only turn it on when I sell a print or I have to make a new show entry. I stopped printing all of my images years ago. My closet is full of print boxes that just take up space. Since I don’t do very many art shows anymore, I don’t need to replace the existing stock very often.

I have a new show later this month (more to come) and the committee selected two of the five prints I submitted, so I fired up the printer a couple of weeks ago. The first thing I do when I turn it on is run a couple of cleaning cycles before I ever load the paper. I want to make sure the printer is hitting on all eight cylinders so I don’t waste a sheet of expensive paper. I went to make my four prints—two for show and two for backup—and the first three printed perfectly. There was something wrong in the shadows with the fourth print, so I tried again with the same results. The indicator for the cyan cartridge was flashing, but I didn’t have a replacement in my stash. Instead, I ran the head cleaning maintenance a couple of times while I ordered another cartridge from Amazon. Then I tried another print, but the results were the same. I tweaked the paper profile, I used another brand of paper, I did more cleaning, but nothing worked. In desperation, I ran a series of cleaning cycles until the printer yelled at me, “Can not do the head cleaning, one of the ink cartridges is out of ink.”

My cyan cartridge arrived yesterday and I put it into the printer. Before printing anything, I ran a nozzle check. When you do that, the printer spits out a print with a series of color music scales. If one of the heads is clogged, that color scale has broken lines. In this case, almost all the black scale was missing. Now that I had plenty of ink, I began running cleaning cycles. After each one, more of the black pattern appeared and after a half-dozen cycles, there was only one small break in the black pattern, so I tried once more. The printer began yelling again, “Maintenance cartridge is full, please replace with a new cartridge.” When you do a head cleaning, the printer squirts ink into the maintenance cartridge and when that’s full, the printer stops working until you replace it.

So I’m waiting for the new cartridge to arrive from Amazon. Because of today’s holiday, it won’t arrive until next week. Instead of matting and framing my show entries, I have to spend the day being nice to the birthday girl. That means I have to cook dinner and watch Independence Day again because that’s what she does on July 4^th. Jeez, it’s not even the alien invasion movie with the cool Slim Whitman ending. Maybe if I’m lucky, I can take a nap and sleep away this nightmare.

Until next time — jw

Granite Dells Sunset Picture of the Week

Welcome to July—the start of the year’s second half and when our nation comes together to celebrate Queen Anne’s birthday. Time flies when you’re having fun … and evidently, even when you’re not. As we tear another month from this year’s calendar, it’s also time to introduce the place we’ll visit: Prescott’s Granite Dells City Park. We were here five years ago during the tragic Yarnell fire, but this time, we came better prepared with experience and a real camera.

Granite Dells—or The Dells—is a “McDonalds’ playground” for adults. The park’s trails take you through or around the rock maze. There are secret rooms to discover, rocks to climb, narrow passageways to squeeze through, and creeks to ford. The only thing missing is the restaurant’s ball pit, where kids pee. The trail lengths vary so that you can spend an hour or an afternoon wandering among the giant boulders all day.

A million and a half years ago, a magma pluton—a six square-mile glob of molten lava shaped like a giant balloon—tried to force its way to the surface as the eruptions in Hawaii have done. Instead, because it didn’t have enough energy to bust through the rocks above, it was trapped and cooled slowly and crystallized into granite. Another famous example of a pluton is Yosemite’s Half Dome. As millennia passed and the forces of erosion and plate tectonics shaped the earth, the pluton eventually made its way to the surface. It has been exposed there long enough for the formation to fracture and undergo spheroidal weathering—the erosion that rounds the rock’s edges. Yavapai County has two other places where you can see these kinds of rock formations: the town of Yarnell along SR 89 and the hilltop where the truck stop of Nothing once was on Route US 93.

The two creeks that drain through the Dells, Granite and Willow, were dammed in the early 1900s as irrigation reservoirs by Chino Valley farm co-operatives. In 1998, Prescott acquired a chunk of Granite Dells, including the lakes, and has set aside the area as an open-space park. The usual picnic areas and sports fields are there, but the backcountry trails lead into parts of the park where you get a taste of wilderness experience. That illusion is occasionally broken when the trail passes a No Trespassing sign along the periphery.

When we visited the park in June, we saw new home developments on its northern flank and another proposed on the east side along the Peavine Trail near Point of Rocks. The development was met with community outcry and packed meetings at city hall. Concerned citizens worry that the new developments will irreparably change Dell’s character by blocking wildlife movements and introducing a sea of roofs to the landscape. It’s another example of a good thing being loved to death. I guess it’s true what they say, “You can’t have your Kate and Edith, too.”

I took this week’s image after a Prescott meeting—not at city hall—that I attended. The sun was about to set, so I rushed to the Dells to get this shot. When I got to the Watson Lake overlook, I knew I wanted to capture this sweeping scene with the most detail. The format is a little different for me because this is a four-shot panorama. I took four shots and stitched them together in PhotoShop. The resulting file size is four times larger than my usual shots, and I can make a print thirty-six inches wide at full resolution. I made a crop of the shoreline tree in actual size to show how much detail I got using this method. This image is called Granite Dells Sunset.

Tree Detail — A full-size crop of the shoreline tree in this week’s image shows how much detail is in this image.

~~Click here to see a larger version of Granite Dell’s Sunset on its Web Page.~~ It’s easier to find the tree in the larger version. I hope you enjoy viewing my newest entry and return next week when I post shots I took while hiking the park’s trails.

Until next time — jw

Bobby D’s BBQ at the English Kitchen Jerome Restaurant Review

To coerce Queen Anne to join me on a photo outing, I have to bribe her with something precious—like food or ice cream. If I schedule everything carefully, I can get away with having to pay for only one meal while we’re on the road. I wanted to shoot in Jerome in the good afternoon light and the drive from our house is a little over a couple of hours, so my cheapest bet was to buy her lunch. When we travel we use the TripAdvisor rankings to see what the popular restaurants are at our destination. It eliminates some guesswork picking out a place to eat. We look at the best reviews and then try to find them when we get to town and for our Jerome trip, Bobby D’s BBQ was their top pick.

Bobby’s is in the English Kitchen Building directly across the street from the Liberty Theater. The old building has hosted various restaurants since Charley Hong built it in 1899, according to the story on the back of the menu. I enjoyed reading the part about the English Kitchen name because—being a Chinese restaurant—it never served traditional British fare. If unwitting diners ordered an English breakfast, they were more likely served a dish of chop suey.

The interior of the original building is simple with about dozen wooden tables and historic Jerome photos decorating the wall. There’s not much room inside and since it was a pleasant day, we opted for seats on the deck. Our friendly hostess quickly found a spot at one of the many picnic tables. We enjoyed a nice breeze in the shade of the orange canopies and gawked at the Verde Valley panorama while the aroma of the smokers seduced our appetites. Our pleasant waitress brought menus and took our drink orders before we finished looking around.

Bobby D’s is a BBQ joint and the staff proudly proclaims that they’ve won a Best in Arizona award. The first page of the menu is all BBQ, but we weren’t that hungry so instead, we split the Arizona Cheesesteak from the second page. It consisted of brisket, sautéed onions, pepper jack cheese and (Ortega) chilies stuffed into a hoagie. It sounded different. It came to the table dry along with four house-made sauces for us to sample.

I’m a guy that likes BBQ and I’ve cooked a mean rib a time or two. I like a lot of flavor. A good sauce should singe your nose hairs but leave a sweet taste. The sandwich was good, but it surprised me at how little smoke and rub seasoning was in the meat. While I’m picking nits here, the mild chilies they use are lost in such a bold sandwich as this—jalapeños would have been a better choice. Their BBQ is southern style so one of the sauces is mustard-based, but it was too reminiscent of honey-mustard dressing for me. A second blend they have is called Jalapeño Molasses and again the chilies were missing in the sweet syrup. That leaves their Little Miss Tango sauce as my pick among the three. Anne liked it too—so that alone shows that it wasn’t spicy enough.

Bobby D’s is a good place in Jerome for lunch or an early dinner. It’s fun to eat in and learn about the historic diner. Our service was very good, and the staff was attentive. The food was also very good even if I felt it was on the bland side. Is this the best restaurant in Jerome? The reviews say it is, but I haven’t tried the others. Is it the best BBQ in Arizona? I’ve had better, but BBQ is always a safe bet. Because Jerome isn’t an overnight destination, many of its restaurants close by 2:00 while Bobby’s is open until 6:00. If this were a Yelp or TripAdvisor review, I’d offer four out of five stars.

Until next time — jw

School Bus 11 Picture of the Week

The Summer of Love was 51 years ago. It was 1967 when a hundred-thousand flower children converged on San Francisco’s Haight-Ashbury District and challenged our worldly perceptions. At the time, I was on duty overseas, so I missed it. When I returned to the States the next year, I got married and had to pass up the free sex movement. Four years later my first wife divorced me and by that time, the movement was over. My timing has always been impeccable.

Before we retired, Queen Anne and I had the pleasure of attending seminars in the Bay area several times. On our last visit, we signed up for a walking tour of the historic old houses. On the tour, we learned that a by-product of the hippie period was the Painted Ladies. Needing a place to live, the invaders bought the cheap dilapidated Victorian homes that no one else wanted. Like any respectable homeowner, they began to restore and personalize the homes by painting them. Instead of using the traditional way—one muted-tone color—they made the house’s details pop with bright contrasting colors. These paint schemes shocked traditionalist, but it drew attention to how much craftsmanship went into building these old houses. It gave them character and made you appreciate them more, so the style of painting Victorian homes in multiple colors has become the norm. We even painted the shed we bought here in Congress with three colors and that shocked the neighborhood then.

Last month, when I turned a corner in Jerome and saw this repurposed bus, it reminded me of those resourceful hippies and when I first visited the ghost town. There was a bit of tension in the old towns like Jerome and Bisbee then. People of my generation rejected the social norms and consumerist values of the period. They didn’t want to live in ticky-tacky tract homes and instead wanted a house that had character. They moved into Phoenix’s Encanto district and the abandoned shacks they found in these historic towns. They were perfect for making arts and crafts away from the rat race in Phoenix. The entrenched community pushed back. “We don’t want those weirdos living here, they’ll ruin everything.” Town hall meetings were often very heated and vocal and sometimes even made news in the Phoenix papers (yes, at one time, there were two papers). The conflict seems to have eased and there’s no apparent evidence of tension in today’s Jerome. It’s become a nice place to visit with the family, shop for mementos, and enjoy history—sort of a light version of Main Street, Disneyland.

The photo of the bus that triggered these recollections is called School Bus 11 and it’s my picture of the week. In it, I’m showing the essence of the school bus and its colors. The lights, the faded yellow, the rust, and the graphics tell stories about school children and—to me—the flower children of my past. I moved in to emphasize the patina, faded paint, and letters. From this close perspective, they become the composition and a story of yesterday.

You can see a larger version of School Bus 11 on its Web Page by clicking here. I hope you enjoy viewing my newest entry and come back next week when we move onto a new location for July.

Until next time — jw