I am out doing some ground-truthing for a broad landform-age model to evaluate the potential for buried archaeological resources in areas of the Mojave Desert where Joshua Trees are one of keystone species. (Lousy default thumbnail, I know).
California
American Avocets in Surprise Valley, California — A morning on the causeway
I can almost remember the first time a saw an American Avocet. I cannot, of course, recall the exact day, but it was on an early excursion to Warner Valley, Oregon, sometime in 1988. Probably. I loved birds, but I was not as quietly infatuated with them as I am now. I recall, however, the dramatic coloring and upright stance of this confident shore bird. My wife has similar memories of brilliant Avocets at the Fernley Wildlife Management Area between Winnemucca and Reno. Because the Avocet is distinctive and lacks the relative sameness or subtle distinctions of so many bird families, I can see why it might be many western birder’s ‘entry point’ to a lifetime of birding. And they are so fun to photograph.
In June of 2025, leaving a geoarchaeological study in northwestern Nevada, I crossed into Surprise Valley, California, traversing the basin floor on the causeway through Middle Alkali Lake. The shallow lake, sometimes nothing more than a dry lakebed, is the floor of the once vast pluvial Lake Surprise, its relict, Pleistocene-age shorelines ringing the much higher valley-margin hillslopes. Small, gravel islands emerge from the shallow lake, paralleling the roadway. The gravel, left from roadwork along the causeway, catch the rising sun and glow warmly in the shallow water. Clear skies reflect from the smoothness of the mirror lake.
I am moving slowly westbound along the causeway when I notice a Willet wading calmly in grass protruding from a narrow shoreline. At the same moment, I notice a flat-bed pickup, the only other vehicle for many miles it seems, practically tailgating me. A pair of collies stare intently from the sides of the cab. No fault of the guy heading to chores, or whatever, I’m barely moving. There are no turnouts on this section of the causeway, so I pick up the pace to get to the other side. I will turn around and let the man and his impatient dogs get on with their morning.
Working my way back to the wading Willet I find a turnout on the eastbound side of the causeway that will fit my rig. While Willets are nice to see, what had caught my attention just as ranch-life had barreled down on me was the flash of contrast; the black, white, and pink, of American Avocets! There were six or so outstanding birds wading or roosting on the gravel bars poking above the reflective waters.
I waded slowly from the causeway shore, staying close to the road but getting to level ground. The birds did not seem to care. Avocets tend to be less skittish than many shorebirds. I move slowly getting low to the water – the Willet had already had enough of me – but the Avocets went about their business. Two more flew in, landing with easy steps in the shallow water.
The light was perfect. I spent an hour with the birds, getting a myriad of singles and pairs reflected easily in the low-gradient light of early morning. A pair seemed to be considering nesting spots while others foraged in the grass and gravel. It is a pleasant pause before my journey home, as I am soon southbound on Hwy 447 toward Gerlach and Pyramid Lake. The Avocets have a summer ahead of them, wading the segmented lakes of Surprise Valley, I am better having spent some time with them.
Keep going. (Thanks to Desna for the Avocet as birding ‘entry point’ story idea).
Martis Dogs: A chance encounter with Coyotes near Truckee, California
Martis Valley, California, a few miles north of Lake Tahoe and just below Donner Summit, is often significantly colder than the surrounding mountains and almost always colder than the valleys of western Nevada. It seemed as cold as ever on this April morning (2025) even though it was a few days into spring. This morning, the valley’s reputation as a ‘cold sink’ is deserved. But where’s the snow? Only patches peek out from the shade of the forest floor; it is already drier than I expected.
I had driven from Nevada to do some documentary photography for a National Register nomination highlighting a complex of traditional properties and archaeological sites along Martis Creek, a tributary of the Truckee River, which flows from Lake Tahoe to Pyramid Lake in western Nevada. I traveled against its flow on my short journey into the mountains. My problem, on this frozen morning, is that there are millions icy crystals reflecting the sunrise from every surface and seemingly hanging in the air. The bright highlights were impossible distractions from the necessary documentation. I would have to wait for some mid-morning warmth, at least.
To make use of the extra time, I started to scout for the requisite shots, but I was quickly distracted by the calls of a pack of coyotes. They were nearby, but in the woodlands that ring the open meadow of the valley bottom. I turned toward the forest, following a wide trail in the general direction of the melodic howling. The clustered trees favored me, as I soon caught a glimpse of a pair of yearling pups. Nipping and wrestling, they failed to notice me even though I was relatively close. They would tussle and then stop to sing and yelp. It was musical.
Soon, mom appeared behind the pair pushing them onward, into the forest toward a nearby meadow. Unlike the unaware pups, she caught sight of me immediately. We shared a long gaze, implying that it was fine to share the trail but not to follow her little pack.
I watched for a while, sticking to the trail to let them wander without watching me too closely. They were now quiet and got to business in the meadow, running among deep grass, sage, and willows as their hopeful hunt began.
As I lost sight of them, a Mountain Chickadee stopped by to see what all the ruckus had been about. By then the song-dogs had disappeared completely, and it was time for me to get to work.
Keep going.
Please respect the natural and cultural resources of our public lands.
Time for the visitors: Photographing comets at the margins of the Great Basin
I seem to have driven above the fall colors of central Utah. The Old River Bed of the ancient Great Salt Lake, where I had been walking an ancient delta earlier in the day, was far behind me. With the light fading, I realized I was too late in the season – beyond the middle of October – for peak color in the aspen groves of the Wasatch Mountains. Never mind ‘peak color’, I was clearly too late for leaves of any kind; the aspens formed rows and rows of picket-lined, skeletal woodland, no leaves in sight. My goal this autumn, however, was something different.
I have had a long interest in the night sky. While I completed college courses and picked up a nice collection of books on astronomy, none of that prepares you for a night under a desert’s canopy of stars. Before I wandered deserts, living in the cross-timbers of northern Texas, telescopes had my attention, and I even fumbled around with camera mounts in high school, trying to connect a Canon AE-1 to an 8” tracking scope. I never solved that puzzle. My astrophotography has advanced little since the early 1980s.
However, comets.
In 1986, while I was at college struggling through physics class, my dad tracked Halley’s Comet as it approached perihelion on its ±76-year orbit. My grandfather had seen it as a boy, and my father wanted him, his father-in-law, to see it twice. Although I did not get to share in that effort, I have the picture my father captured from our front porch after several attempts at various locations. An engineer, he was able to get his AE-1 attached to a modified tripod to get the image. Although he recorded settings for several of his attempts in a notebook (high-quality paper metadata!), his best image is almost an afterthought; a classic moment of ‘one last image’.
So, my fascination with comets, and photographing them, has been transmitted across generations. The lumen-tailed visitors connect us to calendars of expansive scale, with predictable orbital cycles of centuries to many, many millennia. Some pass by only once, surprises from discovery to departure. As they approach the sun, the solemn apex of their journey, cyclical or not, they increase in brightness, shredding mass in the solar headwind, but their ultimate display remains a mystery of our night sky; an experience unpredictable to even the most experienced astronomer.
I have taken to photographing the celestial visitors, building on my father’s passion in the spring of 1986. My imagery could be more creative, certainly – this post is personal motivation for the next visitor.
Comet Neowise lit up the morning sky for several days in 2020. I captured its sudden drama, maybe as a sign of new days beyond the Covid pandemic. It was bright in the morning sky, and I only needed to walk into the hills above our home to set up a photo. I remember thinking it was fascinating that I could do this without having to travel at all, a unique spectacle just outside the house. I now wish I had found some landscape interest to go with its brilliance – I have time, it will be back in about 5,000 years.
I had slightly more success with Comet Tsuchinshan-ATLAS four years later. On a night Desna and I thought to go into the hills above Washoe Lake to simply look for it, I captured a ‘portrait’ shot with wonderful detail of its tail and anti-tail (the anti-tail appears to point toward the sun, but it is a rare trick of perspective as the earth crosses the comet’s orbital plane). It was for Comet Tuchinshan that I climbed into the leafless and windy Wasatch, hoping to capture its image against the backdrop of the Milky Way. I was not happy, at first, with the light pollution from the towns in Utah’s Sanpete Valley, but the image has grown on me, remembering my camp on the windy ridge of Skyline Road. It is nice to have two very different views of this exceptional comet – a comet that will never be seen again.
As I drafted an early version of this post, thinking about my father’s Comet Halley, I learned of the appearance of Comet Lemmon in the fall of 2025 – just last month. I was leading a project in Yosemite National Park, testing the boundaries and depth of several archaeological sites on the park’s boundary. I had little free time, but I also knew I could not complete this post without at least trying to capture an image of the most recent visible comet. I waited into dark on a hillside below the road to Tioga Pass, and soon enough Comet Lemmon revealed itself. It reflected a subtle, suggestive light, difficult to keep an eye on, but a careful, long exposure revealed its short-lived spectacle. I will have to wait a millennium for this one to return. It was worth it.
For the past couple years, my searches for fall color have been timed poorly. I will, however, have chances next year. These comets are once-in-a-lifetime, so I am happy to have spent at least one night in a buffeted tent, far above and beyond the leaves of autumn. Icy fragments of the cosmos, luminous for a moment in an evening sky, are worth missing the perennial colors of our locally wonderful trees. I will camp in the color next year, I hope – unless there is another comet.
Keep going.
Please respect the natural and cultural resources of our public lands.
Winter’s Coming to the Eastern Sierra, CA
We were closing out the 2021 field season in Owens Valley, and I had been on a long circuitous road trip working on projects in San Diego, California, visiting with colleagues in Henderson, Nevada, and traversing Death Valley to return to our team working on the fans of the Owens Lake basin. While we wrapped up our fieldwork, the first solid winter storm bore down on the Sierra. Travel home was not possible. The storm meant steady rain in Lone Pine, California, our lodging and logistical base, with the Sierra massif clouded over. I took some time to wrap up some field mapping in the southern valley, taking advantage of the road closures that precluded a homebound journey.
Eastern Sierra – Winter’s Coming Collection
Soon, however, the storm caught up with me and the graded roads of the Olancha and Walker fans were flooded. I retraced my way around to the east side of the valley and visited the falling dunes of the Centennial benches, a small dune-set on the Highway 190 as it climbs out of Owens Valley. I really enjoy this small falling dune and adjacent sand ramps as they move across the dramatic black basalt of the local rimrock benches. Today, the wind was the subject. I was pushed by gusts and polished by grains as a worked low on the dune to tell the story of the wind and its motive power. No changing lenses in these conditions, but I chose well, and I am happy with the results.
The rains finally reached the desert side with the Inyo and Coso mountains soon engulfed in clouds and sheeting rain. I was not quite finished, however. I worked my way into blue hour in the Alabama Hills looking for small scenes in the fading light under the stormy clouds – only the lower mountain-front was visible. The barrel cactus seemed to bend the blue light into a kind of warmth, needles glowing against the cold rocks and sandy grus. Looking for a different perspective, I crawled into a tight cave-like alcove to keyhole small cactus. I am not sure it works but the contortion effort of lifting the camera into the slotted crevices to frame a hoped for subject had me laughing out loud; I am sure a strange solitary sound in the windy evening.
I returned to the hotel to hope for a break in road conditions so I could get home. I had logged over 1600 miles on this outing, and the first pangs of homesickness are more acute when conditions change the plan. Clearing skies of the following morning brought reward. Forecasting the changing conditions, I hurried back into the Alabama Hills before dawn. I once again patrolled Movie Road. Driving its full extent and returned eventually to the newly restricted ‘Day Use’ area where the road first bends sharply east. The Sierra crest beckoned, and I had great pleasure watching the refreshed skies on Lone Pine Peak. The light of the Sierra, a gift accepted once again.
Eastern Sierra – Winter’s Coming Collection
Keep going.
Please respect the natural and cultural resources of our public lands.