On June 1, 2013, after a few weeks of sporadic aurora activity, I had decided to drive up to Mt Hood’s Trillium Lake to take some photos of the sunset, twilight, and night sky. Over the previous year I had noticed a steady uptick in the number of photographers that would set up along the shores at the lake, but this particular day/night was still in the halcyon pre-Instagram days, where the odds were, if other photographers were there, I would likely know them, and there was plenty of lake shore to spread out and work together.
Shockingly, I did not own a smart phone at the time. I know, I know…the times were different. About an hour after sunset, my wife, who was at home and had an Internet connection, called me to tell me that the KP had jumped up. I immediately looked to the north, and, could just make out faint glimmers of aurora activity in the blue twilight sky.
I settled in and started snapping photos. As the sky got darker the show became more and more clear: Red-pink vertical columns danced above Yellow-green blurs of aurora low on the horizon.
And then something strange happened.
To the northwest of Trillium Lake is an unnamed hill that’s about 500 to 1,000 feet higher than the lake itself. Slowly, over a couple of minutes, a bright band of glow worm-like light grew out of the hill and began to arc across the sky over the lake, so high that it was nearly touching the sky’s zenith. I angled my 14mm lens upward, trying to capture the full display, but it was impossible. I struggled to point my camera straight up; my ballhead and a knob or two on my tripod simply weren’t allowing me to do it. I could’ve reconfigured my center column to get the angle I wanted, but in the dark with limited time I decided to just shoot what I could.
What I didn’t know at the time was that I’d just met STEVE (strong thermal emission velocity enhancement), years before STEVE was even STEVE.
And in just 5 minutes, the phenomenon was gone. The strong arc expanded, wavered a bit like it was flapping in the wind, and then it broke up, leaving the aurora display much lower on the horizon to continue on strong.
Strong thermal emission velocity enhancement (STEVE) appears over Trillium Lake and Mt Hood, Oregon, June 1, 2013. To my knowledge this is the only photo I know of that features STEVE in Oregon.
The above panorama was assembled from 4 or 5 photos to give a greater field of view of the scene. I thought the result was better than any of the frames individually, as I was able to show the lake, a tiny sliver of actual foreground in the lower left corner, a nearby tree (on the left), and then a good amount of sky. (Just to illustrate, Polaris can be found about 4/5ths up in the center of the photograph, and Polaris is about 45 degrees above the horizon. I’m guessing my final result was 60 or more degrees of sky, along with foreground just a few feet in front of me.
I put together a quick gif that shows some of STEVE’s movement over a minute or two.
Ah, Hawaii, isle of luxuriant white sand beaches, fruity tropical drinks with tiny umbrellas, and widespread smiling aloha. A perfect getaway for an overworked, stressed mainlander!
And yet for eight days in early June instead of drinks with tiny umbrellas I opted to go to Hawaii to ice my fingertips off in sub-freezing conditions, to spend a few days under skies so thick with vog (volcanic fog) that I couldn’t see the mid-day sun overhead, and to have some hot tephra burped into my eye by a fiery lava deity. And not once did I don a bathing suit!
But I took lots of photos.
With that out of the way, let’s skip right to the end. On the last morning of my trip, my friend Jeff and I decided to get in a boat and go photograph the ocean entry. About a month before, Hawaii’s most active volcano (Kilauea) had begun to get a lot more feisty, issuing forth vast quantities of lava, resulting in dozens of fissures and an enormous lava river that raced toward the sea, fanning out delta-like upon its approach. In the first few days of my visit to Hawaii, while I explored the “sunny” side of the island, which was actually totally vogged over, all of that new lava flow finally reached the ocean, overtaking the beautiful Kapoho Bay in the process. Days later, I signed up for a boat trip to this area for a sunrise shoot.
The 3:30 am meeting time in Hilo was followed by a quick safety briefing and a reminder that we’d be in the open ocean (read: rough waters) for 75 minutes before getting to the ocean entry. By 4 am we had left. Within a few minutes we passed the long dark breakwater that separates Hilo Bay from open ocean. And that’s when the real fun began.
For the entire week I was there high-surf warnings had been issued all around the island, and this particular morning was no different. It’s hard to imagine a multi-thousand-pound boat skipping over waves, but it wasn’t long before the ocean first fell away from the underneath side of the boat and we dropped, belly-flopping back onto the sea with a reverberating “thuuung.” I issued forth a feeble “wheeee.” The captain made a slight adjustment in his bearing, and we soldiered on. Then, about 15 minutes into the journey, the puking began. And it didn’t stop for another couple of hours.
It was dark, and the only thing my eyes could fixate on were the few lights onshore. Most of them came from Hilo, although nearly the entire trip I could see the giant fountain of lava emitting from Fissure 8, the eruption’s most productive fissure. We worked our way along the coast, bumping along, sometimes violently, getting closer and closer to the lava-lit clouds that represented the ocean entry to the south.
With 36 passengers on the boat, our guide was busy shuttling 10 blue plastic puke buckets to a fro, occasionally washing them out with seawater and handing them back. Eventually all 10 puke buckets were in use. A smaller metal bucket labelled “FIRE” was enlisted for barf duty. To my left, three members of a family shared two buckets. The situation was getting bad.
“Is it usually like this?” I asked the guide.
He gagged while rinsing some yellow bile out of a bucket. “No. I’ve never had to give out EVERY bucket.”
At this point I was thankful to be unaffected by the ocean’s motion, but I knew that could all change at a moment’s notice.
We arrived at the ocean entry around 5:15, and small windows in the clouds on the eastern horizon where the sun was rising had allowed some light through. The scene was horrific: Huge columns of orange-colored smoke rose from farther inland, while the sea around us roiled with crashing waves and billowing explosions of smoke, steam, and bits of lava and tephra. The devastation was all-encompassing and surreal, and the waves were relentless. Inland was a blackened, smoldering wasteland. Nothing remained of the once beautiful bay.
I immediately got to work shooting photos. The first of the series had a much higher percentage of blurry, out-of-focus shots than the later ones. The same waves creating those amazing steam explosions also made for challenging shooting conditions for anyone trying to take photos. The experience was a little bit like trying to photograph a rodeo from the back of a bucking bronco. While fireworks go off around you. In the dark.
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“Night lights at the ocean entry,” lava steams in the low light as it enters the ocean at Kapoho Bay, Hawaii. For fine art prints or licensing, please message me using the “Contact Me” form.
“Lava steam bath,” high surf causes massive amounts of steam and smoke at the Kapoho Bay ocean entry, Hawaii. For licensing or prints, please message me using the “Contact Me” form.
“Lavalands,” high surf triggered dramatic explosions, sending bits of lava and tephra flying. For fine art prints or licensing, please message me using the “Contact Me” form.
“Roiling waters, Kapoho Bay,” lava snakes its way to the sea at the Kapoho Bay ocean entry. For fine art prints or licensing, please message me using the “Contact Me” form.
As the sun rose and more light hit the scene, the shooting got easier. I continued firing away as the boat made multiple passes along the coast, alternating between having the left side and the right side face the shore. Occasionally we were washed over by steam and laze. My lens completely fogged over as we passed through an all-encompassing steam cloud, and I briefly worried about whether our captain could even see where we were in relation to the lava.
And we got close.
Like, real close a few times. At one point an explosion to my right side showered my side of the boat in black sand tephra, a hot piece of it landing directly in my right eye. For a second I seriously thought that a piece of lava had hit my eye. That I was doomed. I blinked a couple of times in a near panic, and the sand cleared my eyeball. I blinked it out and continued shooting, relieved.
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“Woman with selfie stick, ocean entry,” a woman records video of the ocean entry at Kapoho Bay during a boat tour, June of 2018. For fine art prints or licensing, please message me using the “Contact Me” form.
“Ocean entry at first light,” the rising sun turns the clouds pink over the Kapoho Bay lava ocean entry, Hawaii. For prints or licensing, please message me using the “Contact Me” form.
“Ocean entry at first light II,” the rising sun turns the clouds pink over the Kapoho Bay lava ocean entry, Hawaii. For prints or licensing, please message me using the “Contact Me” form.
“Land of fire, sea of steam,” water boils at the Kapoho ocean entry, Hawaii. For fine art prints or licensing, please message me using the “Contact Me” form.
“Pele’s fist,” an explosion of steam, smoke, and tephra erupts from the Kapoho Bay ocean entry, Hawaii. For licensing or fine art prints, please message me using the “Contact Me” form.
“Mushroom cloud, lava ocean entry,” smoke and steam billow upward after an explosion at the Kapoho Bay ocean entry, Hawaii. For fine art prints and licensing, please message me using the “Contact Me” form.
After half an hour of passes, the captain turned us for home. Bits of black volcanic rock covered my white Canon lens. I had the same grit stuck to my face, as did the people who were sitting around me.
I marveled at what I had just witnessed, trying to suppress my gleefulness for the sake of those on board who were seasick and still throwing up.
We returned to port in Hilo at around 7 am. What a way to start the day.
In the mid 1800s, with a booming gold rush turning once-filthy miners into Izod-shirt wearing, boat-shoe clad member of the nouveau riche, the miners of Death Valley decided to upgrade their standard of living and send for their estranged families. Unfortunately, as the kids of Death Valley soon discovered, there wasn’t much to do in Death Valley other than work in the mines. Landscape photography was a pursuit relegated to opium addicts and the criminally drunk, and social media bullying still hadn’t been invented. Children, tired of traditional diversions such as “Kick the Cat” and “Whip the Burro,” were in desperate need of some entertainment.
This necessity resulted in a number of children-oriented structures being built: First, a one-room schoolhouse, then a hugely unpopular wooden slide, and finally a high-elevation summer camp perched far above the valley floor and away from the valley’s main settlements. This camp was aptly named “Fun Camp.”
With the summer weather in Death Valley being generally unfit for both man and beast, the mothers of Death Valley had sought out a location at higher elevations where they could drop their kids off for the summer to learn some of the lost pioneer arts of their forefathers, such as animal husbandry, husband wifery, and fence whitewashing. At 4,000 feet above sea level, the location for Fun Camp was a bit of an anomaly, as it rarely exceeded 60 degrees Fahrenheit all summer long due to coastal zephyrs that, as one 19th century writer put it, “Flowed o’er the seas, gathering up its coolness and finally spat that coolness upon the upper flank of the Panamint Range like so much chewing tobacco in a spittoon.”
During the spring of 1866, dozens of barracks were built. In the summer of 1866 the first group of kids moved in. Over the following decades a number of improvements were made to the 15-acre grounds, including something called a “swimming hall,” rudimentary thrill rides, and what historians later believed to be a sacrificial altar.
But despite all this fun, the camp had its problems. Hilarious but fatal dingo attacks were reported to have occurred on a somewhat frequent basis, and even the most basic of injuries were treated poorly, mostly because not a single adult was onsite from June to August, a detail that the mothers of Death Valley had overlooked in their desperation to rid themselves of a seemingly never-ending chorus of “We’re boooooored.” Some things never change!
In 1931, the newly formed Child Protective Services made raiding Fun Camp their first order of business. The camp was closed, and CPS cited unsafe living conditions, amusement park rides that had been both created from and fixed with duct tape, and a plethora of shallow unmarked graves filled with tiny child-sized bones as the reasons.
The Milky Way, Jupiter, Saturn, and Mars shine brightly over these abandoned structures in Death Valley National Park. For licensing or prints, please use the “Contact Me” form.
Pictured in this photo are Fun Camp’s swimming hall, the pub, and the ticket booth for the world’s very first Tilt-a-Whirl. The structures have been preserved impeccably because of the quick and decisive work of a collective of historians named the Fathers of the Eastern Sierras, who in 1933, two years after Fun Camp’s closing, loaded a dozen 20-mule-trains with some 80,000 gallons of epoxy resin and made the long and arduous trek up to Fun Camp, where they used the epoxy resin to coat the entire site for posterity, thus preserving an important but oft-forgotten part of American history.
Death Valley has some pretty wild weather in the spring.
One evening, my friends and I had plans to take photos of the salt patterns in Badwater Basin. However, 20 minutes before we were scheduled to meet, my friend Jake knocked at my door.
“Have you seen this?” he asked, and I looked past him to see, well, a sandstorm. The campgrounds across the road were completely consumed by blowing sand; there was no visibility at all. Even in the breezeway outside my door, which was somewhat protected by the hotel, sand was swirling into my face, landing in my eyes, mouth, and hair.
The sand particulates had so filled the air that the valley floor was glowing, particularly as the sun continued to descend lower. Instead of driving to Badwater Basin, we headed to the Mesquite Flat Dunes. Before emerging from the car, I put a long lens on my camera. About half an hour before sunset, still in the middle of golden hour, I shot the photo below. The low clouds, and the sheer amount of particulates in the air seemed to bring an early end to the golden hour; twilight descended rapidly on Death Valley.
Rays of light filter through airborne sand, clouds, and the Panamint Range, Death Valley National Park. Use the “Contact me” form at right for prints or licensing.
On our second and third nights in Baja California Norte last month, we followed a wending dirt road north from the sleepy town perched next to the edge of Bahia de los Angeles, past the one-step-above primitive camping of Playa La Gringa, where a row of not-very-private three-sided outhouses sat just a stone’s throw from the beach, bounced over deep ruts and rocks in my uncle’s Subaru Forester over a hill, to finally arrive at a secluded beach where we had great views of Isla Coronado and its volcanic northern tip, Volcan Coronado.
We pitched our tents in a wash to give ourselves a windbreak and proceeded to spend the next couple of days exploring the nearby hills, throwing rocks in the water, eating fish tacos, digging clams, and attempting to make our old inflatable kayak seaworthy.
And, of course, I took some photos.
Our second day was a cloudy one, and windy like all the others. However, the clouds were fantastic: Large stacked lenticulars lingered over the bay for 24 hours, mammatus clouds, wave clouds, and a number of others passed overhead. All were probably a result of the stormy weather blowing in from San Diego, travelling a few hundred miles down the peninsula, and then getting shaken up while passing over Cerro Santa Ana (otherwise known as Mike’s Mountain), It made for quite a show for anyone who appreciates a well-constructed cloud.
While watching these wild clouds, I had thought ahead to sunset and hoped that the clouds would still be visible. In the hours before sunset, the western horizon had been packed with clouds, and my hopes for an interesting sunset had begun to diminish.
That evening, I had begun to help make fish tacos when my son alerted me to the fact that the sunset was about to go off, so I dropped my knife and went into full-on landscape photographer mode. I’m glad I did, as the sunset was probably the best we experienced on this trip, with 360-degree color painted over some of the interesting clouds that had been hanging around all day.
Finding a foreground was relatively easy. I really enjoyed shooting the varied pyroclastic rocks in the area; they made for interesting foregrounds with their differing shapes and colors.
Sunset colors explode over Baja’s Volcan Coronado. Please use the “Contact me” form on the right to inquire about art prints or licensing the photo for commercial use.
