A personal geography of landscape and place, art and geo-science.
Arc Dome 11,788 ft (3593 m) – 4005 ft gain 2021.05.14 Sometimes life gets in the way. As Second Friday approached, it appeared the workaday world required more that its usual allocation. Although I am fortunate to have spent much of my career working outside and have been overlanding since
Mount Irish 8473 ft; 2665 m. 2200 ft gain. 2021.04.11 It is April’s Second Friday, so that means it is time for a backcountry recce, but first, I get vaccinated. It is my second shot. Although I had no side-effects other than a sore arm the first time around, I
Continue readingNevada High Points #82 – Mount Irish Mountains
Ok, this is not a bird photography website. It just happens that this was an interesting week. After our brief birding excursion along the East Walker River, Desna heard that a Red-headed Woodpecker had taken up brief residence in Six Mile Canyon in the Virginia Range, just below Virginia City,
Continue readingWildlife Photography: Getting Lost with the Red-headed Woodpecker
Here is a slightly different angle for the LightOpt Photography blog. My wife and I teamed up on a quick camp trip to the East Walker River to check out birds in the Walker River State Recreation Area, a relatively new component of the state park system. I had passed
Continue readingWildlife Photography: Birds of the East Walker River, Nevada
Mahogany Mountain 6979 ft (2127m) — 1510 ft gain 2021.03.27 Although I had been able to visit the Cuprite Hills on the journey south, fieldwork along the Gila Mountains of southern Arizona postponed our Second Friday overland recce for March. To keep our run going, however, we took to northwestern
Continue readingNevada High Points #81: Little High Rock Mountains
Cuprite Hills HP (Peak 6071) 6071 ft (1850 m) — 1503 ft gain 2021.03.10 When I first imagined a quest of climbing to the high point of each of Nevada’s named mountain ranges, as I studied my collection of topographic maps, it came as a solution to a problem. As
Gray Hills HP 6665 ft (2032 m); 1420 ft gain 2021.02.07 It is a nice Sunday afternoon, why not get out to close high point? I have, of course, visited most of the ranges and hills near our home, so my choices are limited – I am basically running out
Snow filled the valleys of the western Great Basin at the end of January, when lake-effect squalls, energized as they traversed Lake Tahoe, cycled through the valleys southeast of the lake. We approached two feet of coverage at St0neHeart, with deep drifts along fence lines and out-buildings. So early on
Continue readingLandscape Photography: Snow Recce in Antelope Valley CA
I have been camped for a little more than a week with an archaeological team in the Quinn River Valley of northern Nevada. Our work focuses on the vast, natural obsidian sources of the Double H and Montana Mountains that rise west of the valley’s broad sagebrush and agricultural land.
One of my favorite respites from road-weary travel in the Black Rock – High Rock country of northern Nevada is a stop at Planet X Pottery. John and Rachel have become great friends over several decades of occasional, but all-too-rare, visits to their home and gallery northwest of Gerlach. Our