Millions of years in the making, hoodoos never fail to capture my fascination and photographic interest. Their formation process begins with flat-lying sedimentary rocks deposited in ancient lakes or floodplains, later elevated by tectonic forces, and finally sculpted by frost wedging and acidic rain that erodes softer layers beneath harder caprock. The caprock protects the weaker underlying rock, creating the hoodoo’s columnar shape, which persists until erosion eventually topples the cap and destroys the spire. Today, I revisited several of my favorites, the Toadstools and the White Ghost. The former are easily accessible from the highway and can be reached via a relatively short hike. The latter, not so much. On my first visit to the White Ghost, I opted for the southern approach, which requires an 8-mile hike. This time, I opted for the northern approach, which only requires a 2-mile hike. What is the “catch,” you might wonder?  The shorter hike requires a 20-mile round trip on “unimproved roads.” For the most part, these are just very bumpy dirt roads. The problem is with the other parts. There are about a dozen places where the road crosses a river wash. Each one offers a unique way to strand your vehicle in a place where a new vehicle would cost less than the tow truck fee. Let’s just say that I will opt for the longer hike on any future visits. On a positive note, I did encounter some very beautiful landscapes along the way.

Unsuccessful at winning the 1000:1 daily lottery for a pass to The Wave, I opted to use my drone to look for equally impressive rock formations. I found several, my favorite being the one below, which I call “Melting Ice Cream.”

I also made a long flight to capture the aptly named North Teepees.

Lone Rock is a prominent and solitary rock formation located in Wahweap Bay within Lake Powell.

I caught the last light of the day at the Glen Canyon Dam before heading into Page, AZ for the night.

As soon as the sun was up, I made a beeline for St. George, UT where my first stop was Pioneer Park. I had hoped to photograph the St. George Narrows located there, but a group of teenagers was climbing on belay, and it did not look like they would be finishing anytime soon. Instead, I found a beautiful little arch to start the day off on a good note. I made my way north to the Snow Canyon State Park, which had a lovely valley view overlook.

Next, I had planned to photograph the Toquerville Falls, hoping that the all-wheel-drive, high-ground-clearance SUV that I rented would be up to the challenge. One mile into the five-mile final ascent, I had to abandon the effort, because I was not up to the challenge. Jeanine will attest to the fact that I have tackled some very insane roads. This one was just too treacherous and I could just imagine stranding my rental on the side of a mountain and ruining the rest of my trip.

Instead, I decided to drive through Zion National Park on my way to Kanab. Fortunately, traffic was light and I could stop often to soak in the magnificence.

As the sun was setting, I made a final stop at the Coral Pink Sand Dunes State Park. The light was exceptional, and the dunes looked like waves of water. A perfect way to finish day one of my road trip.

I found a very cute cabin in Kanab and hitched my trusty steed to the post.

Despite what you might imagine is happening in this photo, these squirrels were neither fighting nor engaged in foreplay. They were, in fact, grooming each other. I never realized squirrels did this, but if you think about it, it makes perfect sense. They run up and down sap-covered trees all day when they are not digging in the dirt.

This morning, I decided I would take a week-long trip to canyon country (Utah, Arizona, Nevada) while Jeanine is in Greece. I booked a flight, car, and first night’s stay in the morning, completed a rough itinerary and packed by early afternoon, and was on a plane headed west before dinner. I made a similar weekend-long trip in May, 2019 when Jeanine was bicycling in France with my cousins. On that adventure, I lost my drone on the second morning and missed out on all the aerial photos I had hoped to take. Hopefully, I will not repeat that debacle.

Anytime I discover a photographically interesting destination, I save it in Google Maps. I have been doing this for years. Pictured below is the rough area I will be visiting. As you can see, it is a target-rich environment. I will only have time to see a fraction of these locations and will choose based on how much ground (in the car and on foot) that I can cover, as well as weather conditions.

Concerned after yesterday’s post, that some might consider me hostile to all Hymenoptera, I decided to create a loving portrait of this member of the Apidae family. When I approached very closely to take the photo, it did not summon a swarm of its buddies to mount an attack, it did not chase me for hundreds of feet, and it did not bite and sting me repeatedly, as did the members of the Vespidae family I encountered yesterday. In short, this bee was very friendly, and I was pleased that we could peacefully coexist in the same space.

The moral of the story: Live and Let Live. An alternative interpretation: Don’t attack me for walking too close to your nest, and I won’t fill it with a flammable accelerant.

I dropped Jeanine off at the airport this afternoon. She is headed to Greece, where she will spend 4 days in Athens before taking the ferry to Aegina. There she will be staying with her friend Maile at a vacation home in Perdika through the first week of September.

The southern yellowjacket (Vespula squamosa) is known for its notably aggressive behavior, especially when its nest is disturbed or threatened, and it can coordinate group attacks using alarm pheromones released by individuals in the colony. This species is recognized as having a “shorter fuse” than other yellowjacket types, often attacking more quickly and aggressively, particularly in late summer and fall when food scarcity and high colony populations amplify their defensiveness. Even a minor disturbance near their underground nest can provoke a swarm response, with multiple individuals joining in defense and stinging repeatedly without losing their stingers.

While spreading the last of the wood chips, I managed to disturb such a population of yellowjackets and suddenly found myself under attack. I set a new personal best speed record while retreating and simultaneously swatting at the marauders that were already on me. Fortunately, I only sustained four stings, but they are quite painful. After licking my wounds, I returned to the nest with a pint of gasoline, which I poured into their underground burrow. Admittedly, it was more an act of retribution than remediation, but I felt quite pleased with my counter offensive and justified it as necessary to protect neighbors who might be attacked while walking a dog who stumbled upon the nest.

I have decided not to risk further confrontation with the yellowjackets, and I am done spreading wood chips for the season. The remaining 1/2 ton will be left in a small pile for future use.

While on an evening walk with Jeanine, we encountered a neighbor coming from the community garden. She was thrilled to show us the basket of tomatoes she had just picked from her plot. About the size of a softball, the tomato pictured above was her gift to us and will be in my belly as soon as I complete typing this post.

I made another big dent in the last remaining wood chip pile and estimate that 1 ton of the original 21 remains to be spread. I am very much looking forward to a change of pace to my landscaping workout.

While driving down the highway this afternoon, a large push broom came flying off a truck traveling well ahead of me. It hit a car in front of me and broke in half. The severed handle flew into my lane and skewered the front of my car. Picture above is what I discovered when I reached home. I still need to do further investigation but my initial assessment is that no major damage was sustained. A few inches in any direction could have led to a completely different story. For the record, all parties were traveling at an approriate speed with reasonable following distance. Even so, there was ZERO time to react and the only thing to be done was to brace for impact.

My soccer team played a preseason match this morning against a team from the age division below us. We traditionally begin our season with such a competition to help us prepare for the challenges ahead. Despite having a limited number of substitutes, we managed a 0-0 tie, which felt like a win against our younger opponents. I played a total of 60 minutes and needed a nap three times as long to recover. Even so, I felt like I was in reasonably good shape, which I attribute to my daily wood chip workouts (see prior posts on the topic).

Later in the day, I completed the wireless switching upgrade to my window washing deionizer and finished cleaning the windows on the front side of the house. I am delighted with the performance and ease of use, and will look forward to this bi-annual task in the years to come.

As the sun was setting, I decided to get a drone shot of the property showing the exposed shoreline, the result of the lower river level we are now experiencing. Jeanine has encouraged me to find a way to carry our kayaks down our steep embankment so that we can access the river directly from our property rather than relying on the use of our gracious neighbors’ launching area. I have an idea in mind. Stay tuned for updates.

With this being the last weekend before Jeanine heads off to vacation in Greece, we drove into Boston to spend the afternoon on the Common and at the Downtown Crossing. At the former, the Marine Corps had several aircraft on display as part of their 250th anniversary celebration. Photos do not convey the scale of these machines. They are enormous and insanely impressive, especially the tilt-rotor vertical take-off Osprey.

Although it was installed almost three years ago, this was my first opportunity to see The Embrace, a bronze sculpture by Hank Willis Thomas, commemorating Martin Luther King Jr. and Coretta Scott King. It depicts four intertwined arms, representing the hug they shared after he was awarded the Nobel Peace Prize in 1964. The work was created by welding together about 609 smaller pieces.

Later, we walked over to Downtown Crossing, where we attended two musical performances as part of the We Make Noise Festival, which showcases women and gender-expansive artists.

We enjoyed more music when we returned to Concord and a truly unique outdoor venue called the Back Forty. All in all, a very fun day.

Among photography professionals and enthusiasts, the “Holy Trinity” refers to a set of three professional zoom lenses designed to cover a vast range of focal lengths with constant wide apertures. These are:

• 16-35 mm f/2.8
• 24-70 mm f/2.8
• 70-200 mm f/2.8

For the last 8 years, my lens kit has included the following zooms:

• 16-35 mm f/4
• 24-105 mm f/4
• 100-400 mm f/4.5-5.6

I chose f/4 lenses because they are lighter than their equivalent f/2.8 counterparts, and I already have a set of primes for low-light situations. Even though it is quite heavy, I chose the 100-400 mm for shooting birds and soccer.

Today, I began the transition to what I am calling the “Dynamic Duo,” a pair of zoom lenses to replace the trinity.

• 20-70 mm f/4
• 70-200 mm f/4 + 1.4x teleconverter

I started with the purchase of a new 20-70 mm f/4 lens (pictured above) to replace my 16-35 mm and 24-105 mm lenses (pictured below), which are now up for sale on Craigslist and Facebook Marketplace. My new kit will weigh 3.2 pounds, down from 5.7 pounds. I will lose 4 mm on the wide end and 120 mm on the long end. It remains to be seen if the reduced range will be worth the lighter load. I would not have gone down this path if I were not already fairly certain about the answer. I used Lightroom to create a histogram for the 115,000 photos I have taken to determine my most frequently used focal lengths. The answer: roughly 6,000 taken at each of 24 mm, 50 mm, 70 mm, 85 mm, 100 mm, and 135 mm.

Every so often, my preferred online photo printer runs a 50% off sale. I take advantage of these occasions to print photos that I would like to display or share. Most recently, I had them print my all-time favorite aerial photo, which I hung in my office today. The photograph is a wide-angle panorama composed of 21 images and stitched together with software. The 3-foot-wide by 1-foot-tall picture is of Mount Fitz Roy, located in Patagonia straddling the border between Argentina and Chile. I took this photograph with my drone during my trip there with Nico in 2019. Rising to 11,170 feet, Fitz Roy dominates this section of the Andes located within Los Glaciares National Park near the village of El Chaltén. On this early morning, Nico hiked to Laguna de Los Tres (pictured below, a small slice of the larger panorama), a climb I had done 7 years earlier with Kyle. I opted instead to hike to a different area where I could launch my drone safely and away from other climbers. The further I flew away from the mountain the more spectacular the panorama became. I was positioned perfectly when the sun lit up the peaks and against all odds, there was not a cloud in the sky.

Yesterday, I started testing my newly constructed deionized water window washing system. A feature that distinguishes it from every other system I have seen on the market is the ability to switch between regular water for washing and (expensive) pure water for rinsing using electric solenoid valves rather than a mechanical bypass valve. This allows me to switch from the window washing pole location rather than having to go back to the deionizer tanks. What I realized after washing a few windows is that a wireless remote control switch would be a far superior alternative to the wired version I initially built. Managing an electrical cable in addition to the water feed tube proved to be something of a hassle. For the whopping sum of $12, I purchased a wireless transmitter, receiver, and case to upgrade my system. I initially considered this approach but was concerned that a transmission might get dropped and leave the system in the deionized delivery mode wasting the expensive pure water. For an additional $6, I will be adding the beeper/flasher pictured below which will provide a visual and audible alert anytime deionized water is being used.

Against all odds, several of the coneflowers that Jeanine planted last year are blooming. Most succumbed to the voracious appetite of our resident groundhogs, who have a particular fancy for the young sprouts.

Recently, the water level in the Sudbury River has dropped significantly, exposing wide enough banks to create a nice area for walking along the river edge. I took advantage of this to explore and was rewarded with sightings of a Great Egret and what I believe is a juvenile Sharp-Shinned Hawk.

Back in early June, we were visited by a large snapping turtle, which deposited a clutch of eggs in the compost pile at the end of our driveway turnaround. We left the pile undisturbed in the hope that those eggs would hatch. Today, while working in the yard, I spotted a baby turtle making its way across our driveway and into the river rocks that line it. When I investigated the compost pile for signs of further hatchlings, I discovered the poor little fellow pictured above, who was not strong enough to break free from his shell.