Using That New Christmas Camera

San Diego – So you or someone in your family got a new camera over the holidays and has been shooting like blazes with it, really getting “into” taking photos?  That is precisely what happened to the young neice of a friend of mine so he dropped me an email asking what they could do to help support and encourage her.  What follows is an expansion of my emailed response to him…

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This new world of digital photography demands that good photographers wear more “hats” than was formerly required; computer skills at least in terms of computer editing of image files has replaced the darkroom.  Those on the top of the photographer’s pile have mastered three components, none of which are easy.

The first is the Technical.  This is the underpinning of it all and without which the rest really doesn’t matter.  it involves learning to “play” the camera as a musician plays their instrument and the editing skills.  The camera is simply a tool; in and of itself it creates nothing.  It has no heart nor does it have a soul nor even a good “eye” for what is in front of it.  All of those things come only from the person using it.  But none of them can be used well unless that photographer has mastered how to use camera controls to do more than simply capture some portion of the real world out there in front of them both.

Camera controls are capable of a huge influence on how the resulting photo’s interpretation of the reality before it will be rendered.  Using them in various ways can result in a large variety of renditions, all with various “messages” for the viewer.  It is only through mastery of those controls that one can then really begin to create photographs rather than just take snapshots.  But it doesn’t end here.

The second is the Aesthetic.  Mastering the language of visual communications to instill and control the photographer’s message and in a package attractive or in some way appealing to most viewers is the next element.  Most humans due to both culturally instilled, as well as some nearly intuitive responses, will “get” the visual language of the photograph.  But the question is whether or not that message is what was intended or not, or whether it was simply gibberish as if someone tried to translate Hamlet into Martian without knowing either English or Martian very well.

The third is the Creative.  How does one use the first two elements to produce works (in this case visual) that create for the viewers a new and unique experience to which those viewers will react both viscerally and cerebrally?  That is the role of creativity and it is often given very short shrift by educators under the assumption that one either already has it or not, and in any case, in their opinions it cannot be taught.  I believe strongly that is not true.

I believe we are all born creative creatures but that our education system has tried its dead level best to beat it out of us in order to make of us better workers for the mercantile society surrounding us.  But unless that fire has been completely quenched, then I also believe it can be fanned back into embers and then back into full flame.  And I believe it is this third element, building on the other two, that will make the difference between being lost somewhere in the overall pile of OK shooters and being on the top of the pile.

So I would encourage you all to gift that family member (or yourself) with some of the really good photo text books out there.  Unfortunately none of them cover all elements well but individually the material; is out there.  The biggest thing however, is practice and play at it; explore the world of photography and the world of visual art and artists.  On my web primary site (www.ndavidking.com) is a page, “SDCCD,” that provides a link to some of the better books out there as a starting place.

If the budding photographer is young, say, High School age or less, then always encourage him or her to have their camera with them, support their work and and interest.  Take them to good places to photograph and show them good web sites devoted to serious photography and photographers.  (There is a “Links” page on my website that can get you off and running.)  If his or her school has a photo club encourage joining.  There are also private workshops around the area dealing with some of the technical and aesthetic issues that would be good for her.  She will have a leg up on competition from starting so young.

And then if the interest is still alive after high school, then encourage them to get in a good photo program such as the one we have at City.  The artistic spirit under development is incredibly fragile.  It takes time for it to gain the internal strength needed to be self supporting.  Minimal discouragement can kill it early so it is important for those close to the growing artist to be supportive and to make it clear they are behind this exploration.

Unfortunately, you or they will encounter well meaning people that will be discouraging because they believe that getting into the arts is a sure fire way of going broke quickly.  That is only partially true.

Yes, if you can at best hope to enter the field at the bottom or middle of the pile then it is true.  Perhaps you can eak out a living but because it is already teeming with other want-to-bes it more likely you will be eaten alive.  But there is another side to it.  There is some real money to be made at the top of the pile and there is always room at the top.  But getting there will require dedication and practice that is far more demanding of you than any normal career where you just show up, clock in, do your task, and then go home.  THere is a reason why so few rise to that level, and the reason is that it is desperately hard work and takes a lot out of the person and also out of those around them.

But the rewards, not just monetarily, can be so completely fulfilling to the spirit and soul as to make all other endeavors and successes pale by comparison.  And for the photographer it all often starts with the simple gift of a good camera.  Good luck and perhaps someday I’ll get to meet you in person in one of our classes.

Playing Around

San Diego – In addition to getting my syllabi and Blackboard pagers ready for Spring semester, and trying to work out some good times for weekend and longer workshops and seminars, I do try to do what I encourage students to do: play and practice with your photography.  On a recent walk in Balboa Park I took a single lens, in this case a 70-200mm to practice seeing with it in ways it is not normally used.  Here are two examples.

The first is a shot of some backlit leaves.

The second shot is of the rim-lit tips of some palm fronds.

Both are shot with a canvas print in mind.  You can click on either print to see a larger version (I can’t believe I just realized how to do this… some things are just too obvious and it is like a forest and trees issue.  Duh!)

On the workshop page I’ve added some more data, so if you are interested make sure I have your email address so i can let you know when things get firmed up.

Christmas Trip – Part Three: Review

San Diego – So, it is time for the trip debriefing and the question, what was learned on this trip?  Actually some very practical things, especially about using the motorhome for both personal trips and for workshop base camps.

I’ll try to make this worth while reading by inserting some of the finished shots from the trip.  As I mentioned in the last entry, it seems that my vision for my imagery is undergoing some evolution.  Over the last year I have experimented with the look of old lenses, old photo technologies, and with the look of canvas.  The work is evolving back into my fine art beginnings and it pleases me when a first glance does not confirm with certainty just how the image was made; is it an old time photo process or equipment, a painting, an ink drawing, a print, a new “straight” photograph… or what?  And the positive (and unexpected) response to the older non-photographic work I included in the Visual Arts Faculty show last semester re-awakened an old but still viable notion:  The image itself ought, in my opinion, transcend the specifics of how it was wrought.  And I’m being drawn back to my earliest landscape idols, the painters Bierstadt, Moran, and Turner.

You already saw one application of that thinking in the old barn shot that ended the last post.   Here is one of a fallen log shot along the Avenue of the Giants among the great coastal redwoods. A different look but the same thinking.

OK, on to lessons learned… The basic statistics for Rocinante are that she has a roughly 50 gallon engine fuel tank and gets roughly 8 miles per gallon.  That means, depending on driving conditions that effect mileage good and bad, she has a roughly 350-425 miles range per tank of gas.  At $4.00 per gallon, that is $200.00 per tank refill.

On the other hand, good RV parks will full hookups run in the $30 – $35 per night range and State and Federal Parks campgrounds run $20 – $30 per night with no hookups.  And there are all of the places one can “boondock” or dry camp for no nightly fee such as on the BLM lands in Alabama Hills.  Eating out on the road is not cheap; breakfasts are from $10-$15 per person, lunches about the same, dinners $20-$30 and snacks another $5, so on average it copmes out to $40-$65 per day per person.  From a purely economic standpoint I’ll leave off the intangible value of flexibility and trip convenience of a motorhome in general but I have to tell that you being able to pull over or send your navigator back for some coffee or a sandwich, or if team driving, being able to relax in a real bed, has some serious value.

That seems to work out to the idea that if one travels roughly a tank of gas or less per segment of trip and then spends two-to-four days in and around that locale, cooking in the motorhome rather than eating out, then the motorhome is the clear economic winner.  More miles per segment, or fewer days at a spot, starts to tip the scales toward using a normal vehicle and staying in motels.

OK, Time for another shot, this time of a moss-covered tree on a hillside along 101 near Crescent City.  if ever there was a composition that cried out to me for an impressionist approach, this was it.

The above calculations get modified when there is someone ride-sharing.  The 8 mpg figure gets multiplied by however many are going along as do food costs.  The coach could comfortably handle three passengers, so four people in all, and that would make the effective mileage per person, 32 mpg.  Now we are starting to get very reasonable.

Speaking of reasonable, it seemed reasonable to let you see a work in progress at this point.  Remember the unedited shot of poor old “Sioux,” the boat up on jacks at the boat repair yard in the first post of this series?  Well when I was standing there looking at it I thought that the proper way to render that rotting wood and rigging would be for me to do a color pen and ink rendering or maybe even a mixed media with drawing  and some dry-brush watercolor.  So with that in mind I set about creating this image:

OK, back to lessons learned…   Of course I also RE-learned that I cannot hand-hold a 180mm macro lens at 1/60 second especially with only one good arm.  But hey, I had to try…

I Iearned too that I love – LOVE – doing trips like this only I do need to plan them a little better than this one, especially if we are going to be going off the main highways for very far.  That ordeal of a drive would have been fun if we had not been in a time crunch (and my arm was not killing me), but without proper planning we got off into something that was a real surprise.

You can see in the photo on the left taken at one of our stops early on that road while we were still going up, that it too had its share of incredible areas to stop and photograph.  For two or three of us out on a lark just seeing and photographing whatever comes along, that side trip would not be a huge deal; but for a workshop where things are supposed to go more or less as the erstwhile leader plans for and predicts, it could have resulted in some very, very unhappy participants.  I know from other workshops that there are a lot of drivers that would be VERY put out having to follow me over that road and would have been consumed with assumptions that we were all going to fall off and die among the elves in the forest.

And the trip experience reinforced for me that although I am quite OK doing these trips alone, it really is not only more fun to have someone else along, if that someone else is a photographer or artist of some type, there is a creative symbiosis that happens, at least for me, that leads to trying new things, seeing in new ways, and it certainly makes the long drives go faster.

And finally, you may remember the coastal storm shot from the first post in this series.  It was pretty close to what I wanted even in that unedited state, but here it is again as an ending punctuation to this post after a little bit of work to make it come closer to the way I “felt” about the scene standing there looking at it.

So now I need to get busy planning the next trips and workshops.  If you want to come along make sure I have your name on my list.

Christmas Trip – Part Two

San Diego – (If you are just tuning in, do drop to the post below this where the trip thread starts then come back…)

The day after Christmas dawned pretty clear with a nice sunrise over the harbor and docks in Crescent City.  Since our campsite had us parked next to the boat repair docks we had shot there Christmas evening doing some unexpected shooting of subjects not on the primary hunting list.  Sort of a photographic Christmas present.  To tie the last and this post together, here is a shot of Larry photographing the boats in the repair yard the previous evening.

It was a short walk around the rest of the area so next morning, the day after Christmas, we struck out in search of a nice sunrise shot. Larry headed for the bay and I headed down to the docks following the morning call of the sea lions and found this shot with the Crescent City lighthouse in the background.  I call it “Roosters of the Sea.” …think about it…

When we got back to Rosey we had breakfast and then turned back south, stopping several times along the way to shoot both overlooks and beach shots.  The storm appeared to be over but the tidal surge was still pretty strong.  Here is a shot of Larry at one of those pull outs.

Though the day started clear in Crescent City, as we headed south we were once again back in fog and sometimes rain.  In places it made the headlands look like an oriental painting as the ridges disappeared off into the fog and gave you just a hint of the wave action crashing against the shore below.

Larry wanted to shoot some lighthouses, a term by the way, that he is now forbidden to ever utter in my presence again…  So we took off on a road that was to take us to a couple of them according to some print-out he had gotten from the web..  We exited 101 and went first through Ferndale (what a GREAT little town to shoot in, but we were on a mission).  The road out of Ferndale through the mountains to Petrolia was shown as a continuation of the road from 101 to the town — actually a normal paved, two lane country road — on all of the maps we had.  But it was quickly evident it was anything but normal.  It did not go THROUGH the mountains, it went OVER then… straight up and over with hairpins that challenged both Rosey’s 26 foot length and my failing shoulder.  and it had last seen any service on it sometime in the middle 1800s.

Here is a shot of her stopped at a wide spot for us to shoot in some of the moss encrusted area.  The storms had left everything wet and saturated so that colors were unnaturally rich and deep; so of course we stopped several times for photos.

Finally, after several time wondering if we would EVER stop climbing, we got to the top.  It leveled out and presented a view of the most incredible valleys and meadows this side of Colorado; it was beautiful.  I had no idea this existed in the mountains between 101 and the coast.  OK, I’ll admit it, I didn’t even know there WERE mountains between 101 and the coast.

And then we started… DOWN.  Whoa, I mean D-O-W-N, Down.  Even in low gear I sometimes had to ride the brakes to keep us marginally under control.  As steep as we had been climbing we were descending even more steeply.  The road, to borrow a phrase from C.W. McCall, looked like a collection of malaria germs.  Finally we could see the coast and one last little down pitch and we would be level.

I stopped at the last semi-level spot (only about 6 degrees down bubble) to downshift into low gear.  While I firmly stood on the brakes, Larry kindly got out to take a shot of the coach with that last section and a view of the coast. But a photo really does not give a sense of the steepness of the road.  There were no switchbacks in this section to tame the drop.  Rather, once around this bend, the road veered back to the right as it lined up with the road below and then went straight down toward the coastal shelf you can see winding off in the distance.  It would make a world class, if somewhat terrifying sledding hill if they ever got enough snow here.

But we reached the bottom safely with the coast spread out before us… but… there was NO lighthouse to be seen.  No structure, no trail or road marked as going to it; a clear and beautiful secluded bit of coast line, but not a lighthouse to be seen.  Hmmmm…  We were not amused.

So we drove on, glad to be on what was mercifully now a fairly normal, level, straight country road right along the coast to Petrolia.  There we followed a sign to the dead-end dirt road going 10 miles to where the Punta Gorda light house was shown on the map.

Bear in mind that at that moment, seeing the state of this dirt road, I was very worried about our timing vis-a-vis getting back to the highway and getting far enough south for that night’s camp ground that we could have a chance of meeting Larry’s deadline of being home by Tuesday night.  (You can see the length of the shadow in Larry’s shot above taken a good half and hour before we reached Petrolia.)  And, adding some sport to the action, my shoulder was screaming bloody murder at every turn of the steering wheel. But I could simply not get my mind around the concept that the other end of the road could be like the first part, so was not too worried.

We got to the end of the road and sure enough, an info sign said yes, indeed, there was a lighthouse in the area, but that it was a ½ mile hike to see it.  I wasn’t sure whether I wanted to make him do that hike at gun point carrying ALL of his AND my gear, or to say forget it, there is no time.  Except I was not sure I could even hold a gun, my shoulder ached so much.  On his own however, he returned after reading the data and said, “…forget it!”  So, more than a little disappointed and quite relieved, all at the same time, we headed back down the wonderful, rough, dirt, hole-filled road to Petrolia and what we hoped would be a reasonable road back to 101.

Well that hope lasted about 100 yards out of town!  We immnediately started to climb steeply back up over the mountains on a road that on the GPS (unlike the map) looked like a snake convention in a coffee can.  It went through some gorgeous country, there is no denying it.  But we were averaging about 10-15 miles per hour, sometimes a blistering 20 and it was 30 miles to the highway.  Daylight was fading fast but there was nothing for it but to keep going and hope that if the map lied about the condition and character of the road, it at least told the truth about where it came out.

The road dropped down therough the mountains and into Humboldt Redwoods State Park and wound through some incredible groves.  Even had there been any light left to stop and photograph (and we would ahve wanted to) there was no time.  It was almost a blessing that by the time we got in amongst those wonderful trees it was sufficiently dark I had to turn my lights on.

All in all we spent over 5 hours on a trek we anticipated spending less than 2, never saw or photographed a single %#$@(*% lighthouse, and now we were WAY late.  The road, (forever after to be known on my maps and memory as “Larry’s Road”) when we finally hit 101 had just taken all of the stuffing out of me, but we still had at least 2-3 hours to drive to get far enough south for me to feel comfortable that we could make it back on Tuesday, easily.  I kept trying to rationalize in my mind that if we stopped and just got up early enough we could still make it work but I truly had no faith in that plan so set it aside and kept going.

There was no point whining, much as I wanted to.  All that did was make me focus even more on my now completely shot shoulder.  There was no way I could hold that arm that did not send shooting pains from the shoulder cuff down into the tricep muscles.  So in some ways it was mercifull that much of 101 in that area had the lane marking paint so worn away that it was hard to tell where the center line or the shoulder was.  Those are two very important bits of information for an 8 ft wide vehicle piloted by a very tired, very pained driver.  But it gave me something else to focus on and worry about so the truth is, it helped.

We passed Willitts where we spent the first night, on through Ukiah, and ended up in Cloverdale for the night.   We got up early and then had an easy drive home, arriving about 5 pm after getting stuck in LA rush hour traffic and then rush hour and returning vacationers traffic coming into San Diego.

This was a great learning trip for me about how to plan for proper RV-based trips and workshops (and how NOT to).  Rosey was a trooper and did everything asked of her including perfectly navigating a road never designed for any sort of motorhome.

Now it is time to work on trip photos.  But before I leave this tale I also want to put up one more shot.  Before we turned toward Ferndale and while still on 101 near Requa, we spied this old abandoned barn.  All during this trip I could feel my own artistic ‘vision’ in flux, responding somewhat to the impact of the canvas class of last semester and the look of images on canvas.  So here, then, I’ll leave you with the shot of that barn.

See you next trip!

Christmas (YES, CHRISTMAS!) Trip – Part 1

Crescent City, CA — I really, really, really did not want to stay at home and make a turkey or ham shaped meatloaf for me and the cat while everyone else was having a wonderful, festive Christmas holiday with their families… like I used to do.  Nor did I want to be the orphan or odd-man out and recipient of an “Oh poor guy” invite so decided to do a short Christmas Photo trip.  The time was opened up because the doctor at Kaiser seems to refuse to believe I have something seriously wrong with my shoulder so won’t order an MRI to check it out.

And by a fortuitous sequence of events, one of my students and friends, Larry Coffinberry, found himself “batching” it so fired up Rocinante for her first real shake down cruise and determined to take four days, head up the Califonia northern coast to photograph redwoods and whatever else leapt in front of our cameras.

We took off Saturday, December 24^th and headed north.  Right away one small problem surfaced… the fan in the dash heater does not work so we froze our tails off until the sun came up to warm the coach.

Second problem was I made a navigational blunder at the junction of I-5 and US99 and took 99 by mistake, not noticing the error until Bakersfield.  At that point we decided to just ride it out until it rejoined I-5 near Modesto.

Since we had already screwed up the initial plan we also created an ad hoc course correction and took US20 across to US101, planning on stopping for the night at an RV park in Glenhaven.  But for the first time since I’ve had it, my little Garmin completely bombed out and we missed it.  So we went ahead to 101, turned north and found the Creekside Resort and RV Park north of Willits.  They graciously opened the gate for us since we were running late and in the pitch dark we got settled, sat up the connection, and  chatted for awhile and then went to bed.  Santa would have had a hard time finding us…

I was exhausted and my shoulder was screaming from wrestling the RV through the mountains so I was pleased to get into bed.  The beds are pretty comfortable but I could have slept on a rock at that point,

CHRISTMAS MORNING!!!  We slept late and got sort of together about 8:30.  Looking outside now that it was  light there were some interesting frozen leaves  to photograph (oh yeah, it was COLD) and then we noticed that around us was an RV park that looked like something out of World of Warcraft AFTER the big battle.

So off we headed north and through the Avenue of the Giants. 

Finally some Redwoods!  I’ve not had time to fully process them but here are some unedited shots from the Avenue of the Giants and from Redwood State Parks.

The Avenue of the Giants is a VERY narrow road with trees growing right to the very edge of the lanes.  I hadn’t noticed it so much when driving normal cars but driving an 8 foot wide motor home is a whole ‘nuther thing entirely.  And finding places wide enough to pull it over to get out and shoot was a challenge.  It is not like it stops on a dime!

There were some frustrating times when an incredible scene appeared off to the side but there was no place for ANY sort of vehicle much less a 26 ft Motor Home to pull over.

 The day went from overcast when we got up to clear when we started down the ”avenue” to raining and foggy (and visually WONDERFUL) before we had completed the tour of the Avenue, to finally clear off as we were ending the day.

But in the Humboldt Redwoods it was a pretty steady heavy drizzle and it made the colors just leap out at you.

The old growth timber and the ever-present moss plus the lush ferns give this place a most unique feel.  Not a jungle exactly, but more than just a forest. 

It is a photographer’s paradise but bizarrely, it is often at its visual best when the weather, like today, is really pretty miserable to be out in.  But you do have to watch out for your equipment.  If it is not pretty well weather sealed on its own then you ought to have a rain cover for camera and lens because it will definitely get wet… not just a few drops, I mean pretty wet.

Along the coast the storm was ending its run with some awesome power..

Our target for the night: Crescent City.  We made it about 4:30.  Our RV Park of choice was far less colorful, shall we say, but clean, the gang of hill folk from “Deliverance”  were not anywhere in evidence so we shut down and even went to take some shots of boats since we were parked next to a boat repair dock.

Tomorrow we will probably hit Jedediah Smith Park and then head back south.

Thanksgiving Trip: Chapter 7 — Debriefing

San Diego – As I noted before, any trip worth having taken should have provided an educational experience.  Otherwise you might as well save the money and sat home letting your brain atrophy watching the mental pabulum on the TV.   As an old friend of mine once said to an incredibly obtuse person, “I wouldn’t be so rude as to say you were stupid, but you seem singularly unable to profit from an educational experience.”  So the point of this last entry in the Thanksgiving Day Trip saga is to review that educational experience and see if I was able to profit from it or have to fess up to simply being stupid.

Not that I’ve avoided doing far more than my share of stupid things in my life, much as I would dearly like to claim the contrary.  But my friends are the type that if I had the temerity to do so, and they read this, would immnediately be on the phone to me questioning my memory.  But hopefully a string of stupid things does not, in and of itself, mean that person is themselves stupid unless they failed to profit from and learn from those unfortunate incidences.

The trip was certainly frought with opportunities for learning, probably more than I can quickly recall as I type this.  But a few stand out and to help me recall them and cement them in my own mind, referencing them here might help.

1. My home is here.  No, this is not just a “Duh!” revelation.  I’ve always considered the Rockies as my “home.”  They are unique among mountain chains and their quiet power has helped me through some very rough times and put me in my place during others.  My spirit is somehow tied to those mountains.  But they are more than just a place, they are a  concept and I can take that with me no matter where I am.  But I no longer reside, physically, emotionally, or spiritually in Denver.  Admittedly nearly every day I suffer some cultural shock here in southern California — and hope that never goes away because if it did it would mean my values, ethics, and morals would also be going away.  But this is now my home and there will be no more looking back over my shoulder or wondering what might have been had I not left to come here to teach.  That loose end has at last been tied up.
2. When I came here I felt in my heart that I was coming here to do something important and yet, up to the day I left on this trip I would have said I still had no idea what that was or would be.  I was blind.  I came here to teach and what could be more important than to be able to pass on to others the knowledge and lessons I had learned over the years?  And along the way, with my teaching partner, Dave Eichinger, have helped to put together a world class photo education program in a facilities like none other in the country.  Sometimes you ahve to get out of the forest to be able to see the trees.  We have created a legacy anyone should be proud of.
3. And I reaffirmed to myself that much as I love teaching and hope to continue doing it in various forms such as in the classroom, on workshops, perhaps in books, I am at heart an image maker.  I cannot live without spending time making images whether it is in my now normal medium of photography or in some of my old traditional approaches, or continuing my exploration of the possibilities provided by the digital arean where I can combine visions and “looks” from traditional and modern technologies.
4. And finally I finally accepted my rebellion from the unfortunately typical photo-scholastic thinking that a photographic image has to look a certain way or be assembled a certain way or be displayed a certain way.  Art, no, ART, is far bigger than such intellectual and aesthetic nihilism.  It is OK to do a tack sharp 40×90 image and then turn around and produce a very painterly 16×20 if, IF, each corresponds to your vision for the final piece and you remain true to that.  Narrowly constrained views of what is acceptable as an artistic piece belong to the mentally constrained and I wish to be no part of it.

So those are the primary results, for me, of this trip.  There are a few other smaller ones involving cutting some ties and perhaps establishing some new ones or rekindling old lost ones.  Who knows?  The fun is in the journey.  And this journey of just short of 2,500 miles has been a very, very good one.

I can hardly wait to start planning the next one.  Meantime, let me leave this trip with a finished image.  Earlier you saw this in its “raw” form but here it is after I worked on it to recreate my sense of how the scene really “felt” emotionally to me when I stopped to make the photograph.  In their finished form I believe a good photograph should convey how the photographer “felt” about the subject, not just what it looked like as if it were a passport shot if a scene.  Here, unlike the incredibly sharp mosaic of the Grand Canyon I’m working on, this one has a looser more painterly touch.  I started as a painter so that is not a bad word to me even if the core of this image was capture optically.

 

Thanksgiving Trip: Chapter 6 — Homeward Bound

San Diego – It dawned bright and sunny in Phoenix and I was ready to be home.  I had some friends who used to travel between San Diego and Phoenix a lot and always took two days to make the trip, so it sort of made me question my assertion that it was an easy one day drive.  But I was determined to give it a try.

I did get off to a slightly rough start when at the continental breakfast in my motel I forgot to pre-spray the  waffle iron and had a very stuck waffle while a bunch of ladies watched in horror at my pathetic cooking attempt and even worse approach to digging my waffle out of the one available iron.  The pieces were good though!!!

Anyway, by 8:30 I was on the road.  The Highway was busy but moving at the speed limit or a little better which i took to be a good sign, along with the lack of ANY clouds on ANY horizon.   I took the dogleg south to Gila Bend to join I-8 west then headed straight to San Diego.

I was going to simply stop in Yuma, which is right on the border, for a top off of cheap Arizona gas (same source as San Diego but regular was $3.279 in Yuma).  But it was about 11 am and since my gas station was right next to a buffet, and dearly I love buffets, I decided to have a good lunch instead of a gas station hot dog and chips on the road.  Wonderful as those are, there comes a time when options can lure you away.

Have you ever noticed that if you go to a normal restaurant lunch may be about $7-$10 and you get normal servings and feel fine.  But at  a buffet for the same price if you haven’t gone back 27 times and need to be carried to your car in a wheelbarrow you somehow feel cheated?  Trust me, I was not cheated!

Since I had already blown some time and it was still early I decided to go take some photos of what is left of the infamous Yuma Territorial Prison.  Ever since I was a kid soaking up books on the old west, the Prison at Yuma was the iconic lock-up for bad guys.  It was our own version of Devil’s Island and the literature made it sound like even a short sentence to Yuma was essentially a death sentence.

The last view of freedom a new prisoner got to see was this gate as he entered the main prison compound.  The double gate allowed a wagon to enter and be trapped between gates while it was searched.  Escapes were attempted, of course, but escaping while going through this “salley-port” was difficult at best.  Not that any escape from Yuma was easy but this was an extremely difficult place to sneak through undetected.  But over the years not that many managed to actually escape and survive anyway.  Most were caught right away and those were the lucky ones.

Not that much remains of the old cell blocks that at one time were two stories high in places.  Here is a shot looking down the alleyway between two of the cell blocks.

You can see the old stone work made for a very strong fortress designed to keep people in and the surrounding desert and, in some directions, extremely unfriendly indigenous folks who were not thinking the white man was all that good a deal for them, made for an even more formidable barrier to freedom.  Of course the guards in the watch towers with Gatling guns also helped tarnish the idea of trying to escape.  It is interesting to know that in spite of its fearsome reputation as a “Hell Hole” and “Snake Den” (it actually did attract some of the local creepy crawlers for a variety of reasons and a number of inmates died of snakebite IN JAIL), the locals were jealous of the accomodations.  They didn’t eat as well as the prisoners (actually in those tough times, not that many people did), plus the prison had running water (it sits on a bend of the Colorado River) and with the invention of electricity, they even had forced air cooling and power.

Still, this prison was operational at a time when prison was not a place you wanted to go to.  The theory was that if you made it unpleasant enough people would want to avoid going there.  However, like today, some of the “crimes” that resulted in sentences from the hinterland that sent someone here seems awfully thin.  It is fascinating to read why some of the prisoners were there.

Here on the left is a typical six person cell of about 9×12 sq ft.  This was taken looking through the bars of one of the cells in the cell block shot above.  Do notice the “facilities” furnished by the bucket in the call as well as the ring in the center to chain unruly individuals when necessary.  This looks light and airy but I rested the camera on the bars in the door and took a wide open shot for a second at ISO 1600 and this was about high noon.  These were dark, dank, thoroughly unplesant places to spend a few years.

These cells, unpleasant as they were, were nevertheless the good ones.  The so-called “Dark Cells” were for solitary confinement and had no windows, beds, ventilation, “facilties,” and prisoners there were served a single daily meal of bread and water for the duration of the confinement.  It made the normal cells look like the Ritz Carlton.  I’m actually in favor of re-opening Yuma as it was in the 1870s and 80s, before electricity and reserving it for the likes of child molesters, rapists, and the sort.  20 years would be about right and for the 2 or 3 who survived the heat, the snakes, the conditions, after 20 years they might REALLY not want to go back.  Ah but that is a topic for my “rant” blog and not so much this one.

While there I was chatting with a docent and complimenting them on finally having a sign indicating it was likely Frank Leslie not Doc Holliday who killed johnny Ringo (despite every movie about that period in Tombstone with Wyatt and the O.K. Corral showing Doc as doing it) when she laid a bombshell on me.  Her maiden name was “Donner” and she was a descendant of that famous Donner party trapped in the snows in northern California.  We had a wonderful discussion about that and those days.

So, after about an hour and a half in Yuma it was time to get back on the highway and head west once more.  When the prison was the town’s main attraction and even up through the 1970s, Yuma was a sleepy little town but now, it is an endless sea of RV resorts and all of the support stores, shops, and resources for the so-called “Snow Birds” (or sometimes “Sun Birds”) fleeing the northern climes and heading for the warmth.  I knew there were giant flocks of them in Phoenix and Tucson but never expected to see so many here.  There were even “cities” of them in the desert sand dunes areas.

As I drove west through the Imperial Dunes in California the winds came up and it was blowing even my little rig around.  What a perfect closure to the trip.  On the way to the destination in Denver I went over Vail Pass where it was blowing snow and 28 degrees.  Around El Centro starting over the pass up out of the desert, it was blowing sand and 82 degrees.  Too perfect.

Now after a few days to reflect on it I’ll try to log a debreifing to this mission as we used to have to do in one of those past lives.  I feel it was, as good trips shout be, a good learning experience.  Now to see if I was paying attention.