This summer, thunderstorms and infernos have been flirting with the High Sierra way more than usual. We have had several severe forest fires in the past few months that have prompted evacuation of Mariposa, the nearest town to Yosemite, and closure of several roads in the area. Driving down Mariposa today, one could easily see scorched roadside trees and the blackened earth. Black has never looked so ugly.
Currently, there are several big and small fires burning in the national park. These fires are throwing up quite handsome looking smoke plumes in the air. I am resisting the urge to photograph them; it doesn’t feel right to indulge artistically in something that is causing all sorts of trouble for folks around the valley.
The above image was supposed to be about Swift-Tuttle debris burning up in our air, but instead, ended up documenting a minor flaming spot supposedly in the Sunrise Creek area.
Tags: GlacierPoint Yosemite YosemiteNationalPark ForestFire Fire Night photography Night Meteor MilkyWay HalfDome Ramen Saha Stars YosemiteFire AstronomicalTwilight LittleYosemiteValleyFire
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Saguaros are indomitably resilient. They stand in harsh desert conditions often for more than 250 years and, as the true keystone king of their biome, sustain several other plants and animals. Often, they are seen in popular photos as silhouettes (or, semi-silhouettes) in the dramatic back-drop of a sunset where the viewer is likely more enchanted by the sky than the Saguaro. To bring the focus back to the giant cactus, this Saguaro-enamored nomad shot in the infrared to kill the sky. On purpose, he also shot into the sun to proxy the glaring heat that these beautiful creatures withstand for centuries. Other cacti were included in the frame because a king, no matter how lonely, must adorn his royal court. In this court, the indelible emperor of the neglected now looms large to the fugacious as the audacious eternity.
Tags: Saguaro Cactus CarnegieaGigante Carnegiea SaguaroNationalPark NationalPark Infrared InfraRedFilter InfraredPhotography Arizona RinconMountainDistrict PricklyPear Ramen Saha 690mmirayirfilter 690mm IR
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Some of my most endearing and memorable childhood memories involve fireflies. I grew up in a suburban rural community next to a waterbody, where summer twilights were special. After the sunset, hundreds of fireflies blinked their way into the forest and my imagination. Chasing them, holding them, and letting them fly away was a pure joy never to be attained in any other way. My childhood twinkles brightly, in many parts, because of these fireflies. When something is so special, my son must endow it from me.
One problem with that idea… California has no fireflies.
Solution… The Appalachian does!
Thus, the other week, Rishabh and I flew cross-country with the specific intent of seeing fireflies in Appalachian mountains and forests, where many firefly species exist and display their fiery mating rituals for a few summer weeks. Of all these species, Photinus carolinous is special; this species has attained popularity as synchronous fireflies of the Smoky Mountains. As males of this mysterious species synchronize their flashing, the entire forest blinks in unison – like an IMAX theater displaying a fluidic form of Van Gogh's 'Starry night'. Thousands of flying fireflies flash about six times synchronously, and then after a brief period of total darkness, the cycle is repeated. This light show occurs only in a handful of places in the world and for a few scores of hours every year. If that is not exclusive enough, then consider the following: these fireflies do not flash if it rains, which it often does in these humid mountains around this time of the year. They also refuse to fly and fire if its too cold. Last but not the least, they are bothered significantly by any other light source and therefore are best viewed in secluded areas.
Because of such inbuilt rarity, synchronous fireflies have captured the public’s imagination. Thousands flock to trails near the Little River Valley in Elkmont, where the largest concentration of synchronous fireflies are reported within the Great Smoky Mountain national park. When we arrived at sunset, trails in Elkmont looked like a county fair without an admission fee; there were lots of people everywhere with their bug sprays, umbrellas, lawn chairs, kids and babies, and eagerness to experience something unique and uncapturable on video. While I appreciate everyone’s interest in nature, however, those crowded trails were a far cry from memories of my childhood, where I would often be the only one playing with fires of the darkness. Neverland can't be this crowded.
After diligent research, Rishabh and I found several alternative options. Over the next five consecutive nights, we saw, shot, and played with fireflies in several non-traditional locations spread across three national parks. The image presented above is of one such location by the Roaring Fork stream in the Great Smoky Mountains, where two kids – Rishabh and I – were the only witness to the firefly show. Standing within that mute orchestra of light and beauty, I realized why bluegrass music could have originated nowhere else, but only in this land of synchronous symphonies.
Technical information: The displayed EXIF data are for the background forest, which was shot at twilight before firefly flashing began. The image is a composite of several 20 second exposures (ISO 3200, f/2.8) shot later at the exact same location.
Tags: SynchronousFireflies Fireflies PhotinusCarolinous Firefly NorthCarolina Tenessee GreatSmokyMountains GreatSmokyMountainsNationalPark NationalPark RoaringForkStream RoaringForkMotorTrail Gatlinburg Ramen Saha
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"To go inside, you go outside because you need to know yourself in context. Not the big “I” you usually feel you are as you go trotting through your daily life, but to find that added dimension of yourself that… that innermost essential you… that is there."
–Ruth Kirk (filmographer, naturalist, and author of several books about US national parks)
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To visit the inside of the ‘outside’, one could visit caves. Four of the 62 US national parks – Wind Cave, Carlsbad Caverns, Great Basin, and Mammoth – offer cave experience to anyone wanting to ‘dig deeper’. Despite varying in their inherent characters like us human beings, these caves have one thing in common. It’s dark down there. Very dark.
During our visit to the Mammoth Cave national park last year, we took the ‘River Styx’ tour to the underground river that carved the cave system. I had mild trepidation signing up for this tour, which is rated moderate and goes deeper than any other tour… up to the water level. As an aside – I am not a keen cave-tour-taker; beyond a point, the incomprehensible darkness unnerves me. My anxiety was a bit more intense here at Mammoth caves, which has the unsettling history of Floyd Collins. Collins was a private cave explorer who, while spelunking in 1925, was trapped in the crystal caves here. Despite a noteworthy national media attention and a valiant rescue effort, he died trapped in the darkness. I don’t fear death, but I don’t want to meet her in total darkness either.
“Is everyone here?”, the young Kentucky-born-and-raised ranger asked loudly.
Thirty minutes into our tour, we had assembled in a large chamber after walking and squeezing through several passages of various width and height. Thanks to my past cave tours, I knew exactly what was coming next. When assured of everyone’s presence, the ranger reached out for a hidden switch and flipped it. The lights went out and we were left in total darkness. This pitch-black ‘cave darkness’ is truly unique; no matter how long you let your eyes adapt, you will still see absolutely nothing. As a fallout, all other senses are immediately heightened, and disembodied narration by the ranger only perturbs and daunts more. Gifted authors have described this darkness as “choking” and “smothering”. I don’t blame them. We, the visually unimpaired, are extraordinarily pampered by light!
But on this particular tour, I was ready not to be smothered by the darkness. Remember, this tour was all about gathering some of Ruth Kirk’s context for my innermost essential by visiting the “inside of the outside”? Well, here I was… in the very core of the outside, which like a galactic blackhole, adamantly refused the light. It doesn’t get any deeper and denser than this, does it? The ranger’s narration slowly fainted, so did all my proprioception. I was… floating away.
Suddenly, surrounding me, there were tiny blinking light... Fireflies! How did fireflies get in a cave? Oh, wait… I was not in the cave anymore. There was the subterranean Styx River surfacing through the large spring and flowing away from the grotto into the nearby mighty Green river. Upstream on this mighty tawny river, one could see the Green River Rural Ferry, ferrying cars, trucks, and Kentucky’s history for one and all. But then, in the fading twilight, I was mostly engrossed by the angelic display of these little riparian lights. Were they flickering hope? Were they happy memories of my childhood? Or, were they just little traces of my innermost inside out there on the outside?
Technical information: The displayed EXIF data are for the background scene, which was shot at twilight before firefly flashing peaked. The image is a composite of several 30 second exposures (ISO 3200, f/2.8) shot later from the exact same spot as the background.
Tags: PhotinusPyralis Fireflies Firefly GreenRiver Kentucky MammothCaveNationalPark MammothCave NationalPark Ramen Saha CommonEasternFirefly BigDipperFirefly
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California is burning. Oregon is burning. Washington is burning. If you haven’t seen the smoke outside your window, you must have seen some of those eerie Bay area photos from Wednesday that looked more like images from an alien planet. Our air quality indices have been screaming in high hundreds (unhealthy to hazardous), and the faint bleeding sun on our horizon look more like a nightmare than a life-support. As of today (September 10, 2020), 3.1 million acres have burned in California alone (for scale, Connecticut's area is 3.5 million acres) and fourteen thousand firefighters are fighting 29 fires in California. Heroic helicopters have rescued hundreds of stranded people from burning national forests. But, seven folks (including an infant less than a year old) have died from these fires, and thousands of others are left without their homes –temporarily or permanently– under COVID-related restrictions and challenges. In some places, entire towns have burned down to nothing, while others have sustained damage, which will likely remain irreversible under our current economical strains. Who said one must die to be in hell? This is Dante’s inferno personified on our doorsteps. Hell is here, hell is now!
To keep people safe and focus all our thin resources on firefighting, every USFS national forests in California are now closed and our eight national parks should follow suit soon. This mandated forest closure has upset a lot of people; their irritation is evident from some of their social media posts:
”How about we bring back some good old fashioned logging, oh wait the tree huggers said they would rather see it burn than logged. So be it."
”They better be opening them up this hunting season..!”
“Close or not mother nature love to do more damage I guess all Hunter waisted (sic)…”
Who are these people?
And why the hell am I so angry at them?
Well… what I am going to say next will anger them in return. So be it.
It takes only one fool to light a fire, but it takes a battalion to fight it and it takes an entire city, an entire state, and sometimes, an entire generation to pay for it. Similarly, it took our penchant for an easy life to shift our planet’s climate. Now, California’s Fourth Climate Change Assessment opined, if greenhouse gas emissions continue to rise at the current rate, the frequency of extreme wildfires will increase, and by 2100, the average area burned statewide would grow by a staggering 77 percent. Should we now get used to red skies and smoky air for every foreseeable Californian summer? Or, is there any hope of retaining our fabled blue skies and breathable air?
Let’s talk hope. Californian redwoods are totems of resilience that live thousands of years despite naturally occurring forest fires; those fire scars are their wrinkles of age. Their thick bark –laden with high water content and fire-resistant tannins– don’t burn off easily and protect the tender sapwood beneath. Pictured above is the view from within the hollow gut of a very old redwood in northern California; you may notice, it is charred, but not dead. We are now charring, but will we know how to protect our sapwood? To survive as a race, we must wake up from our petulant slumber of denial, get past our toxic brand of individualism and, much as our forefathers did, lean back on nature and let her lead the way. Mothers always forgive, if only we can muster the humility to apologize sincerely.
Tags: RedwoodNationalPark NationalPark DelNorteCoastRedwoodsStatePark Redwood SequoiaSempervirens Ramen Saha California NorthernCalifornia CaliforniaFire
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