Driving through the Yukon the day after our wedding, Michelle and I stopped along the shore of Tutshi Lake. The view wasn't obvious from the roadside, hidden behind a band of scrub brush, but we suspected there was something special beyond it. Without a drone, we improvised by mounting the camera on a fifteen-foot painter's pole and raising it above the vegetation. Michelle held and rotated the pole while I framed the composition remotely, making this photograph a true collaboration. The effort revealed a sweeping view of lake, forest, and mountain, shaped by immense geological forces over thousands of years.
It’s difficult to hard to render the scale of Hubbard Glacier, even in a wide photograph – it’s nearly as tall as a 40-story building. The fractured wall of blue ice dominates the foreground, yet beyond it rise snowfields, mountains, and glaciers stretching toward the horizon. And it thunders as it continues, inexorably, to Disenchantment Bay.
Mirror Lake in Misty Fjords National Monument earns its name on calm days, when the water becomes so smooth that it can be difficult for floatplane pilots to judge their altitude during landing. This dock serves one of only a handful of private cabins that predated the creation of the monument in 1978. Michelle and I flew here from Ketchikan during our honeymoon, arriving in one of Alaska's most remote and peaceful landscapes.
Flying above Misty Fjords National Monument near Ketchikan, breaks in the late-summer cloud bank revealed dark lakes and forested ridges thousands of feet below. The shifting weather opened and closed the landscape by the minute, offering a fleeting glimpse into one of North America's most dramatic coastal wildernesses before the mist reclaimed it. It’s also vast and silent – about the size of Connecticut – with no buildings or development.
Carcross Desert is an ancient dry lake in the Yukon, and Michelle and I shot this (again) from a painter’s pole atop a dune on a clear September afternoon. I’ve long been fascinated with infrared film, so I used an infrared filter to bring out the sky’s depth and the radiance of the pines. Another image from my Alaska/Yukon honeymoon series.
On our Alaska voyage, Queen Elizabeth could not travel all the way into Disenchantment Bay, (icebergs & oceanliners, anyone?) so we transferred to two smaller excursion boats to get closer to the glaciers. One of the boats can be seen here, , giving a sense of the scale of Turner Glacier behind it. Turner is roughly half the height of Hubbard Glacier just to the east, which makes the comparison even more striking.
Late summer weather in Alaska is capricious, so I was fortunate to capture this helicopter (look closely) hovering above Mendenhall Glacier near Juneau. The glacier's luminous blue ice and surrounding peaks made for a spectacular scene, but what I remember most – this was also the place and time of my wedding day.
