Flora and Fauna of the American Northwest

(Manny Santiago)

(Manny Santiago)


It is spring and the usual photos of Japanese people of all ages and incomes gathered as one nation undivided in drunken revelry beneath cherry blossoms across the archipelago are nowhere to be seen. I’m feeling a bit of anxiety at the missing pink and white pixels flashing across my laptop’s screensaver slideshow. The only way I could ease the emptiness in my usually brimming Hanami image folder was to do one of two things:

  • Re-rescan old positives to try to tweak the hue and contrast to give the blossoms a little brighter glow and republish…

Or

  • Road Trip.

Despite the unseasonal chilly weather this late in May (But then again I don’t what is unseasonal for the Pacific Northwest as I haven’t experienced a Winter in America–except for the current economic one–for more than six years), the sun could not be completely contained by storm clouds, try though they did.

With all the ups and downs that come with getting out on the road, in the end it was a trip worth doing over, without much alteration. Looking back on it, as it crawls out of its infancy in my mind into a memory and anecdote and one liner and what have you, it feels like a great big tour of (most of) the north western U.S. National Parks: Devil’s Gate, Yellowstone, Scottsbluff, Arches, Mt. Lassen (mostly closed due to snow), & Crater Lake (still very closed due to snow).

Rather then keep us at home, the hailstorm in Idaho passed by to the south, the two feet of snowfall predicted at Yellowstone never came, the thunderstorms pouring down on us in western Nebraska were only loud reminders of the Tornadoes hitting nearby Kansas & Arkansas and the logging roads still “closed for the winter” merely gave us a moment of sober pause with nothing but the idle of the engine before we plunged forward, ever further into the dark and exciting future that is the road.

I am off to pick up my slides from the lab, but here are the broad strokes of what Oregon, Washington, Idaho, Montana, Wyoming, Nebraska, Colorado, Utah, Nevada, & yes even California are up to in this mid-spring chill:

This entry was posted on Wednesday, June 8th, 2011 at 04:06. It is filed under Blog and tagged with , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , . You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed.