Throughout any given year I take quite a few photographs. Really I take a lot of pictures. The number of pics grows exponentially when we go to national parks. So you can imagine the number of pictures that I snapped last summer as we celebrated the 100 Anniversary of the National Park Services with a blow out trip to 5 National Parks and three National Monuments. Through this Friday's Note entry I offer two avenues of sharing photographs I've taken. The first is a link to a video I assembled of our family visits to many national parks over the past decade. I fully admit it's a little like a home movie, though it is a nice chronology of my girls growing while visiting some pretty incredible landscapes.
The second avenue of sharing the photographs are the following top 10 pictures from that trip. These are some of my favorite landscape pictures from the trip. The first picture is of the Tetons from Schwabacher landing, not Swashbuckler landing as I had said for a day or so. The back story for getting this picture is convincing the family to get up at 4:45am in order to drive to this location to get the 5:20am rays of sunshine against the mountains. As we pulled into the parking area, already populated by a dozen cars and a mini tour bus, I managed the, "see I'm not the only crazy person!"
The second photo is from the same general area, but a little further down the river. The water at this location was clear and calm making the reflection nearly as sharp as the mountains themselves.
The next picture was the following morning, yes another 4:45am wake up call and 40 min drive to get to the location of the Mormon barns at the southern end of the national park. The early morning light against the barn framed by the mountains is one of the best 15 minutes of picture taking that is possible.
This picture is inside of the chapel of the Transfiguration. The picture shows the panoramic view behind the alter. I would find paying attention to a homily a little difficult with this being the view.
The lower falls of the Yellowstone river are twice the height of the Niagara falls. The falls are the entry point to the Grand Canyon of Yellowstone. The power of the water pouring over the falls is impressive. The view from Artist Point absolutely never gets old.
In the southern half of Yellowstone is the Grand Prismatic Spring. I was thwarted in my attempt to scale the hill on the far side of this oversized hot spring since the park had that road closed for work. So this picture is from the boardwalk that takes you out onto the bacteria fields that surround the hot spring. The different colors are the various types of bacteria that grow at different temperatures.
In the northern end of Yellowstone is the Mammoth hot spring. This snapshot is just a snippet of the overall hot spring mountain which is constantly changing as various paths get clogged and flows redirect. These changes were very evident in comparing the views from multiple years apart.
At the top of Montana is a stunning park title Glacier National Park. While the park is down to approximately 25 glaciers, down from 150 glaciers a century ago. This picture (yes getting up early yet again) is of Goose Island on Lake St Mary as the first rays of sun light up the clouds and far mountain tops.
Glacier National Park has a single road that bisects the park (east to west) with there being a size limit on the vehicles allowed to navigate the road due to the narrow lanes and sharp turns next to sheer rock walls. While parking at one of the pull outs to take in the scene I notice one of the iconic red tour buses pass us going up the mountain. Luckily I was able to take this picture as the bus crosses over the falls.
On the west side of the mountain range is Avalanche Creek. This is the a classic view of the crystal blue milky stream that cuts through the moss covered boulders. I have basically the same picture from back in 1996, but that picture was taken in August and the water was a lot lower and less striking.
One of my final favorite pictures is from Mount Rushmore. I played around with some manual focus in order to get a little different view of old Abe. I was pretty pleased with how this turned out. It's nice having a portrait figure stay so still for his picture.
Well, that is it for my retrospective of favorite 2016 vacation pictures. Look at it this way, you didn't have get up early to enjoy these views.
