Was out on a feature hunt yesterday and came across this squirrel blasting into the snow as it ran on the top of a fence. Sorta fun. We've had about 16 inches since Christmas Eve. More snow is on the way. All told, could get a foot more by Monday.

I'm not so sure this tree is stable... thinks the dog.

There’s a wall in my house that we shored up this summer, not because it was going to fall down or anything. No, not that bad. It just had a sag in it. It was one of those walls that extends down from the ceiling and the cupboards hang on it and, over time, it began to sag, ever so slightly.
So we took a large beam and secured it into said wall and propped it back up correctly and the sag is gone. I speak of this wall because sunk inside its flesh of drywall, paint and mud is a small hook and tied to that hook is a string and tied to that string is our Christmas tree, all 18 feet of it.

That’s right, 18 feet.

See, it was a pleasant but cold day a few weeks back and I loaded Olivia and Boy Wonder and the dog and her awful breath into the truck to go get a Christmas tree out of our fine Flathead National Forest, where, for the low, low price of $5 you can bring Christmas joy to your house.

We struck out up the North Fork where I’d been eyeing some smallish Christmas-like trees a few days before. But then a snow came and all the trees, either good or bad, looked good. Snow has a way of doing that. You walk up to a tree. It looks good. You shake it, and find out it either:

A) Has three trunks.

B) Is barren on one side.

C) Is a larch.

D) All of the above.

So we wandered through the woods, looking for a tree and of course, it started to get dark and Christmas desperation set in and Olivia finally said, “How about this one?”

“Well,” I said. “It looks to be about 12 feet high.”

Which is not a problem since our ceilings in the living room are 19 feet.

So I fired up the chainsaw and dove into the tree. Just as the tree fell the chain came off the saw and instead of yelling “Timber!” I yelled, “Where’s you’re brother? I don’t want this to fall on him!”

Poof!

The tree fell and the snow whooshed off the branches and even then, it didn’t look too bad, considering it was getting dark and desperation was firmly setting in.

It took all three of us to get it to the truck and of course, I had but one small piece of rope to lash

it down. Still, we somehow made it down the rough and tumble North Fork Road we affectionately call Grimaldi Lane and only four or five cars tailgated us on the 10-mile trek back to town.

(Why is it that when you are going slow with an 18-foot Christmas tree lashed to your truck with your emergency lights flashing, people feel the need to ride right on your bumper? Are they getting closer for a better look? Do they expect you to suddenly speed up?)

At any rate, we got the tree in the house and stood it up and that’s when it went from 12 feet to 18 feet because it came within a foot of scraping the ceiling.

We attached the aforementioned said hook into said wall with a sad piece of string lashed to the

tree and so far, so good. The string has held. The hook has yet to budge or twist or come loose.

The knot has stayed fast.

You know what?

It must be Christmas.

The recent round of storms in the Park has pushed plenty of whitetails down low. The snow isn't very deep, however. About 6 to 8 inches of powder. Great for skiing, but I busted trail on the Camas Road yesterday and the pole tips were hitting pavement. Temperatures dipped down to more than 20 below in most places last night. More snow is expected today and tonight. Despite the cold, we really need snow. Snowpack is still less than half of average. It didn't snow much at all in November. In fact, it was one of the warmest Novembers on record.

Got down to 14 below in C. Falls last night, 19 below in West Glacier, 25 below in St. Mary, at 25 below in Polebridge. The storm blew in some interesting birds. Here a flock of snow buntings eat the seeds off grasses in a small field in West Glacier.

The blizzard came and went, with not a whole lot of snow (maybe 5 inches). But it is cold. Supposed to drop in the 20 to 30 below range, with nasty winds. The cold didn't keep the kids and their parents from going to the Dam Town Tavern Saturday. Santa was there, and he hands out real honest to goodness presents for the children from Hungry Horse to West Glacier.

A big storm is headed this way this weekend. At least that's what they say here. We'll see how much snow we actually get. Big cold fronts usually make for good photos if you can stand the cold. Here, some deer lick their lips along the shore of Lake McDonald last week. A different version of this photo will likely make a cover some day. This is one of the few times I've actually gotten a decent shot of deer with the lake in the background. I laid on my belly to do it, which was fun.

We've had two really nice (but cold) days after a mini snowstorm. The storm shut down most of the Glacier's roads to winter levels, but the cold air behind it made for some really nice skies. This is the sun setting over the Flathead River last night.

http://www.hungryhorsenews.com/articles/2008/11/27/news/news01.txt

Covering this sort of thing is always a bit difficult. It's not very pleasant watching a man try to kill himself. It's even less pleasant knowing that you have to let events take their course. Your job is to get the pictures, not interfere. Early in my career I went to a bear mauling in Glacier. They were wheeling one of the victims down the trail and I took some photos of her being loaded into the ambulance and then I asked the ranger "Does this mean the trail is closed?"

Perhaps one of the dumbest questions I've ever asked anyone. He looked at me like he wanted to kill me. I get along with that ranger rather well, today.

A Kokanee salmon, caught earlier in the day.

We were coming back from a short but pleasant hike along McDonald Creek Sunday. November, in general, has been unusually nice and Sunday was no exception — the sun was shining, the air was cold but not unpleasant and the conversation ranged from the darkness in the financial markets to when it had been worse to how little, really, we could do about it.
Why let Wall Street ruin a perfectly good day in Glacier?
At the end of our hike we crossed the one lane bridge near the outlet to Lake McDonald. Below us, kokanee salmon were spawning, their orange and black shapes gliding in the clear water beneath us.
Earlier in the day I had stopped and caught a fish with a fly rod, just to see if they would eat a fly. Most didn’t. One did. I gave the fish to another fisherman who happily took it home to smoke it.
Now a spin fisherman was trying his luck and wrapped his lure into the bridge. He asked if I might be able to get it out, and, after a bit of maneuvering, I was able to reach down, unsnag his lure from the timbers and let it fall to the water below. The lure landed nearly directly over a fish, briefly caught it, before it was able to squirm away.
The man laughed.
On the other side of the bridge three youngsters were also fishing with spinning rods and directly above them a man was decked out in neoprene waders and wading shoes and vest and hat and all the other crap that goes along with a fully equipped fly fisherman.
He was lobbing something big and heavy at the fish by the looks of it. His rod wasn’t loading right and jerked back and forth against the weight at the end of his line. Fly fishing, done right, can look downright elegant. Fly fishing done wrong, looks like a body with one joint badly broken.
The fly fisherman kept flailing the water and then he did something I didn’t expect: He walked right across the lies of the spin fishermen to go after salmon he couldn’t reach with his lousy casting.
And then, he did it again and again.
Salmon scattered to and fro. The fly fisherman, caught none of them. Perhaps salmon, even in death, know an idiot when they see one.
The rules of fishing, spin or fly, are that you never walk through another fisherman’s lie. You give them their space, unless they say it’s OK to walk through.
I suppose that’s just common sense. But common sense and courtesy are lost on some folks. You can outfit them with all the fancy gear, the expensive rods, but you can’t buy brains or decency or sportsmanship.
A friend of mine had a more blunt assessment.
“We should have stuffed that fish you caught up his ass,” he said.
A novel approach, I suppose, but one that certainly would have caught this goon’s attention.

In the Fall/Winter issue I misspelled Julie Helgeson's name in the story of the Night of the Grizzlies. I regret the error. I had it spelled right in my notes. Thanks to reader Charles Browne for catching the mistake.

Here: http://www.timberlakefire.com/goat.html

Yeah, the classic shot a of a whitetail buck is ears up, looking straight at you, but I like to try to get critters doing something natural, like eating lunch... The Park hasn't seen much snow in lower elevations yet. In fact, it's been downright pleasant, which is sort of scary. I mean, we need, snow for a lot of different reasons. I hope we don't have a dry winter.

I recently did a lengthy hike in the Nyack Valley. For the most part, the trip was a disaster — I carried too much weight — I was running close to 65 pounds — and I tried to do too many miles in too short a period of time. November only gives you about eight hours of daylight — less on cloudy days. My back and hips protested immensely and somehow I got an infection in my eye. Still, the place is downright gorgeous, and I did get this sunrise...

When I started with digital photography in 2000, we used the Nikon D1, it was pretty much a horrible camera. Trees turned purple, people turned purple, and at anything over ISO 400, you got nasty purple and blue streaks in the photos. Fast forward 8 years later and this deer, shot yesterday, was taken at ISO 800, underexposed at least a half stop, at a file size that is 10 times bigger than the original D1. Digital cameras have widely expanded nature and particularly bird and wildlife photography. The light can be marginal and yet the pictures exceptional. I still like film for certain situations (alpenglow, where the pink hues are captured better by film), but I suspect in 2009, I'll shoot maybe 20 rolls of film, whereas I used to shoot 10-20 rolls a week.

One of my favorite birds in Glacier is the pine grosbeak. Beautiful song and the males are bright red. This is a female, eating mountain ash berries. Every home west of the Divide should have one of these trees in their yard. In Glacier, they're more of a bush, but for your yard, you buy them as a tree. It was a very good berry year in the Park, which was good for the bears and the birds. Grosbeaks can be difficult to photograph because they spend most of their time in the canopy of conifers. They're found on both sides of the Divide, but I see them more on the east side. This one was photographed in Two Medicine. I took a nice post-election hike in the snow. It was very pleasant. I think I'm up to about 220 miles this season lugging that big ol' camera-lens combo however. My knees are getting sore, but my legs are like rocks and my back is in pretty good shape, all things considered.

Mick Holm lost to Dee Brown, the Republican, 2617 to 1965. Republicans still pretty much rule the roost in Flathead County.

Former Glacier Park Superintendent Mick Holm gets one last campaign stop in Monday evening at the corner of Nucleus and Ninth St. In Columbia Falls Monday night (Nov. 3). Holm, a Democrat, is vying for the open House District 3 seat, which covers a big chunk of real estate in Montana, including half of Glacier Park, the city of Columbia Falls and the Canyon communities of Hungry Horse, West Glacier, Coram and Martin City. I expect a tight race between him and Republican Dee Brown, who held the seat for 6 years. My prediction? Holm by a nose. He's campaigned hard in a door-to-door effort for support. I guess we'll all know by the end of the day...

You can take this photo. You need: A) camera and tripod; B) 10 year old that will sit still for 2.5 seconds.

Humm after me: Muskrat Love ... Mmmmmm

There are some technical aspects to this shot. For one, the reflection and low light will almost always give you the wrong meter reading. The D300 has a tendency to overexpose water shots. In this case though, the reflection as fairly bright, so it was reading an underexposure. I went with what looked good; about 2/3 stop over and then tweaked it in Photoshop. We have a city Park nearby that has lots of muskrats. Still, they know something is up when the camera starts clicking and they take off.

While most people around here are gearing up for hunting season, the fishing isn't too shabby, either and the crowds are decidedly thinner than the summertime. Here some anglers take to the water in the Badrock Canyon section of the Flathead River. It looks serene, but it's a noisy place. There's a highway behind you and a train track in front of you. Get down river a ways and it becomes much more pleasant. I'm always looking for reflections in the fall. Wait for low light, then shoot away. You'll take your best photos in the last 10 minutes of the day.

I still keep my old F5 around for one reason: Super wide angles. You can pick up a Nikon 16mm fisheye manual lens for cheap (less than $100; many times less than $50). The one I have also has built in filters for shooting black and white film (or for shooting some real funky color film). The idea behind this photo was to get the tops of the trees I was standing under while still having the seemingly shorter trees fill some of the background. Aspens are my favorite tree in Glacier. They have so many birds and wildlife in them, they're tough not to like.

This is a familiar sight in Many Glacier. But if you look close, you'll see star tracks in the background (those long streaks of light). It's about a 20 minute exposure, lit entirely by moonlight. The tech specs: taken with a D300 in RAW format, I had the long exposure noise reduction set on high, the camera set up on a tripod. The camera had about half a battery left and died in the cold (it was in the teens) in short order. In fact, when I went to pick up the camera the next morning, it was completely white with frost. At first I was worried I'd killed it completely because it didn't work, even with a new battery, but I thawed it out over the truck heater and it came back to life, which is a good thing, because a D300 costs about $1,800.

I watched the moose drink, lick his lips, scratch himself with his back leg, drink some more, then scratch himself on a tree, a small tree that could have done without a big old moose scratching itself on it, thank you very much.
He was a big moose by Glacier Park standards. Glacier’s moose are the shiras variety — they have smaller antlers than Alaskan moose. He scratched himself some more on the small tree and then started heading up the slope toward the trail.
Right about then four guys in their 20s came around the corner and I expected to hear some hoping and hollering as they encountered or at least saw the moose.
But nothing. Zero.
What the?
The guys made it to me and I gave them a look.
“You didn’t see a moose?”
“What moose?” they asked.
“The moose,” I said. “there’s a moose right there.”
Then I pointed down the slope.
The moose was gone.
Well, sort of gone. He was as gone as a moose can get in Glacier. It’s always fun to watch a 1,200 pound gangily legged animal disappear in a couple of steps, and this moose had done just that. It hadn’t done much, really. It just lay down in a patch of willows and began chewing its cud.
All you could see was the paddles of its antlers, and you had to look close to see that.
“He laid down,” I told the group.
They came back for a look-see. The moose could have cared less. He was a good 50 feet below the trail, content.
Such is life in Many Glacier in the fall. The tourist season is over. The hotel is shuttered up for the winter. The campground has gone primitive (no running water) and the nights are cold and the days shorter every day.
It might be the best time of year, if you can put up the fickle weather, which can range from snow squalls and wind to pleasant sun and blue skies (sometimes all in the span of a view minutes.)
The idea of fall journeys into Many is to set up base camp and then hike and be patient. Very few days are a complete bust. You take what comes. One day, it might be a lowly muskrat, who swims to your feed and decides to eat his lunch. Another it might be a 13 mile hike, earmarked by a bull elk in the aspens and a dipper swimming endless laps in a bitterly cold lake. Other days its mountain goats in their winter coats or bighorn sheep chewing their cuds on sun warmed rocks or a wolverine that sniffs its way along the cliffs, looking for an easy meal.
The wolverine is too far away to yield any decent pictures, but still, it’s a wolverine, so big that at first, you thought it was a bear.
One ewe in particular has a lamb that jumps on her back, bites her horn and prods her on. It’s getting dark mom, time to go up higher on the slope, the lamb says. And then you see the tragedy in it. The mother has a badly broken leg, but somehow has been able to forge on, raise a kid, despite the odds against her.
Life persists here, in this raw and nasty and beautiful and forgiving place. Soak up the sun while you can. The wind is coming. Change is a breeze away.

See the entire photo spread in the upcoming issue of Glacier Park Magazine.

The state is proposing selling oil and gas leases on the Rocky Mountain Front. Read about it here.

Columbia Falls has a nice Park down along the river which is a good place to photograph birds, particularly if you're short on time, like I was yesterday. Boy Wonder and I went down there and found some ruby crowned kinglets, a small frustrating bird because they always seem to be one branch too far away or just barely hidden in the brush. The male flares its ruby crown in the spring when mating season begins. These birds have a long and tremendously beautiful song, but like most birds, they don't sing in the fall.

While working on a piece about the 20th anniversary of the Red Bench Fire in Glacier National Park, I came upon this doe. She was curious and in a split second, she licked her lips and bent her ear forward like a dog. I've seen plenty of whitetail deer ears on full alert bend backwards, but the forward curl is a new, and very fun, thing.

A fisherman wades across the Middle Fork yesterday. Fall has been fairly gentle in Glacier this year, with warm days and cool nights. That's supposed to change this weekend, with wet and cooler weather. Had to happen sometime.

An average day with average light can become an interesting landscape if you stick a person in there. (Of course, Lake McDonald is rarely average, but you get the drift.) People lend a sense of scale to landscapes. Some purists don't like people in their landscape photos and that's OK. All I know is in the Hungry Horse news archives we have tons of landscapes and the most interesting ones have humans in them. The mountains in Glacier just don't change much. The Garden Wall today looks like the Garden Wall in '48. But the Garden Wall with a woman in a dress and a man in a suit from the '50s ... well, that's interesting.

So grab your kids or your wife or gramma or grandpa and even a perfect stranger and stick them in your frame once in awhile.

Cow elk, downpour.

Went into a favorite valley over the past three days. On the way in it was approaching 80. On the way out, a wind driven downpour with little hope of relief — in fact, the snow level was dropping lower and lower as I left. It's tough to get good pictures in a driving rain. Gore-tex or not, water runs down your back and your sleeves. I have a system where the dry stuff stays in the tent, then I wear the wet stuff outside. You keep the wet stuff on one end of the tent and the dry on the other. But when it rains this hard, it's tough to keep the water out, because you're so damn wet yourself. I actually had a permit to stay another day, but figured I would have had to hole up in the tent and then hope the weather got better. It didn't. It rained all last night again and looks pretty black out there right now, even though the sun is creeping through the clouds. Still, I got some pretty good images. Photographing elk in Glacier Park is a challenge. The herds leave the confines and get shot at by hunters, so they're very wary of humans. It's not like Yellowstone where they walk down the sidewalks. Still, trying to make good pictures of elk is always fun. Even in the rain.

I don't think it matters which system a photographer shoots anymore. Nikon and Canon are just about the same — great cameras, great lenses. A few years ago, I'd give a big edge to Canon, but Nikon's D3 and D300 are very good cameras. I use a D300 because I like the smaller sensor — it makes the 400 a 600 and with a 1.4 teleconverter the 600 becomes an 840mm. Nikon's early digital cameras sucked. The D1 was awful and the D2H nearly as bad. My favorite camera for people and landscapes continues to be my Leica M6. I can carry it in a pocket and take a quick picture and people don't even notice until you walk up and ask them their name. It also slows you down and makes you think about what you're doing. Everything is manual — the meter, the aperture, the focus. I shoot maybe 20-40 rolls of film a year. All of it Fuji Velvia. It's a great alpenglow film. Being a rangefinder, you can also hand hold at very slow shutter speeds — I've hand held many a picture at 1/15th of a second and more than a few at 1/8th of a second.

For wildlife and birds it's all Nikon digital. The autofocus is extremely fast and the lenses are great, but heavy and expensive. The Nikon D300 with a 400mm lens and a monopod weighs 14 pounds — add a full pack with tent, sleeping bag, food, clothes and survival gear and you're carrying 50 to 60 pounds — heavier than that in the winter. At least in the winter you can use a sled. People ask if it's worth it, particularly if they see me slogging up some switchbacky trail with all that crap.

It's always worth it, I say.

Just don't ask my back.

Granite Park, evening light, Glacier National Park.

It always helps to get in a good spot and then coach the hell out of the light: Like this: C'mon sun, c'mon boy! That's it! That's it! Right there! It will make you a better photographer (or just look a little nuts). Take your pick.

Did a 20-plus mile traverse over the weekend — a classic hike — Gunsight Pass. Lots of up and down. On the down side ran into this cow moose feeding. A nice way to end a grunt of a hike. Full pack plus a 14-pound camera and lens combo wears you down. On the other hand, if you don't have it with you, you don't get photos like this. Such is life.

The wife planted sunflowers along the edge of the vegetable garden. Some are 15 feet high. The goldfinches, which are in the molt and very scruffy, are loving it.

Still no sign of Hwa. My story is here.

Having talked more to searchers, it appears he was a very meticulous man. He made lists and checked them twice. But Glacier is full of rotten rock. Those mountains may look strong, but they are famous for crumbling in your hand. A simple slip is all it takes, especially when you're alone.

This photo has proven extremely popular this summer. If you'd like a print, an 8 by 12 is just $25 postpaid. Send a check or money order to our address. Or order via credit card, here.

Still no sign of missing hiker. The odds of finding him as time goes on grow less and less. My initial story about him will appear in tomorrow's edition of the Hungry Horse News. I read several of his posts online. Hwa sounded like a passionate hiker with a real love for the outdoors. The search for him has been scaled back, and will effectively end next Tuesday (a week from today).

So I've been volunteering doing these loon surveys in Glacier this summer. The loons are nice, but the bonuses are better, like watching an otter family for most of the late afternoon...

A 27-year old man has come up missing, likely in Glacier. They found his car in the Logan Pass parking lot. Let's hope he just left the Park without telling anyone. There's two people that I know that were presumably lost in Glacier and never found in the 10 years I've covered the Park: Larry Kimble (I may have the spelling wrong on his last name.) And Patrick Whalen. Kimble's truck was found near the Rocky Point Trailhead, but he wasn't. Whalen's camp was found on the Park's East side between Two Med and Cut Bank. But he was never found, either. Let's hope this latest case is just one of someone not checking in...

Here's a couple links to stories...

Missoulian

The short version on HHN Web site.

This summer I’ve volunteered for a couple of projects in the Park. One is the citizen science loon survey and the other is the pika, goat, and Clark’s nutcracker surveys. The idea is to get baseline data on all the species and then, later on, see how the critters are doing 5, 10, 15 years down the line.
I volunteered not so much because I have a driving interest for science, but because I have one goal in life and now it is fulfilled: I’ve found and collected pika poop in the wild.
That’s right, pika poop.
For those of you unfamiliar with Glacier National Park’s small, fuzzy, charismatic, creatures the pika is a high country critter related to the rabbit. It lives primarily in big piles of rocks in the mountains and it makes a sound that sounds like this: Eeeeep!
The pika doesn’t tolerate heat very well and there’s some concern that global warming could harm this little creature.
And so as volunteers, we’ve been asked to not only find and count pikas, but to gather their poop for scientific analysis. Pika poop looks like a b.b., though it doesn’t taste anything like one (That’s a joke. I kid you, honest. I have only tasted rabbit poop, and that’s a story for another day).
So on Saturday I took the long hot hike up to Triple Divide Pass to look for pikas and goats and Clark’s nutcrackers and if a loon happened to fly over, well, I’d make a note of that, too.
(I spent the night in the Cut Bank campground to save a little time and I’m not so sure that was a good idea. I mean, I expected a good night’s sleep, but there was this guy in camp who, for whatever reason, was making noises like he was throwing up — loud throwup noises that rang through the campground. It was awful. I happened to get up to go to the bathroom and I walked by the guy’s site and he had this huge campfire going and he started making these throwup sounds and then he saw me and said “I thought you were a grizzle bear.”
(“No,” I said. “I am not a grizzle bear.”
(And so the guy stopped making the noises and I managed to fall back asleep at least for a few hours. But sheesh, a grizzle bear? Only I would have such bad luck.)
But I digress…
When I got almost to the pass I heard and saw a pika living in a place I wouldn’t expect a pika to live in. For one, most pikas live in what’s known as talus slopes — big piles of rock deposited on the sides of mountains as the mountain falls apart. But this pika was living in more what I would consider cliffs than piles of rock.
At any rate, it gave out a few Eeeeps! then disappeared and that’s when I saw it, tucked in a crevice in the rock.
Pika poop!
I quickly picked up a little, put it in my little brown envelope, which is especially made for pika poop, then and was on my merry way.
This science stuff, it’s fun. But grown men trying to scare off grizzle bears, well, them I can do without.

The Summer 2 issue was set to be mailed today. It's running about a week late and we apologize. We think you'll enjoy the issue, however. The above picture, taken in Glacier, is part of the spread. I've never seen the flowers bloom that intensely in the 11 summers I've been here. I believe the flower is nine-leaved desert parsley.

The Summer Two issue is off to press, will be proofed and printed next week and should be in mailboxes in 10 days or so (provided there's no huge snafus). In this preview, we left in the crop and registration marks. That's what it looks like before it hits the press.

In this issue we:

A) Have a memorable grizzly encounter we like to call "King of the Road."
B) Tell you why we hiked 12 miles in our underwear.
C) Share a few lines of poetry (and no, we're not taking poetry submissions)
D) We leave Glacier for the Great White North of Canada to look at coal and coal bed methane threats in the Flathead, and why it's so important to the Park.

Humped into a Glacier Park lake yesterday evening because I needed a shot of it for a piece on bull trout. This pair of loons did a big circle in the bay and ended up right in front of me. I never moved. They also had a fledgling with them who wasn't nearly as intrepid — he stayed in the middle of the lake.

Belted Kingfisher, evening light

On summer days like this people will see me in the office at noon and say "Boy, I thought you'd be out in the woods looking for a critter." But photography is always about light and the light in the middle of day in the summer around here usually stinks — high, hot and harsh. Plus, most critters aren't very active in the middle of the day anyway. So I go for morning and evening hikes, or hike all day to get to a spot where the light will be nice. It will wear you out, but hey, that's life.

A couple of weeks ago I spent about a week in the Canadian Flathead, known locally as the North Fork of the Flathead. The North Fork forms the western boundary of Glacier National Park and is afforded protection under state and federal law. But in Canada, it is threatened by coal mines and coal bed methane extraction. The pollution from such mines would flow right to Glacier Park. The debate about mining the Flathead has gone on for decades. This sign, posted near the river in Canada, likely dates back to 1979 — that's when Stephen Rogers was Minister of Environment for British Columbia.

A red chipmunk eats not quite ripe serviceberries on Thursday. The park has three species of chipmunk — the least, yellow and red. The berry crop looks to be doing well. We've had a shot of rain the past of couple of days, which should help. It's good to see berries, because when the crops fail, bears start to get into trouble — namely roaming into town and campgrounds, looking for food.

I like hiking in the big woods of Glacier on cloudy days. An alternative to that horribly crowded Avalanche Lake hike is to hike from the Avalanche Lake trailhead back to Lake McDonald Lodge. the woods is sort of spooky, which is why I don't think many people go there. This shot is film, using a Leica and a tripod, the shutter speed was way slow, maybe 1/15th of a second.

Photos of bald eagles have virtually no commercial value because the birds are so common. But everytime I see one, I can't help but stop and at least try to get a picture. This one is up the North Fork of the Flathead River, taken on Sunday. Glacier has about 13 nesting pairs of bald eagles. When shooting birds, it is imperative that there's a blue sky background. Gray skies with white heads don't cut it — the head of the bird will almost disappear.

Nesting for most birds in Glacier is just about over. Here, a fledgling northern flicker takes a look at the world before it. Photo was captured using a remote camera. This bird will leave the nest shortly. I took this shot while working on the tailgate of my truck. The tailgate latch had broke (come undone) so I took it apart and fixed while waiting for the birds to do something. Just got a glimpse of something poking its head out of the nest (I was about 100 feet away) and cranked the shutter. Sometimes things work out.

Hikers head to the Hidden lake Overlook at Logan Pass on July 6, 2008. Still Plenty of snow in the high country of Glacier.


The blog has now moved "in house" so to speak. Now we're able to do it in house, cheaper and easier. This coming week includes a trip to the Canadian Flathead (The North Fork of the Flathead), to work on a photo spread. The area is threatened by coal mines and coal bed methane gas exploration. Pollutants from mines could easily impact Glacier National Park and even Flathead Lake. Should be an interesting trip.