Jeremiah Tolbert

I’m slowly get­ting bet­ter at these land­scape shots I guess. This one is pretty cool and the fence leads the eye to the moun­tains pretty nicely.

Not that the moun­tains are very impressive.

So I went out to Bobcat Ridge this morn­ing and decided to hike way up on the ridge, fol­low­ing a coy­ote I saw from way too far away to pho­to­graph. I fol­lowed the ridge for quite a ways, then spot­ted a har­rier and started try­ing to get close enough for a good shot and moved down from the ridge. I saw a trail off on the dis­tance wrap­ping back around to where I want to go, so I made a b-​​line for it. Then I ran into a small prairie dog colony and decided to take a few shots.

That’s when the ranger came up to me and informed me that I was in a restricted area and that I would be tick­eted. He was quite nice about it, and I was the most embar­rassed I think I’ve ever been. It turns out that in front of my car on the bath­room build­ing in the lot was a sign warn­ing me about golden eagle nest­ing, and if I had come in on the trail that I was try­ing to take out, I would have seen the sign that told me the area was off lim­its. But I arrived in the dark and I took a cir­cuitous route to get into that spot. He was nice enough to show me the eagles and the nests with his binoc­u­lars, which was pretty cool.

After he fin­ished writ­ing me the ticket, I quizzed him for tips on places to go, things to shoot. He even took my card when I told him I was laid off and thought he had fam­ily who could use some­one who knows Flash.

A mixed encounter, and I’m not look­ing for­ward to find­ing out what my fine will be next week. I con­sider it a les­son learned though. If I go to a park, I am stop­ping at the entrance and read­ing every damn sign, to be sure I’m not break­ing any rules.

The worst thing was, I didn’t get a sin­gle decent shot all day. Blah.

Meh.

I am alive. I had a brief encounter with a moose but I couldn’t get into posi­tion quickly enough to take the shot, so I have no evi­dence of my meet­ing. Weird look­ing ani­mals. Shot some land­scapes, we’ll see how they turned out but over­all it was a mas­sive waste of 7 hours. I’m a fool for think­ing any­one would pay me to do this.

Now I’m going back to bed. Wake me when the econ­omy doesn’t suck.

So I’m up at 4:45 AM. I am gath­er­ing up my gear and suit­ing up. Today, I drive to the pass in the Poudre Canyon in search of moose which have been sighted in the area.

I’m a lit­tle ner­vous. Moose can do seri­ous dam­age. I’ll almost cer­tainly have to go on foot to find them. If I can stay in the car and shoot, I will, but I am not afraid to hit the trail if I have to.

So if this post doesn’t get updated in the next 72 hours, you can assume I was gored to death by a moose or killed in an avalanche. That’s a risk I’m only too happy to take at this point.

Two bull elks spar in Rocky Mountain National Park. The prob­lem with this loca­tion is that the road is ele­vated above the val­ley that the elk were in. There are some places in the park where this is not the case, but the elk aren’t there as fre­quently. You have a good view, but when you take a tele­photo shot from that angle, you don’t get much of the hori­zon. instead you get the ground, as you can see in a lot of my other elk photos.

This makes them unsuit­able for my port­fo­lio, prob­a­bly. I’ll just have to keep going back until I can get the shots I want. I guess gas is pretty cheap right now at least!