My neice, Grace Parker, whose Fort GIbson Junior High basketball team never lost a game, recently made her debut with the high school varsity and JV teams. They won both games, but her uncle’s indoor no-flash sports photography wasn’t very productive (Obviously, I need more-expensive lenses). Here are a handful of shots, though. Grace is the one with the blue headband.
Just south of my hometown of Vian, Oklahoma, is Sequoyah Wildlife Refuge. Each fall (and spring) the wheatfields of the refuge are swarmed by tens of thousands of wild geese, migrating toward friendlier climates. My dad drove me through the Refuge while I was home for Thanksgiving.
There is a two-lane road through the middle of the Refuge. On the west side, hunting (geese) is legal and popular; on the east side hunting is not allowed. When you drive down that road, you can see thousands of geese on the east side — often just 40 yards or so from the road — but none on the west side. Even the flight patterns of the huge swarms that come in and out carefully stay on the safe side. Like me, the geese are not as dumb as they look.
The www.stevecreek.com website (a photographer from the area) often has pictures (better than mine!) from the Refuge.
My first post-retirement priority was to take a trip with my Mom and Dad. Most Alaska tourists apparently spend their time on cruise ships. I had raised this option with my Dad. Predictably, his response to the cruise ship idea included a good bit of profantity and the word “prison.” So we flew to Anchorage in mid-June, rented an SUV, and for two weeks traveled the majority of the relatively-few roads that exist in that section of Alaska.
Along the way, we chartered a small boat for a private glacier cruise, took a horseback ride in the Kenai peninsula, took a ‘flightseeing’ plane trip to McKinley (including a landing on the Glacier), and spent a day on those terrible old school buses that are the only way to actually go into Denali National Park.
If you get off the tourist-beaten path, you can really have the place to yourself. One day, for example, we drove into Wrangell-St. Elias National Park — the largest national park in U.S. at 13 million acres. There are only two roads in, so we picked one and drove 2 hours, which was as far as you could go in a vehicle. In that time, we saw maybe one or two other cars of sightseers. Meanwhile, most of the visitors to Alaska were sharing a boat with 2,000 other tourists, or at best sharing bus with 40. I think my Dad was right.
