Wide Open Spaces

Immediately upon leaving one of my old jobs as a newspaper reporter and photographer (I worked for a couple of small daily papers where it's common to do both tasks), I drove east over Sonora Pass to visit Mono Lake. Although I'd always loved the photography side of my job, there was a special feeling I got while shooting among the tufa formations and gulls, along the wide-open lakeshore buzzing with alkali flies, surrounded by desert scrub and volcanic cinder cones, and nary a human soul in sight. I guess I'd describe the feeling as a sense of coming home. I felt I was exactly where I ought to be, doing exactly what I ought to be doing.

Being outside stalking nature with a camera was -- and remains -- one of the greatest sources of well-being I know. Ironically, I was on my way to spend the summer living with a friend and his fiance in New York City's East Village, and all these years later I still make my living in the city and find re-creation out beyond it.

Every now and then, though, I like to poke around the city in the company of a friend who actually prefers to photograph in the urban jungle. Although I live in the city, I'm still kind of a fish out of water when it comes to finding inspiration in the urban scene. Part of the reason I keep at it is the sense I have that looking for inspiration here will actually help my nature photography. Keeping in touch with inspiration is like tapping into the Fountain of Youth. It's the only way to keep from getting stale or bogged down in cliches. I guess my hope is that by challenging myself to find inspiration in the city once in a while, I'll have a deeper experience of nature's landscapes too.

In the diptych below you see a trace of our innate human desire for the wide open spaces even within the city. On the left is the Ferry Building during the weekend farmer's market where the sense of space comes from a high ceiling naturally lit with skylights. On the right is the atrium in the Hyatt Regency Hotel where one person has found her own distinctly civilized patch of open space in the heart of San Francisco.

Tiburon Mariposa Lily

[This is the last post in the series that begins below with "Nemesis Bird."]

I covered a large swath of Ring Mountain this morning on a quest for this rare wildflower and only found it moments before I'd have burst into a weeping nervous breakdown for failing yet again. I'd learned through an email group that the flower was in bloom and I was determined not to go home until I found it, but by now my excellent morning light and calm atmosphere were history.

Although I did not have good directions for finding the flower, I did have one indispensable clue. The flowers were growing at a wooden "trail" sign.

It was actually the Ithuriel's Spear that tipped me off to the sign. Although I saw a wooden post that could have been a sign, it was canted at an angle that made it impossible to read, even with binoculars. I had been roaming the mountain for about 3-1/2 hours by this time, and the two bites of overripe banana and glass of orange juice I'd had for breakfast were no longer providing sustenance. I was feeling a little peckish, but I figured that even if the sign was yet another dead-end dud, I'd at least get to check out the pretty purple wildflower growing out of a rock.

When I crossed a ravine and reached the sign, I felt a little chill of ecstasy on the back of my neck. "Trail", it said. And then I saw one of the flowers, and then another and another. The little mariposa lilies were nicely camouflaged in the dry, brown grass and seemed as light and papery as onion skin.

The sun was high and harsh and the wind was up, but photography was still possible, if somewhat challenging. This is precisely the kind of situation where having the company of a non-photographer hiking partner requires the promise of much chocolate and/or beer for putting up with what comes next. (My horde of beer and chocolate is safe since I was alone.) You don't want to feel rushed. You just spent nearly four hours looking for this opportunity, and now you want to savor it. And savor it I did.

Ring Mountain, Tiburon

It's always nice to visit Ring Mountain, and I like to get there around sunrise. Although the locals use Ring Mountain for jogging, dog-walking and so on, it's also a pretty decent natural area considering it's bordered on all sides by housing developments and offers scenic vistas of the Richmond Bridge and San Quentin State Prison.

My wife was the first person who took me up there to see the "rings" -- Native American petroglyphs -- for which the mountain is named. Its other claim to fame is that it hosts a rare and unusual-looking wildflower that grows nowhere else on earth. As I confessed to a gentleman hiking up the mountain as I was heading down late this morning, I have searched in vain for the Tiburon Mariposa Lily in the past. I once thought I'd found the motherlode only to discover, red-faced, that I'd found the related but very common Oakland Star Tulip.

Ithuriel's Spear

I was seeing a lot of this guy all morning and liked the look of its purple blossoms. Only problem is, they usually grow down on the ground among tall stalks of dry grass. You can't take a picture of them without getting a lot of chaff in the bargain. But as I was out wandering around this morning I spotted this lone specimen growing out of a crack in a serpentine boulder and standing out like a flag.

Nemesis Bird

There was a time not long ago when the California Towhee was one of my nemesis birds. I could never catch it out in the open to get a picture. But then I noticed them in Strybing Arboretum where they're familiar not just with humans, but with humans unaccompanied by dogs. Any bird you want a picture of can be had more easily in Strybing than anywhere else I know.

Unfortunately, the Rufous-sided (or Spotted) Towhee shown above is not, to my knowledge, a Strybing resident. It likes to sing from perches out in the open, but it does not like to be approached. I feel lucky to have gotten the photo above, even though I was a lot farther away from it than I'd have liked. Even before I could move a little closer, though, he was gone.

Snow Plant

Some of the things I learned in botany class 20 years ago are no longer true. Come to think of it, they weren't true back then either. Knowledge is provisional, but they don't tell you that in Botany 101. I don't believe they tell you all the stuff they don't really know until you're in grad school, at which time your job becomes trying to find out what really is true while indoctrinating the great unwashed, undergraduate plebes in what is believed to be true, or at least likely to be so.

Anyway, back when I was in school, we learned that Snow Plants were saprophytes. They don't have green parts, meaning they lack chlorophyll and can't derive energy from sunlight like most other plants, so it was thought that they got nutrients from dead or decaying matter. Is that what you learned, too?! Well, now I read that they are called monotropoids, not saprophytes.

A few years back, my wife and I hiked the John Muir Trail in Yosemite from Tuolumne Meadows down to Yosemite Valley. On the bus ride back up to our car, the driver pointed out the snow plants and told everyone they were fungi. I sensed her reluctance to believe me when I told her they were flowering plants, and I'm sure she looked it up when she got home. Although it's still true that they are indeed flowering plants, it turns out they have a very close relationship with fungi. That's not really much of a surprise when you stop to think that pretty much every plant in the forest is dependent to one degree or another on fungi.

In the article linked to above, they mention that sugars produced in a pine tree moved through the fungi associated with that tree and then into the snow plants. Is that wild, or what? They don't feed on dead matter. They get their nutrients in much the same way the algal symbiont does in a lichen -- from a fungus!

I spotted the bright red snow plants in these pictures from probably 100 yards away, from my campsite at Chipmunk Flat. I rushed over to photograph them in the fading light, finding just the right plants (there were two large clumps), getting just the right angle, maneuvering the tripod in small increments on the forest floor, and so on, then snapped a few frames and went back to my campsite. It was only after I got home that I realized I hadn't even sniffed them to find out if they have an odor, or bitten one to see if it had a flavor -- and I definitely hadn't spent enough time with them to learn who even one of their pollinators might be. And adding insult to injury, I find that even some of the knowledge I thought I had about snow plants turns out to be erroneous.

Sometimes out in the field it's difficult to remember that we're not just nature photographers, but naturalists, too. We're not just out to get the shot, but to actually learn something and to increase our appreciation for, and identification with, the natural world.

Bay To Breakers

This morning in Golden Gate Park.