Vics Blog

A couple years back, my business partner Wayne Morine and me were invited on a elk/photograph hunt in the mountains just east of Jackson Hole, Wyoming. The scenery in mid October there is absolutely magnificent with beautiful parks surrounded by deep pine forests and golden groves of aspen. It’s also full of elk, wolves, moose and grizzly bears and we planned on packing into the area on horseback with Frank, another business partner of ours, and his two sons. We met them in Dubois and spent the first night playing pool and having a couple of cool ones at the local watering hole. The next morning dawned clear, crisply cool and we motored the trucks and trailers up into the wilderness. It took a couple hours to get the horses saddled and get our gear all packed and by the time we moved out it was mid afternoon.
The trail meandered gently uphill for fifteen miles along a small crystal clear stream before heading up in the dark timber and over a little divide. It then twisted down a steep set of narrow switchbacks before delivering us to a wonderful campsite at the head of a hidden valley. We set up a large wall tent, gathered firewood and set a battery powered electric wire around the place to keep carousing bears away. That was a bit unnerving. Over the next few picture perfect days we hunted hard and I got lots of nice images but we hadn’t filled the freezer and everyone was a bit bummed out.
On the last full day a cold front came through and turned the place cold and dreary. The drop in temperature started the elk moving and just an hour before sunset we heard the crack of rifle fire from half mile away. We spurred the horses and moved quickly down from a high ridge into a deep park and found the boys beginning to clean three dead elk. Everyone was in a great mood, but as the gathering gloom of a wet evening set in I was thinking about the ten mile trip back to our little garrison and the smell of fresh blood in grizzly country. That was really unnerving.
It took two hours to get the animals processed and we left them there covered in pine branches figuring we’d pack them out the next day on our way back home. We mounted up and started for camp on a moonless, starless, dank, drizzly, grizzly night. It was so dark that I couldn’t see Wayne’s horse ten feet in front of me and I felt myself getting motion sickness from the ride. In addition, every few minutes my horse would get a bit close to an unseen pine and whack my right leg on the trunk which hurt like the blazes. When we finally made it back and were warming our backsides against a crackling campfire, Frank and his boys started to chuckle as they noticed me rubbing my knee. That’s when they told me the truth. I’d been riding that wicked trail with a horse that was blind in its right eye.

I’ve been quietly sitting at a fox den almost every day since early March subtly waiting for a beautiful vixen to emerge with her five kits from underneath and old chicken coup in the south part of town. Arriving at dawn and leaving at dusk has tested my patience, but the hours spent taking almost 9,000 pictures during the last eight weeks were worth every minute. It has taught me a lot about the interactions between the mom and her babies and in a larger sense about how important mothers are to all of us.
In the beginning, mom would magically appear early in the morning and late evening from some hidden place and check me out for fifteen or twenty minutes. When she felt that I wasn’t dangerous, she’d call to the kits in a muted, whispering bark and they’d creep out of the fox hole, one by one only to jump right back in when they spotted me. Another quiet call as if to say all was clear and they would joyously surface again and spend the next few minutes nursing. Once or twice a day, I’d see her sneak off to go hunting and usually come home with a rabbit or snake for dinner and wondered how she could keep up such a harried existence.
This routine went on for a couple of weeks, although the kits were allowed to leave the den more frequently and to play for longer periods of time. They were so little and it was a struggle for me to find a picture that showed their smallness. Finally, one picked up an old cottonwood leaf in its mouth which was the size of its head and I got a wonderful image. As the entire family became more trusting, I was able to take pictures for extended periods and capture their fascinating behaviors. Mom always showed up first followed by three of the kits. She would feed and groom them one by one and then send them back inside. In a couple of minutes she’d call the other two and follow the same routine. Only twice did she allow all five to be out at once and I reasoned that she could only handle two or three at a time. In the first month they doubled in size and it was hard to imagine how much work it was for mom. Hunting, feeding, grooming, teaching and playing with five little ones was so taxing that she’d climb up on the roof to get away and go to sleep for an hour in the middle of the day. The last month was even more exhausting for her as the kits appetites grew ever more demanding and she taught them all the skills needed to survive on their own. In just a few short weeks, they left the den for good and used all the skills she taught them to survive. On this Mother’s Day, take the time to thank your mom for all the incredible things she’s done for you. Thank you mom!

A couple years back I had the opportunity to involve myself in a four day cattle drive up in the Salt River Range of western Wyoming. I wasn’t any person’s idea of a cowpoke except that I did have a big brimmed hat and a good pair of roughed out boots which helped me look the part. I’d ridden a horse about ten times in my life and that was only on head to butt to head trail rides. Other than that, this dude was going to be enlightened as to what it took to be a real cowpuncher and take a bunch of photographs in the process.
I left Fort Collins in late September and motored up to the ranch which was located fifteen miles north of the metropolis of La Barge (population 690). It was a beautiful place, nestled in a sleepy little draw a hundred yards from the Green River. Century old cottonwoods dotted the property and I could see aspens on the distant mountains looking like someone had scattered gold dust on their slopes. My new partners welcomed me at the front door with handshakes that felt like weathered leather and cactus. An hour later, after a hearty dinner of rocky mountain oysters, they had me ride a few ponies to see which one would be the easiest to handle. We picked a gentle, buckskin mare and all the men swore she’d be the best one for me. Later that evening everyone gathered around a glowing campfire before bedtime and listened to one tall tale after another.
The overhead light stabbed at the darkness and fractured my deep sleep in an instant at three a.m. After a quick breakfast of biscuits, bacon and coffee we were out in a frosty field gathering horses. Then it took two hours of hard driving down dusty, rutted roads before we reached a barn at the head of a lonesome valley just as the sun was nudging itself above the surrounding peaks. I snapped tons of pictures as the men in chaps saddled the horses which were bellowing clouds of moist steam from their heaving nostrils. In just a few minutes we were mounted and moving up through high meadows looking for four hundred head of cattle.
We hadn’t gone a quarter mile when one of the boys noticed a big, brown cow moose heading down a hill toward a creek to our left. She was followed by three more and the site was absolutely magnificent. I was involved in picture taking, yet unbeknownst to me, the buckaroos were making plans of a different nature for one of those long legged girls. Now it doesn’t take much to entertain true cowhands and they were off to the races in a New York second, lassos circling in the air, trying to head and heel that critter as she plowed through the pasture. Despite her best efforts she couldn’t escape and when it was all over they’d really roped a moose. After admiring their handy work they let her go no worse for the wear. And as for me, it was though I’d stepped back in time and into the rough and tumble canvas of a Charlie Russell painting. Click

Herbert Spencer coined the phrase “Survival of the Fittest” and Charles Darwin wrote of “Natural Selection.” As a wildlife and nature photographer I’ve seen many examples of these theories in the field over the years. Huge Bull Moose will fight to the death over one female in order to make sure the strongest genes are passed on to the next generation. The story is the same one for elk, deer, marmots, trout and almost all other critters on the planet. The mating seasons are intense and the photo opportunities are incredible as both males and females of the species are in their prime. It’s amazing to think that this process has gone on for hundreds of millions of years and that some species survive for eons and others become extinct in short order.
I’ve written lately about our last trip to Costa Rica. It’s an exciting, third world country and in it I found the greatest example of the theory of natural selection that could ever be photographed. The Tarcoles River winds through the country’s Central Pacific region before emptying into the ocean near Jaco. It slowly meanders through the jungle and has one of the highest populations of American crocodiles in the world averaging about twenty per square mile. Some of them are nearly eighteen feet long and sport choppers that I swear are full of armor piercing teeth. I wanted to find some way to get close to these prehistoric creatures and take a few pictures for the scrapbook.
Frank, the professional guide we had hired, set us up with a man who knew crocs and where to find them. We met him at a little dock on the side of the river and within a few minutes were motoring along in a small boat through the hot, steamy, monster invested water. He grinned as he showed us a gnarly scar that stretched from his wrist to the shoulder from an encounter with one of the beasts. I felt like we had met Captain Quinn from the movie Jaws. It took about half an hour to spot the sixteen footer they called Osama Bin Laden. His immense body was submerged and only his little green eyeballs lurked above the muddy estuary. Our captain beached the craft on the opposite side of the river and jumped out into the thigh high muck with a dead chicken clinched in his fist. Quinn slapped the carcass on the mud and within seconds Mr. Bin Laden glided swiftly past us and hurled his reptilian chassis onto the muddy embankment. In an instant the huge head of the croc lurched upward and his mighty jaws opened within inches of our daring compatriot. A second later the chicken had been devoured whole.
I’ve read that crocodiles have been around about 200 million years and that modern man originated about 200,000 years ago. As I triggered the shutter, I thought about that theory of “Natural Selection” and wondered why there was such a difference. Click.

Utah offers some of the most beautiful landscapes to photograph in the United States. The wildness of the place is almost unimaginable and it is peppered with national parks and monuments including Arches, Canyon lands, Bryce, Capitol Reef, Glen Canyon, Grand Staircase Escalante and Zion. Tucked between these awesome places are numerous state parks and Indian reservations which possess fascinating treasures for the eyes to behold at every turn.
A few years back I’d seen an inspiring photograph of a old Anasazi ruin that really captured my interest. It was of an ancient rock house tucked underneath a stone cliff that literally looked like it was erupting into flames of fire. I knew it had to be located somewhere in the southwestern part of the country but couldn’t remember its name or a place to start looking. After several hours of researching cliff dwellings and their locations on the internet, I happened upon the same picture I’d seen before. The ruin was called “Firehouse” and after some more digging, it was indeed located several miles west of Blanding, Utah.
One of the magazines I shoot for needed some pictures of desert big horn sheep so Wayne Morine and I hired a guide and planned a trip to the Superstition Mountains just east of Phoenix in late April. We thought we’d take an extra day along the way and find the Firehouse. All the research said that if you wanted to get the best shots they had to be taken between late October and February so that reflections from below the ruin would light up the flames of sandstone in the overhanging cliff. It was also very specific that early morning or late afternoon gave the best chance of capturing the fiery display.
We got away from Ft. Collins very early, but after seven hours of driving we were running late. It took additional time to find the hidden turn off of Utah highway 95 on to a rutty, dirt road that led to the trailhead. After another mile of hiking through a canyon of dust and sink holes we found the ruin at around one p.m. but the afternoon had turned overcast. There was a couple sitting near the base of the dwelling and they informed us that they hadn’t taken a shot because the light had been flat all day long. The little stone house wasn’t much higher than four or five feet and we wondered how short the natives must have been who lived there.
We shuffled around the area for a few disappointing minutes and found some ancient pictographs on some of the surrounding rocks but the light was terrible. All the luck was against us. Wrong time of the year, wrong time of the day and clouds. We were just about to hike back out when our fortunes completely changed in about two seconds. The sky cleared and for some unknown reason the light turned fabulous. We swore we could hear native Indian chanting in the wind as the ancient resident ghosts taking pity on us. The stone cliff seemed to change into flame and we took several hundred pictures in the next two hours. Sometimes you just get the good breaks. Click

The New Year has begun and I suppose it’s time to make one of those big resolutions for 2012. Being a superstitious man and prone to the prophecies of the Mayan calendar and Nostradamus, I was pondering the necessity of it all having them predicting the end of the world on December twenty first. However, between now and then there’s a lot of important photography to be done recording the last days of all the critters on this planet. I don’t know who’ll look at them when we’re gone, but maybe aliens in a flying saucer will wonder what happened and it will all be recorded on my dvd’s for them to figure out.
Last fall I was up in the high mountain tundra when I noticed a big bruiser bull elk on top of a peak about a thousand yards away. The sun was just coming up and he was herding his harem of cows around a boulder field way up above the timberline. The scene was magnificent as the sun dripped golden light across his hide and antlers and made them glimmer against the dark rocks in the background. The sky was a deep Colorado blue. He bugled every two or three minutes and the steam from his bellowing lungs filled the frigid air. I knew that I had to shorten the distance between us to get some good shots.
Three thousand feet , loose boulders and high elevations make for a stiff hike when you’re just a bit out of shape. Starting out at a fast pace, I covered the first few hundred feet in no time and promptly felt like my heart was going to explode from my chest. Luckily he and his girls weren’t moving anywhere so I slowed the gait and covered the remaining ground in a relatively short time. Moving much closer, I started to put the sneak on them by taking cover behind some big granite rocks the size of small houses and staying downwind so they didn’t scent me. Then, slowly peeking out from my hiding spot I quickly realized that in the minute spent out of sight, the whole herd had begun to move back down the mountain that I’d just climbed up. Bummer!
The light was still incredible and those pictures were waiting to be had, so off I went right back down to where it had all started thirty minutes before. Luckily, the elk stopped for a little romance before disappearing over the next ridgeline and I had the chance to finally catch my breath and steady the camera. Thank goodness the Canon 100-400mm telephoto lens had image stabilization and the photos I took were some of my best.
That gets me back to my declaration for this year. In front of you and all the world and knowing of its eminent demise , I’m going to get in shape and make sure that when we all make it into 2013, you’ll still be around looking at my pictures.