my travels in pixels

North Cascades National Park/Forest, WA Silver Lake Campground After leaving Bella Coola we went via Williams Lake to pick up our generator that was being serviced and headed south. I wanted to photograph Mt Shuksan in the North Cascades but we also wanted to catch up with some new friends in Vancouver. Although it would have been less driving going into the US to the North Cascades and then driving over to Vancouver we were advised that crossing the borders multiple times in a short period of time would lead to suspicion that we were up to no good, so we went to Vancouver first and then crossed into the US. We made sure we didn't have any fresh food so that we didn't have to declare anything but we were pulled over anyway. We parked our rig and a guy asked us why we had been stopped. We don't know. So he went back to the woman in the booth and asked her - she was either having a bad day or needed to increase her quota of checking on people. It seems we have too many...

Bella Coola, British Columbia, Canada This place is special and this trip has been planned on the time we wanted to spend in Bella Coola. We don’t actually stay in Bella Coola, but in the valley which is at the end of Highway 20 aka the Freedom Road after descending the Heckman Pass otherwise known as “the hill”. A steep, winding, narrow in parts gravel road that descends from 5000ft to the valley floor in just over 21 kms which takes about an hour to travel. There are places which are only one vehicle wide and while downhill traffic is supposed to give way to uphill traffic, they don’t! The drops are breathtaking and I was much happier when our lane was closest to the mountain side. We only had to pass one truck which happened to be in a wide section, all the other vehicles were cars. As we passed the Provincial campground at Fisheries Pool, we stopped outside and I walked in to see if there were any vacancies. As I was walking down the pot-holed dirt road overhung...

Grand Teton NP, WY Working our way north took us to the Grand Teton national park. Even though we’ve been there four times there are places we haven’t photographed. Now that Lindsay is starting to take landscape pictures, he wanted to try the Mormon Row barn at sunrise. There had been forest fires in the north for a few weeks now and the day we arrived the smoke was quite strong and was covering up the mountains so I wasn’t very optimistic that we would get good pictures. While we didn’t really need to be there long before sunrise, you do need to get a spot as it’s very popular. And whoever gets there first sets the line that you can photograph from. So if someone is using a very wide angle lens, they are going to be further back than I would want to be. Going up the back road is full of pot holes and can be really messy if it's been raining but it's significantly shorter than going by the sealed road. Arriving just before sunrise was a bit slack but we did manage to get a go...

We loved photographing the mustangs in Cody, so when Charlene invited us to her neck of the woods to the west of Salt Lake City to photograph the wild mustangs there we jumped at the chance. She showed us of a campsite up in the canyon not far out of Tooele which I still can't pronounce - there's a w in there somewhere! Even though it was quite warm, our campsite was under trees and lovely and cool. Charlene played local guide on our first day taking us way out into the desert for about 90 minutes to her secret place. Sometime during the day the horses normally make their way to a couple of water holes. We checked both but there weren't any horses to be seen. At the second one we could see a huge herd off in the distance. Unfortunately there were some people on trail buggies and the horses bolted and ran further off into the distance. The horses associate the trail buggies with the rangers who come out to sterilise them, so they don't stick around. After a ...

Rocky Mountain National Park, Colorado The best thing about a National Parks pass is that you can bypass the queues going past the entrance kiosks as you can swipe the card reader to open the boom gate up, which came in very handy during the peak times such as the weekend. The queues going into the national park were very long and we just sailed passed them all. We can't fit in the campsites in the National Park as we are too big and unfortunately we couldn't get a booking in the county campground that we had been to before as it was booked out, so had to go to a commercial one. We spent most of our time down at Sprague Lake inside the RMNP photographing the moose, trying a sunrise picture of the lake and mountains and finally a Milky Way shoot but there was too much light pollution and the pictures just came out red. At one time Lindsay had gone walking off in the dark to talk to another photographer leaving me alone in the dark. I could hear noises was it a bear, co...