About the August 2010 Header Photo

Because I have recently been spending more time around water and the beach than in the heights of the mountains, I have had to reached back into my archives for this month’s header photo, all the way back to August 15, 1979. I electronically cropped this month’s header photo from a scanned black and white print. A colleague took the original with my Minolta SRT 101 SLR shooting Tri-X-Pan black and white film, which I developed myself. I also printed the original.

The shot, now a little grainy after scanning, is of me climbing (sans ice ax and crampons) a snowfield on the western slope of Mt. Geike in the Wyoming’s Wind River Range. At the time, I was a student on a National Outdoor Leadership School (NOLS) Outdoor Educators Course. We were backpacking up and out of Desolation Canyon, heading for Pain in the Ass Pass (11,632 ft) between Mt. Bonneville to the northeast and Raid Peak to the south.

Thirty-one years later, many of the lessons I learned on that NOLS course still inform my outdoor ethic and the way I approach outdoor adventure type activities. Now, however, many more of those activities take place on water rather than on mountains.