Read about my photographic journeys

Mark Chen 8/24/24 Mark Chen 8/24/24

On The Edge of The Event Horizon

When J. Robert Oppenheimer and his student proposed their model for black holes, the ingenious physicist, father of atomic bomb, thought we would never see them, because light can’t escape from them. It turns out that he was wrong: before matters fall through the event horizon, the boundary beyond which nothing indeed can come back out, there’s a violent struggle that emits ultra high energy radiation: black holes radiate, therefore are visible. This is not just a theory; we now have photos of them. At this time, EHT, or Event Horizon Telescope, has captured images of two black holes. It’s certain that we will see more of them.

Just over a year ago, during my residency with Grand Canyon Conservancy, the images of black holes were still imaginary: they were never observed. The “rule” I made for Pilgrimage of Light, is that I only project celestial photographs, not illustrations. This makes sense, because my concept conveys the time it takes for the light to travel to us. A photograph from the galactic light that actually makes the journey to reach the sensors of the cameras behind the telescope, is required; drawings of galaxies, no matter how cool they look, are conceptually inappropriate.

This is why when I excitedly accepted the invitation from Clover Morell, GCC’s artist in residence manager, to return to Grand Canyon as their AiR alumnus, one of the first images came to my mind was an EHT’s black hole photo. I had no idea whether this would work, because the images of a black hole have much less features than a galaxy’s.

I also had no idea that during this trip, I would flirt with my own event horizon, a personal, point-of-no-return, before I escaped it to come back to tell the story.

What’s Changed and What’s Not

Much has changed since the winter of 2023 in addition to the existence of black hole photos. When I was at GC last time, the brutal winter raged, which expedited my aging process in that month, notably, getting my first arthritis in the thumb, probably by operating heavy equipment in bitter cold. I expected summer heat this time. With so many recent deaths at GC, some caused by heatstrokes, I planned and prepared my hikes carefully.

Plateau Point was my favorite vantage point. It overlooked Colorado River and Vishnu base rock from right above The Great Unconformity. I did, however, longingly looked at Phantom Ranch from afar, wishing I could get further down there. Stormy weather scratched the plan. This time, I will hike all the way to the bottom to Phantom Ranch.

What remains the same is Grand Canyon itself, the grandeur that witnesses the thousands of millions of years, on which the duration of our life time can make little changes. Every one needs to rush to Grand Canyon to see it, not because it will go away, but because we will go away. To fully experience GC, though, is not for the faint hearted or ill-prepared. Youth is not required, but stamina helps. I don’t have the former, but I do maintain the latter.

The First Shot

I always rush to produce at least one image on my first night; this makes me feel good, seeing my scoreboard counting away from 0. While scouting the site of the night, a soprano shared the trail with me at a distance. She sampled a few operatic arias, singing her heart out while the echos of her vibratos bounced between the walls of the canyon. After the final note of Musetta’s Waltz from the opera La Boheme, I gave her a standing ovation(well, my admission was for standing only anyway) and yelled bravo! She yelled her thankfulness to her only audience member.

I couldn’t stop myself from looking up to the tiny platform of Trail View Overlook, visible to me on the edge of the rim. This is where I took my favorite images during my 2023 winter residency. This image that features two giant planets and my beloved trail, was photographed exactly in the same line of sight in the opposite direction. Where I stood now, was on the left side of the Saturn Ring. Having observed this part of Grand Canyon thoroughly from various points, I started to feel like walking my backyard!

I was at the cluster of switchbacks when I noticed the awe inspiring Coconino Sandstones to my left. The intricate geologic details on a sheer cliff that thrust upward vertically looked perfect to receive the projection of a galaxy. I would place the camera at the turn of that switchback where the sandstone wall was at the closest. The projector would be set behind me, on a higher ground on the trail. With this setup, I produced this image:

Arp 237 on 280 million-year-old Coconino Sandstone.

The compositional strategy is to view the projection from a near, angled perspective, while the projector is further and projection plane is aligned with the surface of projection, Mother Nature’s projection screen, the 280 million years old Coconino Sandstone.

Here is a diagram to illustrate where this took place.

Where *Arp 237 on 280 million-year-old Coconino Sandstone* was photographed.

The weather was incredibly comfortable, with cool breeze. I was so spoiled by the natural air condition, I didn’t want to stop.

Amongst People

The next day, the day before the big hike into the Canyon, I took the day easy. Other than delivering the 30-pound duffel bag to the mule barn which contains the two tripods, the laptop and this and that, which were all required for the life and work at Phantom Ranch, I did go for a shoot. This time though, I was at perhaps the most popular tourist spot at Grand Canyon, Mather Point. I produced images like these:

…which are more aligned to street photography than nature photography. What was I up to? Let me just say that these shots were not just part of a new series, they were also rushed to Slides from Digital, the lab that produced all my slides for projection. I will resume the task when I get the slides back, after 4 days’ hike in the Canyon.

The Descent

10 miles, 5000 feet elevation change and scorching sun are no joking matter. The news of recent deaths at Grand Canyon, some due to heatstroke, are also alarming. I planned for the hike carefully. Other than reducing loads, having enough water and a new pair of hiking boots, I also planned to hike mostly in the dark.

The entire route. The round trip I made to and from Phantom Ranch.

The hike would be broken into two segments. The green segment would bring me to Havasupai Garden, where I would spend a night. The next morning I would start early to complete the descent on the blue segment. An 8-hours walking downward would set me 1.3 billion years back in time to the Vishnu Schist, the oldest rock at GC.

The initial descent on Bright Angel Trail; the entrance to my office for the next 4 days.

Going downward is easy on the heart and the lung but hard on the knees. Every step is to brake the sliding downward. It didn’t help that two weeks ago on the tennis court I emulated Carlos Alcaraz’s charge to the net and won the point with a half volley, but I also felt a sharp pain in my left knee. I was reminded of that glorious moment, every step of the way. I had to give my right leg more work, making it do more the bending. Trek poles are the best, they reduce the load on the legs, keep me balanced and make otherwise idling arms useful. They also prevent the hands from swinging like pendulums and swell up in a long hike.

Shortly after I passed the spot where I project Arp 237 on Coconino Sandstone a couple days ago, I reached 1.5 mile rest house. 33 years ago, Olive and I, the newly wed, hiked down to here with our best friend Calvin on a slippery, wintry trail, after many hard landings on the bums, and were ready to enjoy a box of raisins, a chipmunk rushed out of nowhere, grabbed the whole box and ran. It happened on this edge, illuminated in green by my headlight in the above photo. The critter went home a hero, and we hiked back up empty bellied.

I reached the bunkhouse at Havasupai garden at 10pm. Opening the door, I immediately saw a pair of hiking boots. The boots are the most effective and unofficial way to identify the roommates at this facility for the employees of Grand Canyon. This particular pair of boots were tiny, almost in kids’ size. I’ve “met” them a few times in my previous visit, but I’ve never met their owner.

Just when I was thinking which of the two rooms I should enter, the closed door opened and out came a petite lady. She looked sleepy and alarmed.

“Who are you?” The owner of tiny boots said abruptly.

“Uh, sorry, I hope I didn’t startle you! I’m Mark Chen with the Conservancy.”

“Oh, OK.” Without saying another word, she retreated into her side of the bunkhouse. My choice was clear then: the door led to the other room.

The next morning, we properly introduced ourselves to each other. Kelly was with the compost team. I knew her teammate Matt from the previous residency. These people maintains the restrooms in the park. They do a difficult and important job. They have my ultimate respect.

I said bye to my new friend and off I went to continue the hike. Havasupai Garden is on the gentle slope of Bright Angel Shale. The trail was easy with slow descent, but excitement awaited: I was approaching the Great Uncomformity. When the soil under my feet started to turn reddish, I looked around and I knew I was about to leap 1,100 million years back in geologic time.

In the photo above, the rock at the top is Tapeats Sandstone at the bottom of Bright Angel Shale, aged over 500 million years. Its horizontal layer, typical to sedimentary rocks, sits on top of the completely different rock, Vishnu Schist, which is metamorphic, and 1.6 billion years old! Where did the missing 1.1 billion years’ worth of strata go? The theory is that they were eroded away in an ice age, before the deposit of much younger rocks resumed.

Having a place on my bucket list checked off, I pressed forward and soon reached Devil’s Corkscrew. According to the ranger, the switchbacks’ steepness and distance are no biggies compared to those of Bright Angel Trail near South Rim. But the north facing direction of this slope happens to expose the trail to the sun all day long. I was there early to avoid this, but I could see the sun creeping up on the east, ready to roast whoever stepped on Devil’s Corkscrew. Not me! Not today! But, I would feel its indirect impact in the days to come.

After the quick descent on Devil’s Corkscrew and some hikes on rugged trails, the roar of Colorado became audible in a slow crescendo. Soon, I was near the end Bright Angel Trail. Forgoing the last tiny section of it to reach the beach, I turned onto River Trail to go for Phantom Ranch. Bright Angel Bridge was in sight, beaconing the end of my hike. The mid morning sun was getting intense as I walked in a out of shades. This where I ran into Katarina.

The young lady told me she was just going to see the bridge and she will turn around to return to the rim, when I noticed that she had just 1/4 of a bottle of water.

“That’s not enough water for making the trip back.” I said.

“Oh that’s ok, I will fill them at the water stations.”

The water stations are miles away from each other. I looked at her young face and red cheeks. “Are you sure?” I said.

“Yeah, I’ll be fine.” Said Katarina in a Russian accent.

We crossed the bridge together.

Then she turned around and started her return trip. The day has just started to heat up and she had 10 hours of ascent ahead. What drove her? Youthful confidence or ignorance? Or both? I wished her luck and told myself that I didn’t wish to read about her in future GC news.

Phantom Ranch

Bunkhouse settled in. Duffel bag picked up and the famed lemonade gulped down, I was ready to scout the site for the night’s shoot. Walking just nearby the bunkhouse, I saw plenty of impressive rocky walls. This is my pick of the Vishnu Schist:

Returning to the spot as planned and shutting my mouth tight to avoid ingesting dozens of moths, I projected James Webb’s image of galaxy cluster, MACS 0416 at 4.3 billion light years away. Its light took 1/3 of the universe’ age to reach us.

MACS 0416
Image credits: NASA, ESA, CSA, STScI, Jose M. Diego (IFCA), Jordan C. J. D'Silva (UWA), Anton M. Koekemoer (STScI), Jake Summers (ASU), Rogier Windhorst (ASU), Haojing Yan (University of Missouri)

I littered these thousands of galaxies, each one as grand as our own Milky Way, on the 1.6 billion years old rock, as old as 1/3 of Earth’s age.

I slept like a baby after the long day.

The Storm at The Event Horizon

The weather continued to please. Even at the bottom, which is often 20 degrees F hotter than the rims, the nights are in a comfortable 70. For a Houstonian who recently survived power outage for 5 days after hurricane Beryl wreak havoc, these conditions were more than acceptable. The monsoon rains were to be thanked, until tonight.

As I set up at the planned site at Bright Angel Bridge, the cloud thickened. There would be no star in the shots tonight, I thought. But hey, the compositional plan wasn’t to include the sky, anyway. If Mother Nature doesn’t offer, I won’t fret; I will work around it. I set up the projector and cameras, pre-focused and pre-visualized for a Pilgrimage of Light image as well as a Phantom of The Great Dying image, and I waited for darkness.

Tonight, the darkness seemed to arrive in proportion to the density of rain drops and frequency of lightening.

When it was dark enough for me to test projection, and a successful test it was, the rain also successfully thwarted my task. I packed everything except the tripods, knowing water wouldn’t damage the latter.

I took shelter in a nearby mule barn. Somehow, there’s a recurring theme of being helped by these hoofed beasts on this trip. I took care not to step on their grassy poops. The rain eased up and I re-deployed. The lightening persisted; that means in the 2-minute plus exposures, they provide some of the accumulated light. Would that work?

The pre-focused Hasselblad lens has been reset, thanks to its design of focusing ring. I used the help of laser pointer to focus in the dark. This method works, but it is half-measuring and half-guessing. Trial and error is a must in the process. I wouldn’t go home with a technically flawed shot for the one and only black hole projection. I’d rather spend 30 extra minutes to make sure all details were taken care of.

My stubbornness prevailed.

Sagittarius A*, Vishnu Schist and Bright Angel Bridge

The projection was aimed so the bridge extends from the very center of the black hole, the event horizon, as if it’s the jet stream shooting off from its accretion disk.

I swapped the slide with Colleen’s drawing of diplocaulus and made a projection for the Phantoms.

Bright Angel Bridge Haunted by The Ghost of Diplocaulus

Working Around at Its Best

If I was persistent to catch the curve balls Mother Nature threw at me, I must have been inspired by the people I met earlier that night. At the canteen’s dinner table, I met Michael, Eve and Charlotte, who were in the midst of a rim-to-rim hike. Michael is blind, He was experiencing Grand Canyon in a way most of us can’t fathom: through sound and tactility. Eve and Charlotte were his guides. Their extraordinary endeavor intrigued me. Eve mistook me as Mel Chin, another MC who happens to be my artistic hero, a mistake I gladly accepted and clarified. Our affinity went even further as we identified each other as Houstonians. By the end of the dinner, Eve and I would call each other a lost sibling, having been born only days apart. They introduced me to Andrew, a film maker who’s producing a documentary of their amazing adventure. They would hike out southward at 3am the next morning, an hour earlier than my plan.

I started my ascent at 4am as planned. Starting with crossing of Bright Angel Bridge.

During this hike, I notice foot prints that were fresh, the only ones after the storm reset the ground. I’ve also notice trek pole marks that resembled mine, which could be from Michael’s trek pole, which I identified earlier as the same type by Leki. I would catch them for sure, I thought. True enough, I started hearing their conversation from afar as I approached Davil’s Corkscrew. 1.5 hours later, I reunited with them. Together, we hiked the rest of the way to Havasupai Garden.

Left to right: Andrew, Eve, me and Michael

We said good bye and promised each other a reunion back home in Houston. Then I checked into the bunkhouse for a big nap before the planned hike to the rim.

I was lucky to have had a brief encounter with ranger Debbie, who advised me against the dusk-evening hike. The storm normally strikes in late afternoon into the evening; they might be hazardous. Getting soaked with all the cameras in the backpack was deal breaker. I decided to stay overnight and go for an early morning hike. There was no additional boots at the bunkhouse, I would have a quiet and restful night.

The solitude was suddenly shattered by urgent knocks on the door. Rushing to the door, I saw ranger Debbie again, but this time she was followed by a family of four, among whom the young daughter looked exhausted. The family was on the way from Havasupai to Phantom, when she started to show signs of heat exhaustion under the sun at Devil’s Corkscrew. They turned back, asked for help from Debbie, who brought them to the bunkhouse to cool down in the A/C.

I helped them to settle in, starting with collecting linens for the bunkbeds. Then, an evening alone became a cozy, chatty night with thunders and lightning.

The hike back to the rim was not eventful, though full of fresh obstacles from the runoffs. There were plenty of large pieces of rocks on the trail. If I hiked the night before, they would have fallen on me.

Michael and his gang designed their hike to accommodate his limitation. The family in distress admitted flaws in their plan and changed it. I delayed my hike was to avoid the storm. We all prevailed at the end, not by overcoming the unsurmountable. we worked around it.

Scenes from Sims

The slides awaited me at Grand Canyon Conservancy’s office. With them, I was ready to create images for my new series: Scenes of Sims.

For this series, I ask the question of what if the world is a simulation with glitches. I create a confusion of time and space, through my established technique. This time at Mather Point, I created these images.

Thanks to Clover, David and Jeane’s cameo appearances in the simulations.

To The Edge of The Event Horizon

Grand Canyon is a dangerous place. Many of the tourists put themselves in danger and survived, not because they did the right thing, but because they were lucky. I came as fully prepared as I could. But accident doesn’t happen where you expect it to happen. On this journey, I had a near death experience, and it didn’t happen at Grand Canyon. It happened before I arrived.

At the Car Rental Center at Phoenix Airport, I finished the paperwork and was ready to pick up the car, carrying 3 pieces of luggage. The moment I stepped on the 3 stories high, downward escalator, my heavy luggage in front of me, with two tripods and many other things, tilted forward. My attempt to grab it caused myself to lose balance, exacerbated by the 30 pounds camera backpack. I rolled over the luggage and started tumbling down the escalator. After a split second of memory gap, I regained awareness. My only thought was that if I couldn’t stop rolling, I would die.

I grunted in a struggle and used all my might and all 4 limbs to brake the downward thrust. I managed it. I stood up on the steps and saw my two hand luggages behind me, both lying flat on the metal steps. I held them up and started to feel the pain. All from the limbs and nothing from the head.

Not a single person saw this. A rental car attendant at the “friendliest airport” came to greet me at the landing.

“How are you doing sir?” He asked.

“All fine,” I said, my voice was low and shaky, “except that I just fell down on this escalator.”

“Great! Let me have your contract so I can take you to your car.”

He was busy being friendly and didn’t take in what I said.

In the car, I took out the first aid kit and patched myself.

I thought I had a complete inventory on the damages. Nothing broken. I thought, until I took out the laptop.

In the backpack, the laptop took the brunt of the impact. It might have cause my imbalance, but it also saved my spine.

Like matters falling towards a black hole, I was near the point of no return, only to orbit out of it. I’m telling you the story, having come back from the edge of the event horizon.

Mark Chen 6/29/24 Mark Chen 6/29/24

Enlightened by Darkness

Pilgrimage of Light and I have a very unique relationship. My life long passion for science, especially astronomy, is at the core of it. My crafts in photography, even my proficiency in Photoshop, have been honed for an entire career to sustain this extremely difficult project. The puzzle piece of large scale projection was solved because of my knowledge in optics and my hobby in taking things apart and putting them back. Even my failed attempt to become a novelist helped, by enabling me to put its intricate concept in words.

What I didn’t prepare myself for, and to which now I feel very deeply hooked, is hiking. And not just hiking, but hiking in total darkness.

The Initial Shock

One of my very first Pilgrimages of Light was to Big Bend National Park, where I seek sites with K-pg boundary, the geologic layer that marks the meteor strike that killed most of the dinosaurs. Here’s where I hiked as seen on Google Map.

From this view, you would, and I certainly did, assume the hike would not be too hard. I estimated a 15 minute hike without much altitude change. I was cautious, so when I happily arrived at the real world version of this Google view, I parked the car and conducted practice hike to it. To find my target wasn’t too hard.

A formation with K-Pg boundary at Big Bend. My little shadow can be seen on the left.

What excitement! I’ve wanted to see a K-Pg all of life, knowing this is a cool geologic feature that confirmed the great extinction of dinosaurs.

On the way back to the car though. I realized that what looked like a flat land on Google Earth wasn’t so flat. My stature at nearly 6 feet can be easily obscured by the ups and downs of this ancient riverbed. 80% of the time, the car would be out of my line of sight. The little humps around me, which I nickname baozis, formed a maze by Mother Nature. In case you don’t know what baozis are, here’s a steamer of yummy baozis.

They do resemble geologic formations don’t they? The Chinese in me says yes.

After a few U turns, I did find my car, just in time to sit out a brief storm brought by this fluff.

Cute fluffy clouds at the horizon now is a storm overhead an hour later

Head light ready and gears on the back, I headed back out in the end of dusk when stars were emerging. I would be right on the spot when the light was gone, ready to set up.

Or so I thought. As I tried and failed to retrace my practice hike, I became disoriented among the many baozis around me. All these baozis looked the same, even more the same in the dark. I backtracked and retried, and I simply couldn’t find the spot where I found earlier. I got on a baozi and looked around and realize the baozi I wanted to project on was right there, at a distance. And I simply couldn’t get to it. Not wanting to come for nothing, I settle my shot from the top of an inferior baozi, while I remembered 桃花源記, or An Account of Peach Blossom Tributary by Tao Yuanming, 422 CE.

晉太元中，武陵人，捕魚為業，緣溪行，忘路之遠近。忽逢桃花林，夾岸數百步，中無雜樹，芳草鮮美，落英繽紛，漁人甚異之；復前行，欲窮其林。林盡水源，便得一山，彷彿若有光，便舍船，從口入。
初極狹，纔通人；復行數十步，豁然開朗。土地平曠，屋舍儼然。有良田，美池，桑，竹之屬。阡陌交通，雞犬相聞。其中往來種作，男女衣著，悉如外人；黃發垂髫，並怡然自樂。
During the Jin Dynasty, in the Tai Yuan cycle (376-397), there was a man of the Hunan province who was a fisherman by trade. He was traveling along a stream when he began to lose his way. Suddenly, he came upon a forest of peach blossoms on both sides of the river, several hundred paces away. There were no other trees among them. The fragrant grass was fresh and beautiful, the fallen blossoms scattered about in their myriad ways. The fisherman thought that it was all very strange. But still, he travelled further, hoping to exhaust these woods. Where they ended, he found the spring from which sprang the tributary. Here he came upon a mountain through which a light seemed to shine. He abandoned his boat and walked into the mouth of the mountain.
At first it was extremely narrow, just wide enough for a person to slip through. Then he walked a short distance when, all of a sudden, it opened up to a vast expanse. The land was flat and vast with houses and buildings neatly arranged. One could see things like fertile fields, beautiful ponds, trees of mulberry and bamboo. The footpaths between the fields met at intersections. One could hear the cries of the dogs and the chicken. As for the men and women who went by and those who were at work in the fields, their clothing was very foreign. There were both elders and children who were all content.
見漁人，乃大驚，問所從來，具答之。便要還家，設酒，殺雞，作食。
村中聞有此人，咸來問訊。自云：「先世避秦時亂，率妻子邑人，來此絕境，不復出焉；遂與外人間隔。」問：「今是何世？」乃不知有漢，無論魏、晉。此人一一為具言所聞，皆嘆惋。
餘人各復延至其家，皆出酒食。停數日辭去。此中人語云：「不足為外人道也！」
Upon seeing the fisherman, one of the villagers was greatly surprised and he asked him from where he had come. The fisherman in turn completely answered his questions. Then, he invited him to return to their home to arrange for wine, kill the chicken, and cook food.
In the village, they had heard that there was this person who had come from the outside and they all came to inquire. They said of themselves, “Our ancestors, to avoid the chaos of the Qin period, led their wives, children and fellow villagers and came to this isolated place never to leave again; before long they were separated from the people outside.” They asked, “What age are we currently in?” At that moment it became clear that they did not know that there had been a Han dynasty, let alone a Wei or a Jin. The fisherman considered each of the words he heard and let out a sad sigh.
Those who remained at this time again invited him to their home and they all brought out wine and food. He stayed several days before he decided to go. Among themselves, the villagers said, “It cannot be as the foreigner says!”
既出，得其船，便扶向路，處處志之。及郡下，詣太守，說如此。太守即遣人隨其往，尋向所誌，遂迷不復得路。
After leaving, he found his boat and followed the stream back the way he had come, marking various locations. Upon reaching the provincial capital, he went to see the senior official and told him all he had seen. The official promptly dispatched people to follow the fisherman’s path and seek what he had previously marked. However bewilderingly, they did not again find that way.
南陽劉子驥，高尚士也，聞之，欣然規往，未果，尋病終。後遂無問津者。
Liu Ziji of Nanyang was a distinguished scholar and he heard of this. Joyfully, he planned to go. His plans, however, did not materialize as he soon died of a sickness. After that, there was no one who inquired about the way to the village.

There were no peach blossom in Big Bend, but the notion of a paradise found, then lost, haunted me at this moment. My ordeal wasn’t over though. As I finished the less than satisfactory shoot, I packed and started to find my way back. Only to realize that I didn’t know which way to go.

Actually, writing this 2 years later, I can’t quite recall how I found my way. I do remember I broke a sweat in the cool breeze and I made dozens of U turns. Finally, the high beam of my headlight hit the reflectors on my Prius and the standing hairs on my spine finally laid down. Well, I’m not hairy, but that’s how I felt.

Waking up the next morning at AirBnb. I decided to go and try again tonight, I didn’t want my site remain an illusion like the village in Peach Blossom Tributary. I would go back and find the site, make the shot happen. I would be better prepared. Nothing’s going to stop me.

Under the hot afternoon sun, I practiced the hike again. Not just one more time, but twice. I remembered the shapes of baozis at important turns, and I gave them nicknames which I can’t recall now. I reached the site in broad daylight, then I found my way out to the car. I hike to the site again, and I found my car again.

I wouldn’t hike in when it turned dark. I would be there by dusk, set up in the day light and get ready to shoot when it turned dark.

Good enough? I wasn’t sure. Maybe I can make it more secure though marking. Hey! How about keeping my gold Prius’ blinker on? That would make C3pO visible in the dark. Would that drain the battery? No, according to Google: a hybrid car’s starter runs on the big hybrid battery while the blinker runs on the 12V.

The plan worked and I got my shots.

NGC 4038, 65 million light years away, on K-Pg boundary, 65 million years old. Big Bend National Park.

Perhaps it worked too well. In the middle of the shoot, I turned around and noticed a car parked next to mine. Yes, the car was in my line of sight from the baozi I stood on. The driver pressed the horn. I gathered that he or she was concerned about this driver, not in the car and leaving the blinker on. I pointed my headlight towards the cars, and I signaled, no, I didn’t know how to signal! I just turned the light on and off, in some gibberish. The driver honked again and left. Whew, was I glad that no search and rescue team came in a helicopter!

The solution I came up at Big Bend became a routine I stick to at every shoot. I survey and scout during the day, then I hike in before dusk, do the shoot, then I hike out in the dark. The last bit started as a necessary evil, as I did not wish to get lost or meet a large wild life in the dark. Then, something changed in me.

Darkness Revisited

We as a species are obsessed with light. Photographers love light. We conquered night through innovations: fire, electricity, LED. But have we really conquered nights? What we’ve done is not conquering, but attempting to transform nights to days. We can never achieve that. Or maybe we can when fusion energy is fully harnessed. But boy, I hope we are not so stupid that we would turn nights to days. Our meager lighting power is enough to pollute the night sky that 90% of the world population are deprived of the sight of the Milky Way.

Humans mustn’t be nocturnal by nature. We feel at home in light. We even become biased. Photographers pay more attention to the right side of the histogram. Star Wars put evil Sith Lords in the dark. And I was afraid of dark.

When I was 7, I lost my Grandma. I was traumatized by the Taiwanese funeral procedure which, to put it mildly, was not child friendly. I was so scared I became nyctophobic. I kept the light on while I slept, well into my college days. My worst nightmare was when those fluorescent tubes turned old and wouldn’t turn on for seconds, or minutes, after I flipped the switch. This caused sleep disorder and depression, or so I diagnosed myself in hind sight; my problem was never acknowledged as if it was a taboo.

But don’t worry about me. I outgrew my nyctophobia. I didn’t know how, but I was not afraid of dark anymore in my 20s.

Decades later, I faced the fear once again. I didn’t feel so vulnerable because this time I have had a lot rational thoughts in mind: the navigation, the transportation, the art. I had to brave the dark, or I wouldn’t get the shots.

As the count of my pilgrimages grew, my experience to work and hike in the dark grew. I learned that there were different kind of darkness. A moon overhead virtually turns nights into mini days. Cameras agree on this: when photographing under full moon, it’s hard to tell if the scenery is under broad daylight or a gentle clare de lune. Moon light is not so gentle for my project, though, as it can easily overwhelm my projecting power. Starry nights were the most pleasant when Mother Nature kept my mind at ease through a light show which also oriented my directions. Overcast nights remained the most disconcerting when the whole sky glow in an eerie glow, lack of any feature, and turned all terrain flat—not in the sense of topography, but in the sense of photography as lack of contrast reduces sense of depth. I hiked in Death Valley under such condition and got lost briefly. Luckily, I was very cautious and purposely looked around as I hiked, so I could backtrack easily. At one point, I turned off the headlight and let my pupils expand. In a few seconds, the shape of terrain emerged, and I recognized features that guided me back on track. To see far, one needs to give up the near.

I wouldn’t say as much as that I’ve conquered the fear. Perhaps I was just taking care of business and ignored it. I did, in a few occasions, stop working and just let it sink in. Often times, this is when I became aware of my full bladder and carried out some minor irrigational duties. Other than that, I felt calm and sensed no anxiety. Last winter in Bisti Badland, I experienced the most difficult terrain to navigate. Thanks to AllTrail and I wish I had a third arm to carry the cellphone, I literally made every step of the way under the GPS navigation. It was months after Elliot Erwitt’s death and I prepared special slides in my archive. After a night’s work, I decide to pay my tribute to him by projecting his most iconic images.

Tribute to Elliott Erwitt at Bisti Badlands

When I saw the chihuahua projected on the exotic formations, I laughed out loud. Then I realized that was the first time I made a loud noise when working alone in the dark. I felt(not heard, it was clearly all in my head) the echo of my laughter, announcing my overcoming of my life time’s fear for darkness.

Mark Chen 6/11/24 Mark Chen 6/11/24

Pilgrimage to the Anthropocene

Two years, a residency at Grand Canyon and 20 geologic sites later, the portfolio of Pilgrimage of Light is three dozen images strong. So far, the pairings of the celestial’s light years and the terrestrial’s age are in the range of a few thousands to a few billions.

Olive’s plan for a pleasure trip to Europe for the first time post-COVID struck me as an excellent opportunity to expand that timeline. With Europe’s rich preservation of classic architectures as old as 2,600 years, a much closer neighborhood, right in the Milky Way Galaxy, can be visited.

How far is 2000 light years? Here are illustrations for it.

The red circle has a radius of 2,000 light years. It is still well within our own Milky Way Galaxy. This image is, of course, not a real photo. No camera has ever been far enough to take a selfie for the Milky Way.

A much further view of our neighborhood. Now the Milky Way is a speck in the middle. Within this “subdivision” we call Local Group, two “monster houses” stand: Milky Way and Andromeda. The latter has been my favorite galaxy to project. (Wiki Common)

What do we have along our European tour? There are quite a few interesting sites, Bastei Bridge near Dresden, on the border between Germany and Czech is one of them.

That’s quite a stunning view, isn’t it? For POL, this would be the first manmade structure to feature, a return to the era of human, Anthropocene. How would this work out? I shall be prepared, with the 60 pounds of equipment and the whole archive of NASA image slides. Little did I know that these burdens have very different implications in Europe

Bastei Bridge

A hike on a moderate difficulty level trail is to be expected near the bridge, so I transferred all the gears into my backpack and tied one tripod to it. Another one with the shoulder strap was passed on to Olive—that’s as much as I would asked my dear wife to carry. The two segment bus ride to be followed by a ferry ride was off to a bad start, with me getting confused with the directions. It turned out to be a blessing in disguise. With the delay, Google map sent us to a different route, without the ferry ride and making up all the time lost! This puzzled me until I realized what changed.

Now that the 300 feet climb is dashed, not only I sighed a big relief (mostly for my companion), the “hike” to the bridge has turned into literally a walk in the garden. The granola bar supper while sitting on rocks was upgraded to fine dining in the local best.

Steak Tartare and Schwartenmagen(pork jelly) were much welcome replacements for the granola bars and a cure for my guilt for dragging Olive to a shoot.

Pilgrimage of Light Goes Anthropocene

The term Anthropocene is not clearly defined scientifically, so I will take the liberty to use it poetically as the description of the epoch of human activities. I found Bastei Bridge symbolically and substantially prefect for such activities: a bridge made two centuries ago, with readily available materials onsite, built into nature’s geologic formations and in perfect harmony with it. It is simply breathtaking.

Bastei Bridge is 200 years old. Not that we don’t have any celestial neighbor that’s 200 light years away, but they are all “just stars’. Stars are not that photogenic as seen from a distance, as just a dot can be resolved by our best telescopes. The nearest photogenic object, a nebula, is 700 light years away, well within Anthropocene as defined by me, but not for Bastei Bridge. The formation of Elbe Limestone was shaped in Cretaceous time, 200 to 65 million years ago, which, converted to light years, falls into a rich period for the current archive: plenty of galaxies that are not too far for our technology to handle have been documented.

But, that’s not all. POL is science based, but it’s art by nature. I will still need to project the candidates and see if they look good. Bastei Bridge and its surrounding is a scene with lots of details and textures. Contextually, it’s a rarity, an eye opening sight. This scene, with a strong personality, needs a galactic pairing that has a strong personality too. After some attempts, I found no match from my Cretaceous archive.

Here’s when geology, my new love thanks to POL, comes to the rescue. The rocks at Bastei might be formed over 60 million years ago, but they were shaped, or eroded, in the past few million years. That means I can pull out my big gun: Andromada Galaxy at 2.5 million light years away.

This stunning image by Hubble, with extremely high definition of the stars, the spiral bands and high contrast, never fail to compete in the composition. This is the result of a night’s hard work, after another few hours of post production:

Late at night, there was no escape from hiking out and down 300 feet to the ferry for the train. We didn’t think about the issue of the last train for the night, but we were lucky to be able to catch it! Or we had to experience a night of homelessness. At the deserted platform, we got playful and did a few video selfies with Hover.

I liked this! So I did more, until the platform wasn’t so deserted anymore…

At the end of this one, you can see me talking to an invisible person. “Not a good idea!” In perfect English, this dutiful citizen reprimanded me for flying a drone at the train station. Oops.

A flash back of my childhood memory went over my head. A story told by my friend Deyu Kao, that “in Germany, every adult can educate every child. If little kids were caught misbehaving in the public, everyone can give them a spank.”

I guess there’s a truth in this legend! Luckily I wasn’t spanked.

Vienna, Spaceship

Our next leg of journey brought us to Vienna, Austria. Having great museum to see and exquisite concerts to listen to, I didn’t find a destination for POL here. Instead, I made an image for the series Spaceship in our Airbnb.

Earth is a spaceship; you and I are astronauts riding on it.

When in Rome, Project on The Roman

Fast forward, passing through Prague where we enjoyed the performance of Macbeth at Prague State Opera and visited burial sites of Dvorak and Smetana, two of my most admired composers, we arrived at Ljubljana, the capital of Slovenia and where the convenient European train travel’s power fades. From there we drove and arrived at the first roadtrip stop: Pula.

We liked Prague but we found the city infested with people like us: tourists. Pula offered a wild departure. With a Roman arena at it’s center, it’s a bonafide attraction, yet, it’s not Coliseum, therefore a much smaller magnet for the tourists. The arena was no less impressive than Coliseum, though.

Touring the Pula arena without the being shepherded around by tour guides

I surveyed the ruin inside and out, paying attention to the locations of spot light, where they point to will probably ruin photo opportunities if they were too strong for my projector to compete against. I found a few ideal spots. Off we went on to more sightseeings.

After dinner, we hauled the equipment to the predetermined spot. Making projections in an urban setting is still a novelty to me, as people strolled, chatted, smoked and occasionally threw some curious glances at us.

It worked! PoPP won the arm wrestling against the spot light:

Orion Nebula and the 2000 year old Roman arena in Pula, Croatia.

The light we see today from Orion Nebula, or M42, was emitted when this arena was built. This famed nebula has a distinctive shape, texture and colors. Though the shape is now mostly taken over by the architecture, the texture and color still shine through, quite literally. Riding on the success, I replace the slide with a drawing of crinoid by Colleen Maynard, my collaborator for the series Phantoms of the Great Dying.

The ghosts from the planet’s largest event of extinction, the Permian Extinction, or The Great Dying, came back to haunt us.

The Many Stairs of Dubrovnik

Dubrovnik, Croatia was a major stop for us, not just because of its stunning scenery, but also because of our fandom for Game of Thrones. Fellow fans would know that this is the backdrop where they filmed the famed scene of the Walk of Shame, where Cersei was forced to be stripped naked and walked to her palace while a nun struck a bell every few steps and announced “shame!”.

Little did we know we were going to experience the traumatizing walk in our way. As Uber dropped us off outside the gate of the ancient fortress, we started our walk, mostly on stone pavement and going up, and up, and up. With Olive’s cellists arms and tennis elbow(no, she doesn’t play the sport but she contracted the sickness), I took over most of the load, one luggage in each arm and a back pack behind me, totally 120 pounds. Half of it, of course, is photographic stuff. Finally, we arrived at the Airbnb after stepping up 200 steps. Panting, we open the door to the balcony and saw these views.

The walk was worth it! Later, when we went to the view point on Fort Lovrijenac where I will make projections, we realized that our Airbnb is part of the stunning skyline.

That’s when we felt completely rewarded for the 200 steps. Having scouted the site, we went on to enjoy a good dinner with Risotto al Nero di Seppia, or Squid Ink Rice. It was delicious!

The next day, we went on the walk on the wall. Dubrovnik is a city of red roofs.

The red roofs tiles of Dubrovnik are mostly bright and new, but some are faded and old.

Dubrovnik, a UNESCO site, was attacked by Serb forces in 1991 as the cold war got hot at its end. Majority of the buildings were destroyed or heavily damaged. The mix of the new and old roofs are an understated monument of this war.

Back to work after a relaxing day’s sightseeing. Here’s an Google Earth view of the projection scheme:

Projecting from the view point on Fort Lovrijenac

600 feet wide projection is far less than my current record at 3000 feet, but the city light would complicate the matter. After some testing, I settled on NGC 2336, 100 million light years away, to pair with the age of the rock formation at the base of the city.

From my archive, I dug out the two slides for NGC 2336. Two, because it’s a split of left and right half of the galaxy. What you are seeing is a stitched image of two projection. By doing this I could use a more concentrated beam of projection through a 85mm f/1.2 lens twice. Each one was multi-exposed 8 times.

I went on to make two images for Phantoms of The Great Dying.

A Palatial Party

A drive to Split, Croatia brought us to Palace of Diocletian, built for emperor Diocletian 1700 years ago for his retirement. The oculus provide an unusual backdrop for the projection.

Both objects’ light were emitted at the height of the Roman Republic and both are super nova remanent. While we spent an hour at this quiet corner with a street musician that didn’t make much money(we helped, after listening to his classical guitar for an hour), loud, live music of the 80’s permeated from the neighboring quad, mixed with loud noise of drunken people. I had a flash back of my wedding photography days. This quad, with an great architectural view and superb projection options, was my first priority of the night. But setting up equipment in the middle of the crowd bares so much resemblance to photographing a wedding party. I felt the acid level rose in my stomach. But hey, the crowd, they might provide an unusual context! I bit the bullet and went straight into the middle of the party, and I got this.

1600 years old Diocletian's Palace, 1400 light years away M42, and tonight's party.

Of Heaven, Earth, Ghost and People

Our last leg of the tour brought us back to Ljubljana. From there, we visited Predjama Castle. Built 700 years ago, this view was love at the first sight for me.

“I have to come back tonight to project on this!” I said.

“Making another 1.5 hour round trip?” Olive questioned. Hmm, I sensed a bit of reluctance. Luckily, the humble restaurant introduced us to Prekmurska gibanica, a local dessert that could energize any less-than-enthusiatic mood.

Art, life and food. One can’t survive, missing any of the three.

Coming back before dusk, the place was deserted. The buzzing tourists were replaced by chirping birds. The restaurant which served gabanica was now closed. We were completely alone. Taking my time to set up, I once in a while remembered to document the process.

Projector PoPP is on the left and the camera with a wireless trigger is on the right. Later on I moved the camera to a more forward view point, visible here to the right side of the castle.

PoPP can deliver most of the projection I’ve envisioned so far. But it can’t focus. Look at the number 2 on it: this is version 2.0. I had a 1.2, on which I kept the mirror of the dSLR functional, so I could lower the mirror and focus. But, this requires the camera, now converted to the projector, to be powered with a battery. This battery doesn’t last long, and became a critical part, a NASA term for any part in a complex system, that if it fails, the whole system fails. So, out with 1.2. Now what I have to do is to put the lens for projection on the camera, both with Canon EF mount, to pre focus the lens, then transfer the lens to PoPP. But this procedure requires another detail—the slide needs to be pressed against the camera back with just the right amount of pressure. Too much or too little, causing the slide to be just a fraction of a mm too close or too far, will make the projection’s focal plane off for tens of feet.

I’m cursed by complications. I can’t do anything simple. Nonetheless, two years of accumulated techniques and experience made this projection quite easy.

NGC 7293 is the nearest nebula at 700 light years away, a perfect match for the 700 year old structure.

Sea Scorpion, Eurypterida Campylocephalus, then took the stage.

Two days later, we flew back home on an Austrian Airline flight. Having dozen additions to my portfolio and a truly enjoyable trip, I look at Olive, already in dreamland, and fell asleep with a smile.

Mark Chen 12/22/23 Mark Chen 12/22/23

Bisti Badlands Ain’t Bad

Unmarked trails, slippery clays, lost car, etc., are just some of the obstacle I had to overcome in this pilgrimage.

In the Navajo language, Bisti means badlands. I spent a week here for another Pilgrimage of Light. I’ve photographed badlands before, but Bisti Badlands surprised me, taught me lessons, and gave me the backdrops of some of the most exciting images in and beyond the series.

The Middle of Nowhere

The nearest airport is ABQ, from where there’s a 3 hours’ drive to Farmington the base camp, then there is another 50 mile’s drive with a stretch of dirt road. All teal color dots are points of interest for Pilgrimage of Light.

Under the Bureau of Land Management and right next to Navajoland, Bisti is not easy to access. This is no National Park with rangers, maps, well paved roads that’s hard not to speed. Here, you can ruin the trip easily by not negotiating dirt roads carefully, or getting lost if you do not match your physical steps to that arrow on AllTrails for just 10 seconds. It’s no joke.

Warming Up

Arriving at 2pm at Farmington, I checked in the hotel, dropped the luggage and came right back out with the gears. It’s not because I rush for the sunset at 4:30 in this winter time. In fact, I don’t want daylight, because I deliver my own light! But my routine is to hike in during the day, scout the spot(1, or at most 2), set up, choose projection and photographing spot, previsualize projection and choose slides, and prefocus. These will take an hour when the ambient light dims.

When do I know it’s dark enough? When the proper exposure setting for the projection is at least two stops over the ambient light.

I arrived at the parking area fenced with barbed wires. The national park style restroom and a picnic table were much more civilized than anticipated. Little did I know what’s coming in the other part of this wilderness area, though.

I hiked in fading light and quickly reached the first photogenic formation, setting up my projection apparatus for the first time since Death Valley without much rustiness, and took this image as an opening to a new adventure:

NGC 3318 at 115 million light years away is a good match for Bisti’s geologic age.

Nothing fancy on the terrestrial side, but a subtle silhouette of the formation bordering the starry sky and the projected galaxy gives it a rightful place in the series. Phew! Kicking off with this shot, I know my equipment is in good order, I’m in good order, and superstition is in good order.

Negotiating The Badlands

After a good night sleep, a morning’s planning and a nap to fully recharge myself, I drove to the same parking area, had my lunch at the picnic table before I swung the 55-pound camera bag with two tripods on my shoulders and headed back out to the trail. I had no idea how much time it will require to get to any of the sites, but I thought I had plenty of daylight ahead.

So many attractions, so little time, according to AllTrails.

I went straight for Chocolate Hoodoos. Very soon, I realized how difficult it was to navigate badlands. There’s no distinctive landmarks; on the contrary, similar features pop up here and there, serving nothing else but to confuse. The terrain’s elevation changes are mild, but enough to block sights. The washes are not deep, but many of them are deep enough to keep me from crossing. My 55-pounds burden did not allow jumping: a twisted ankle in such isolation would be disastrous. Every 20 feet there’s a left or right decision to make, like this:

I did this numerous times in this trip

I can’t imagine how people hiked unmarked trails before AllTrails’ time.

Chocolate Hoodoo turned out to be not worthy of a night’s work, and in the same time too rugged for me to cut through. I chose to back out.

The green line indicates my recorded hiking route. My navigation was nothing to write home about.

With the diversions, by the time I reached Flat Tops, I had to settle. This is a site, flat with many small mushroom-like features.

I went for an immersive approach, having the projector higher and behind the camera, also projecting twice, panning between two slides which split NGC 2236 to left and right.

This technique is for creating large projection without using wide angle lens on the projector, hence maintaining brightness by directing the energy to a smaller area at a time.

Phantoms of The Great Dying

On this pilgrimage, I brought with me not just slides of galaxies. Colleen Maynard, an immensely talented painter with deep interests in paleontological subjects, have been planning with me for a project, and produced an exquisite drawing of trilobites and crinoids. This is the first time I have her drawings ready to be projected.

These vivid drawings were digitized and made into slides prior to my trip. Now I was ready to project them onto the exotic formations of Bisti. Scientifically, the period of these creatures actually do not match with Bisti’s geologic age. Will they work?

I found Colleen’s strokes in harmony with Bisti’s forms. I was also very pleased with the crispness of the projections. Clearly, these are characters that differ greatly from the galaxies and nebulae. I was very excited to explore.

These two first attempts also scream for the beginning of a new series. What should it be titled?

Crinoids and trilobites, along with many other species, went extinct during the Permian Extinctions in which 90% of the species died out, hence the term The Great Dying. These projections are ghosts of the dead. They are the phantoms.

That’s it, the Phantoms of The Great Dying. Colleen liked the title wholeheartedly.

Taking off on Stone Wings

Despite many more unexplored sites on the same trail, I opted for a different trail that would lead to Stone Wings.

My hiking route to and back from Stone Wings. I chose to back out the same way. It’s not a good idea to explore an unfamiliar trail in the dark.

This northern entrance had nothing but barbed wires and a little gap to squeeze through.

The parking area for the northern entrance. The posts to the right has a tiny gap.

The trail that leads to Stone Wings posed no greater challenge and the hike to the site was non-eventful. I reached the destination with plenty of time left to set up before sunset.

I even had time to sit down to drink hot chocolate and chew on a Cliff bar. What a luxury!

The shadowy side of this Stone Wing was a great spot to lay NGC 7098.

The formations at Bisti are intricate and rather small. This resulted in bright projections in close proximities. They were so bright I could produce images before the sunset. The bright sky in this one shows just that.

This slope then struck me as a great resting place for the phantom of crinoid.

The flower-like part of the crinoid, called pinnules, were so perfectly matched with the exotic looking formations. The stalks were gently cradled on the slope. I love this image. High 5 Colleen!

Turning around to look westward, I noticed a rare opportunity to use dusk as the backdrop of a POL image, armed with bright projections. To pair with the fantastic Stone Wing, I needed a galaxy with strong personality. I knew just the one.

With Los Angeles and Las Vegas to my west, it was no surprises to have captured this many airplane trails. Their directions nicely matched the shape of the Stone Wing, radiating from the pointy formation.

I was happy to call it a night with these three images under my belt.

The Misadventure to Mesa Verde

Only after I arrived in Farmington did I realize that Mesa Verde National Park was only over an hour’s drive away. Having listed it as point of interest for Pilgrimage of Light, and after three nights of successful shoots, I’ve decide to make an excursion to check out this unique park where the natives lived in dwellings in perfect symbiotic coexistence with nature.

At the entrance, I proudly presented my annual pass to the ranger. From there, there was another 40 minutes of drive to the site. I whistled, enjoyed the scenic drive and arrived at Navajo Canyon Overview.

Bang!

The smart feature of Hyundai Tucson quickly informed me low tire pressure in the front right. I parked to check and saw a complete flat.

“Need help there?” A nice gentleman rolled down the window and asked.

“Oh I’m fine. I will just put on the spare.”

The would-be good Samaritan waved bye and drove away, leaving me in total solidarity. I opened the floor below the cargo area.

No spare tire.

Not even the space for a spare tire. Instead, a “tire mobility kit” that was totally useless for a hole on the tire’s side wall. Evidently, this car model was by design without a spare. This was the first time I know such a possibility, and such a shitty time to learn it.

No cellphone signal, no one around. I sat down and waited.

The following 9 hours was a mix of kind people and shitty cellphone signals, their assistance and miscommunications. By the time I returned to the hotel in a drivable car, it was dinner time.

I washed away a day’s bad luck with Dos Equis and Tacos.

Grand Finale at Alien’s Throne

Having lost a day and knowing rain was coming on my last day, I wanted to go for the best. Alien Throne it was.

My hiking route to and from Alien Throne

Valley of Dreams trail’s parking area was completely unmarked except tire marks on the dirt that suggested cars’ turning and backing. A few hundred feet away from the car, the trail dipped and the car was instantly out of sight. This gave me an uneasy feeling that the reflectors on the car wouldn’t be welcoming beacons when I hike back in the dark. I was right. On the way back to the car, I circled around and hiked 20 extra minute, basically a marathoner that couldn’t get to the finish line, before I finally got this:

It’s funny that the sight of cows and their poops provided some comfort as reminders of proximity to civilizations. If I were lost or stranded, at least I could get help from the cows? But how? Would they lead the way? Or would they let me drink from their udders? That’s silly, I thought, what’s more likely to happen is to be charged at by them. My mind was wandering while I approached Three Wise Men. The gray terrain around them looked rock solid. I confidently stepped on it and…

Wham!

I fell. For a moment I couldn’t understand what happened. I struggled to stand up with 55 pounds on my back, trying to regain my verticality and realized I wasn’t on solid ground at all. The gray color rock turned out to be wet clays. When I stepped on was now a impressive, 2 feet long skid mark. 3 hours later, with the help of AllTrails, I actually found that skid mark and made this video:

When I finally stood up and retreated to safety, I looked again at the death trap that failed to kill me and was amazed how it looked like solid sedimentary rocks, then I realized that what I was looking at will probably become rock solid in, what, 1 million years? My skid mark might be preserved and becomes a record of ancient (clumsy) human activities.

The Alien Throne area was truly impressive. I quickly set up and was ready for a night’s work.

The alien looking Alien Throne inspired another projection for the Phantom of The Great Dying. The shape of rocks at its base looked like a perfect fit for Colleen’s vivid depiction of a trilobite with an arching back!

The ghost of the trilobite’s crawling off Alien Throne

I loved this one! A trilobite’s getting off a throne is so symbolic of the species’ abdicating their world dominance 500 millions years ago. The arched back of the ancient bug fits the contour of the rocks organically.

Phantoms is off to a good start, I need to take care of Pilgrimage. What to project? The Pillars of Creation’s shape should be compatible to Alien Throne…

…and I was right!

Tribute to Elliott Erwitt

One secret mission I have kept to myself so far was to pay tribute to the recently deceased master Elliott Erwitt, whose humorous look at urbanites are unparalleled. I had in my slide box two of his iconic images that depict dogs and their owners. One hundred feet from Alien Throne, a cluster of mushroom shaped formation looked, somehow, funny to me. With a bit of comedic staging in mind, I brought EE’s city scene to wildness.

For the first time in my arduous projection tasks, I laughed out loud when the dogs’ projections emerges. It felt less alone when I was working on this image. Somehow, this quiet little corner in Bisti was made rowdy by EE’s images.

With this unusual projection, I declare the completion of another successful Pilgrimage of Light.

Mark Chen 1/3/23 Mark Chen 1/3/23

Pilgrimage to The Fire and Ice

Yellowstone is a package of excitement: geothermal features with half of the world’s geysers and Old Faithful where Mother Nature hosts a water dance show (almost) every 1.5 hour; wildlife so abundant that when I took my friend, painter Gao Hang there he went into an uncontrollable laugher seeing a bison doing a sand bath, 5 minutes into our visit. The Grand Canyon of Yellowstone is no Grand Canyon, but its upper and lower falls flanked by the yellow stones, the park’s trademark from the rusting iron-rich rocks, has its own grandeur.

I’ve visited this favorite Nation Park of mine 3 times, but I’ve never been there in the winter. Yellowstone, unlike other NPs that are either open year-round, or closed for winter, closes its door by November and reopens in December to present an entirely different season of wintery wonder. With feet of snows on its caldera, 5 miles above the molten magma, and the hot and cold’s clashes at the pools, mud pots and geysers, Yellowstone in the winter is a duel of ice and fire, and a must for my Pilgrimage of Light.

The Plans

The geothermal features are not just stunning, their periods in hours presents an unique opportunity. Instead of thousands, millions or billions of light-year-away galaxies, I get to project objects of our solar system, at distances the light can travel to us in hours. Do we have a match? Yes! Saturn’s 1.5 light hours away in average, that’s also the average interval of Old Faithful’s eruptions.

While I got busy collecting NASA’s Saturn images, my wife/travel companion/assistant Olive, has made her plans as well. Winter visit to Yellowstone presents a logistic challenge, as most park roads are closed to private automobile traffic. All movements in the park are either on foot, on snowshoes, cross-country skis, snowmobiles, or, on snow coaches.

All I cared was that Old Faithful will be only a 10-minute walk for Old Faithful Snow Lodge. I want that unlimited access in case we need multiple night visits to the geyser for any success. Olive, on the other hand, wants to see something during the day. Oh, right, most people do want to see something during the day in a national park. I’m the weird one that forgets about normal sightseeings.

The Arrival

Olive’s itinerary was designed with relaxation in mind. We would arrive at Bozeman, MT on plane, stay a night, then we would take a shuttle bus to enter the park and stay another night at Mammoth Hot Spring’s historic hotel. The latter couldn’t happen because of the damage caused by the great flood at Yellowstone in June. Instead, we would have Gardiner, the gateway to Yellowstone, as the stop for another night before we enter the park.

And finally, we were on the snow coach, inching towards Old Faithful in single digit temperature in Fahrenheit in an otherwordly landscape.

Old Faithful

The routine of surveying during the day and projecting during the night brought us to the predicted 4pm eruption. And Old Faithful delivered.

For those who knows Mandarin, you can eavesdrop the discussion for projection between Olive and I. The eruptions in winter were rather different to the ones in warm days. The mix of hot water and cold air produced much more and higher flying, “solid” steams. For those who wanted the water dance, it might be a bit disappointing that the fountain of nature is veiled. For me, however, Mother Nature’s oversized steamy projection screen provided excellent opportunities.

Here is another great reason to visit Yellowstone in the winter. At this boardwalk surrounding Old Faithful, there were just a few dozens spectators. In the summer time? Thousands. If you are shorter than 5’6”, you would have to crawl through spaces in a forest of legs to get yourself a front row view, unless you can settle for just the sound effects.

The Frigid

Forgive us, vegan friends. but we did try bison short ribs before braving single digit temperature. The tasty meat cooked in red wine provided energies and kept us going, like what they did for the natives.

We made our first attempt at the 7:30 eruption. The stiff fingers and the short duration of event proved to be too challenging for my method, so far designed for formations that remains unchanged for a few million years. The steam dissipates in a matter of seconds. I had to adapt.

“I’m going to have you fully in charge of the composition of the projection,” I said. “We can’t respond to the shaping of the steam fast enough if I give you instructions.”

Olive remained silent, which translated to she did not object but she was thinking whether she would agree or not, but at the moment she couldn’t voice her objection effectively and she might do it later.

Back in the hotel room for a break from the cold, I asked her to practice a bit of quick actions on the Manfrotto geared tripod head. This is a great piece of equipment for nuanced composition. But to make it respond quickly, one needs to make it an extension of one’s fingers.

Surely, a musician can agree with the importance of practice.

In the meantime, I swapped the slide with a color image of the Saturn which not just shows its signature orange hue, but also a rare, blue Saturnian aurora.

Once again we put on layers and layers or clothes, adding the scarves, the caps, the gloves, attaching the crampons to the shoes, carrying the gears, and finally, we made it to Old Faithful before the eruption window. We set up, then we waited.

And thank you, Old Faithful, for another punctual delivery. Olive and I took our stations and executed the plan. She aimed, I clicked. And it worked.

Not only we got Old Faithful and Saturn nicely juxtaposed, we also had Big Dipper’s cameo appearance, to the right of the steam.

High 5, Olive!

The Hike to Morning Glory

The success of the very first night gave me a shot in the arm. Strategically, this would be the time to do something harder and veering off the main path, technically, aesthetically and/or content wise. I’ve been drooling over Yellowstone’s many colorful thermo pools, not literally, as I don’t want them to be contaminated by my personal organism. This is Grand Prismatic Pool, taken by me in summer 2017.

My current projection capacity has way exceeded this geothermo feature’s diameter at 300 feet. What will keep me from attempting this site will be the inaccessibility during winter time. We will need to do cross country skiing or to ride snowmobile, and like always, the return trip will be in total darkness. There’s also the uncertainty of how projection would work on a body of water.

Making Grand Prismatic a reason for another pilgrimage, I chose a less ambitious site at Morning Glory Pool.

This is a time-lapse video on the hike from Old Faithful Snow Lodge to Morning Glory. This was on the day prior to the actual projection.

When we went for the shot, it wasn’t such a pleasant hike at all. The sky was overcast, the wind blew and the snow fell. The last thing one would do was to take out a cellphone to do such a video.

Morning Glory might be much smaller than Grand Prismatic, but’s full of intricacies. The fading cloudy daylight could barely bring out any discernible colors from it, but I brought my own light to reveal the hidden beauty.

Liller 1 star cluster’s image by Hubble wasn’t so colorful. The colors we see in this photo are reflected by the the pool’s living organisms. Yes! Projection into the thermo pool is not only possible, it presents a rare opportunity for the terrestrial feature to provide the colors.

Grand Prismatic, you will be the next.

Mark Chen 12/3/22 Mark Chen 12/3/22

I am Thankful

Day 1, November 24, 2022

Thanksgiving night in an AirBNB in Terlingua, TX. I heated up a package of coconut chicken from Costco, poured it over rice and served them in two plates, one for me and one for my daughter, Marcia. To say that our Thanksgiving dinner was modest was an understatement, especially after seeing photos of delicacies texted from wife on her gastronomic trip in Taiwan.

3 hours ago, after a day’s drive from Houston, we arrived at the site near the west entrance of Big Bend NP. Here, the Black Peak Formation is laden with K-Pg boundaries, a band in the strata that marked the meteor strike which wiped out most of the dinosaurs, 65 million years ago.

Marcia and I in front of a formation with K-Pg boundary

Marcia was there to assist as a substitute. My student Gustavo’s new job as a high school photo teacher did not afford him a break. I wasn’t sure how this photo assistant/daughter dynamic would pan out. I remembered vividly that she freaked out in the dark on a family trip, when I was trying to photograph the milky way.

But she was 10 at the time. And we had no better plan for Thanksgiving without my wife, her mom in town. And she had recently broken up with an asshole after 6 years of relationship. The in-family assignment came quite naturally on multiple fronts.

Minutes into her first day at job, she was assembling equipment, communicating through walkie talkies and helping me to refine compositions, hundreds of feet away and operating the projector on her own. It’s so nice to have a grown-up, capable, quick-to-learn daughter! 2 hours , 2 galactic slides and 2 compositions later, we got this:

This image is more than a keeper; it definitely makes the cut into the portfolio.

7 months into the inception of Pilgrimage of Light, I’ve experimented through 3 versions of projector, each improved certain aspects of the projection and opened up new possibilities. My compositional approach has involved, too. I came to realize that a key to create the sense of a heavenly body descent on Earth is through separation of projection and photographing points. This one, for example, put a distance of 300 feet between Marcia and I.

With the instant success for the father-daughter team, Costco coconut chicken could hardly dampen the celebratory mood. We toasted with water. We chatted about dodging bullets: her escape from a pathological lier who would certainly make a husband from hell and mine many rubbing shoulders with disasters during on my Pilgrimages of Light. This one promises to be a breeze, with one good image under my belt and 2 more days of sunny weather in store for us. She pick up her cell to check on the weather.

“Uh, Dad, the weather forecast now calls for all rainy, windy and cold tomorrow.”

Damn. There would be no breeze.

Day 2, November 25, 2022

Our day started with surveying the sites. Santa Elena Canyon was the subject on my plan. Back in May, I photographed in Big Bend, but found Santa Elena Canyon’s unique structure in need of separated projection and photographing. Here is an illustration of the plan:

The most exciting plan calls for a hike across the river, which was walking over dried, hardened riverbed back in May, then hiking up the cliff of the Mexican side, and project and photograph down in to the river. Rio Grande wasn’t dry this time. Though we did manage to cross, the alternate route took us up a precarious climb, too risky for repeating in the darkness. Our survey gave us nothing but muddy boots twice as heavy as they used to be.

Even our attempt to have a leisurely lunch was proven too much on the day after Thanksgiving. In the Tex-Mex place next to our AirBNB, the waiting staff looked overwhelmed and the customers cold and hungry. Abandoning our table, we had steaming instant Ramen with eggs. It’s good to be Asian and prepared, and not picky.

But there are things that can’t be defended with frugality and adaptability . Things like a toilet that wouldn’t flush down. The AirBNB owners was on top of it, literally, trying to unclog it with a snake and a plunger, to no avail.

Skipping the shitty situation and fast forward to the twilight hours. We had to give up even the second choice of spot because of the muddiness. From the 3rd choice, the “meh” point, we set up the equipment according to the revised scheme for the large projections.

With clumsy cold fingers, unfamiliarity to the different scheme, and a quarter coin to tighten the tripod adapters nowhere to be found, this set up was slow and untidy. But we did it eventually: a 30-burst multiple exposure of Andromeda Galaxy on the rocky wall of Santa Elena. The Packard shutter in front of the camera lens got stock during one of the exposures and ruined the shot. But, the projection’s exposure appeared to be all correct, despite the misty air’s interference.

I would find out later that the width of the projection was at a whopping 2000 feet, and the slide was completely unharmed by the heat of the flash. Our shoot failed, but the new scheme was a success that will open up possibilities that I couldn’t even fathom.

“We will put this to work tomorrow,” I told Marcia. But what shall we project on?

We returned to the AirBNB room to find a toilet that was still clogged.

Day 3, November 26, 2022

I started the day with a frantic text exchange with the AirBNB owner. Despite her effort, she couldn’t find us a replacement room other than a teepee, which is basically the equivalent of having no toilet. No matter, by the time she gave up, I have booked a room in Fort Stockton. The plan is to make a 3 hour dash to comfortable beds and a functional toilet.

After a survey, we have decided on Cerro Castolon.

Marcia seemed to be not entirely impressed. But being a seasoned Junior Ranger that toured innumerable national parks, she was, if I may say so with some irony, spoiled.

Cerro Castolon is no match to Half Dome or Old Faithful, of course! But it is nonetheless a 2000 feet towering volcanic formation dated back 30 million years. I have just the right galaxy in my archive to go with it. Just you wait, now-senior junior ranger!

We arrived at the site early to make sure all is set up and focused when there was still light.

The large projection scheme calls for improvements on both the projection and the photographing. For the latter, the limit of 10 multiple exposures(why why why? Canon and Nikon!?) imposed by current digital cameras have to be circumvented. Simply keep the shutter open at B setting and fire away the projector won’t work, because too much ambient light would accumulate, overwhelming the projection. My solution is to use the B shutter in conjunction with an external shutter from a century-old brand Packard. This contraption is no stranger to wet plates enthusiasts such as my friend Japheth Storlie, who generously loaned me one from his collection for experiment. Without an onsite documentation, this video is an reenactment at home to show how it’s set up and functions:

Old and new: a Packard mechanical shutter in front of a Canon 5D.

The mechanical shutter has a PC cord port, which is here connected to wireless trigger which gives order to the flash on the projector. The shutter speed is around 1/30, which, after, say, 30 exposures, would only have accumulated ambient exposure for 1 second—no biggie, as long as the moon is not shining bright.

The squeeze bulb is a real good workout for the forearm. I expect to have improved muscle tones after many more shots. Or my assistant will.

On the side of the projector, this is what we have:

Projector 2.1 with air cooling: the air mattress pump send air through the silicon hose into the slide chamber to keep the temperature from rising.

Projector 2.1 added air cooling to 2.0. It comprises an air mattress pump and a silicon hose. When activated, the pump sends cool air, especially in a cold place like winter in Big Bend, into the chamber of the camera(a stupid sentence, because camera is chamber in latin!) to cool off.

After an hours of trial-n-err on exposures and composition, I settle on a scheme with 500 feet between us with the projection directly in the line of site, to be cropped out. From where I stood, I could see her red head light:

Through walkie talkies, we coordinated a shot with 30 bursts of projection. She did the count, I did the workout by squeezing the bulb.

And this is what we got, after overlaying the projection exposure and ambient exposure:

The Javelina

We high 5ed, we packed and hiked back to the car. Marcia later told me she had the bear horn and spray ready all these times. So, no wild life encounter?

I drove, we listen to audio book, chat and with the happy thought of a clean toilet, on the throughly deserted state highway 385. It must be near Marathon, when all of a sudden, the road ahead had an impression like this.

Pardon me for the drawing. Rescind my MFA if you want, U of H.

A javelina, leisurely crossing the road without a car perhaps for hours, was merely 30 feet away from the bumper of my Prius. I cursed and swerved to the opposite traffic lanes, sparing the life of the pig, then I swerved back, avoiding a high speed rollover to spare ours.

Hours later, lying in darkness bed of the La Quinta Inn. I realized that the view of the above illustration could have been the last thing Marcia and I saw. I’m thankful that I’m still here to make this crappy drawing.

And I’m thankful to have a clean toilet.

And I’m thankful that Marcia dodged a bullet by breaking up with the asshole.

And I’m thankful that our first Pilgrimage of Light was a success.

And I’m thankful for Olive’s support.

And I’m thankful to be alive and given the opportunity to do what I love and sharing my work with people I love.

Mark Chen 10/8/22 Mark Chen 10/8/22

Journeys, not Made

When I was 12, my violin teacher entered me to a competition. I was required to play an etude, a 10 minutes, non-stop entanglement of 16th notes. I worked my ass off for months, but it was beyond me. I’ve never, ever, finished it without a stop.

The challenge came at a very bad time. I was in the middle school for the first year. My long hair was practically shaved off to a crewcut, as required for all boys at that age in Taiwan under martial law. I was depressed, and I was constantly sick, and my stomach ulcer was about to be diagnosed in a few months. I shouldn’t be loaded with another mission impossible. But what was a meek 12-year-old to say about his fate?

The day of the competition was approaching and my hopeless practices went on. Did my teacher give me tips to practice, like what Olive gave to her cello students? Slow down, or placing emphasis on different notes? The hopeless attempts turned mindless. I was so, so fucked.

And then, a miracle.

I suddenly came down with something nasty. High fever, body ache. Eyes felt like popping out from their sockets. Coughing my lungs out. Nose running 100m dash. I was a poster child of influenza.

And I didn’t have to play. Instead, I was hospitalized for a week.

…like I didn’t have to present my work in Cincinnati, right at this moment, at Society for Photographic Education. Well, not entirely like it, because one came with a sigh of relief and the other is an utter disappointment.

“It was good that you didn’t play,” the teacher told me afterward. “It was soooo scary. So and so(my friend who was lucky to be taught by him, too) almost peed in his pants.” Wow, and he was talking about the guys that played well; better than I, I think.

I dodged a bullet.

Strangely, as years went by, this competition which I did not play in, formed a memory in me. I could clearly see the spotlights, so strong on the young musicians, that the beads of sweat on their forehead glistened. They played, some well and some lousily and they were applauded, enthusiastically or doubtfully. They came down the stage, greeted by nodding parents or chilling silence. I have had these visuals in my head, as if I was there.

But I wasn’t.

Like right now, I’m picturing the hotel conference room in which I’m projecting images of Pilgrimage of Light. I explain how my projector was designed and put together. I demo a projection by enveloping my audience in Andromeda galaxy, and I take a photo of that. I thank the crowd and offered all of them this image. They applaud.

But this is not happening, because I’m Covid positive.

I’m barely coughing. No fever. No bone crashing ache. No eye trying to pop out of the eye sockets and my nose’ staying put. Not like the horrible flu I had 46 years ago. Maybe there is such a thing as pay back time. Dodging a bullet. Taking a bullet. Forgoing an opportunity. Dodging another bullet.

The emotion, the situation that I didn’t get to experience. The people, the exchange with whom that didn’t happen. The names that I won’t know and the stories that I can’t tell. Or maybe I still can.

The journeys that weren’t made.

Mark Chen 5/28/22 Mark Chen 5/28/22

An Alpine Lake in the Sierras

45 pounds, 3000 feet elevation, 6000 calories

1 month into the inception of project Light/Year (later renamed as Pilgrimage of Light) and I was ready for an adventure.

The destination was Pear Lake, deep in the Sierras Nevada in the boundary of Sequoia National Park. The trail led to it was rated hard for elevation gain and length. I’ve never been a hiker. I walked, I played tennis and I was reasonably fit for my age, but, carrying a backpack and walking with trek poles in hands was something that did not occurred to me that I would do.

There is nothing I would not do for photography. Well, I probably still wouldn’t jump out of an airplane for it. Not yet.

The Planning

The pristine alpine lakes were calling me—I’ve never been to these hard-to-access destinations, but I could see how stunning they were on Google image search. My experience from Glen Rose, Big Bend and White Sands told me this one needs careful planning.

On Google Earth, I found scenes like this

When were these lakes carved out by glaciers? The glaciation in Sierra Nevada took place during the Paleocene, as early as 2.5 million years ago, a number that did not match many galaxies in terms of distances in light years. But, there is one rock star galaxy, 2.5 million light years away, right in our Local Group: Andromeda, or M31. What else can I ask for?

I had the matching subjects. The next question was: how do I get there?

This was when Google’s power disappear: it didn’t know much about trails. Time to expand my horizon, a bit literally. I found this app called AllTrails. On it, I found this trail that will bring me to the lakes.

It was rated “hard”; it had 3000 feet elevation gain and it might have ice hazard. If you are a season hiker, this might sound like a stroll in the neighborhood. Not for me, I’ve never backpacked. Should I go?

I looked at the lake again, closely.

Imagine the Andromeda projected on the granite, it’s reflection on the mirror-like lake.

Fuck it. I’m going.

The Preparation

I had a new pair of boots and comfy wool socks. Oh yes, I had a pair of trek poles I bought at slippery icy Grand Canyon after my butt was seriously bruised. I had a nice Manfrotto camera backpack that could tie two tripod, but it looked a bit…huh, stretched, with the load. And if it became fully loaded with photo stuff, where was I going to put my sleeping bag, tent, food, first aide, and yes, bear repellent?

“You need a serious backpack,” says Liz, my niece who lives in the Bay Area and the most seasoned backpacker in the family, “and we should have a visit at REI when you are in town.” I didn’t know what REI was, but quickly remembered Reese Witherspoon mentioned it in her movie Wild, the quintessential hiking movie. Yes, it must be serious.

We visited REI 2 days before my hike, when most other stuffs were bought piecemeal from here and there. I brought all the photo equipment, packed nicely in protective inner cases. “I need a backpack that can hold all these,” I say, and Jenna the nice REI consultant measures me, and brought a gargantuan bag. It’s fancy with many compartments and fully compatible with a hydration bladder.

At Liz’s home, I loaded everything in it and lift it with a grunt. The bag was well designed. The weight distributed evenly mostly on the hip, and the contour of the frame hugged my back. Nonetheless, it was quite an effort just to put it on. I struggled and I looked at Liz and Olive.

We Chinese don’t do verbal tsunami. But their expressions said they were worried.

The Rock on The Road

I cut the shoot at General Sherman tree short the night before, so I may have plenty of sleep. Tips to avoid altitude sickness say that I should east lots of carb. So, in the national park cafe, I garbled up potatoes. No cellphone signal means no saying goodbye. I wondered into the gift shop and bought Olive and Marcia matching Sequoia NP shirts(Olive says to me afterward “these shirts are damn expensive!”). I didn’t pay attention at the time. I was thinking if I never come back, people would find these shirts in my car and give to them. If I have to go, I want to leave something nice behind.

On the drive to the trail head, I ran into this

My car was the third in the line, which means this might have happened minutes before I passed it.

“Somebody is trying to stop me,” I thought. Strangely, this idea made me more determined.

One side of the road is cleared pretty quickly. And I arrived at the trail head.

The Hike

At the Lake Trailhead, hikers sat on the opened trunk of their cars, putting on boots and eating banana. A couple women passed me by, clinkity clunkity with their trek poles doing part of the walking. They all seemed knowing what they were doing. I, on the other hand, struggled to keep balance with my backpack, now with the additional 5 pounds of bear canister which the NP required. But there I went, leaving my rental car and civilization behind.

The first couple hours was a breeze, without much elevation gain, and with lots of shade, thanks to the sequoia giants. A few creeks cut the trail. Hopping on the rocks were much easier with the trek pole, which helped me to balance with a much elevated center of gravity.

1/3 of the way into the trail, the going got tough when I started to ascend on the Hump.

The ascent was steep and continuous, which quickly overload the muscles of the leg and the heart. Every single step was a struggle aggravated by rugged rocks and fallen trees. I put one foot in front of—and above—the other as many times as I can, until I needed to stop and let the drumming heart quiet down.

“If I can make one more step, and another one after that, I will get to Pear Lake”. I told myself over and over again.

The Glacial Water

Heather is the name of my favorite student and the lake that greeted me after the torturous Hump. My hydration bladder was emptied at the time, so a pool of turquoise water below was most encouraging, and drinking filtered water from it was most refreshing. From here on, a string of lakes awaits, with Pear Lake at the every end.

I must have ascended to elevation where the trees disliked. The terrain is now even more rugged. The shades were gone, but the spring breeze spared me from sweats. Heather, Aster, Emerald and Pear sits at the bottom of cirques, amphitheater like terrain carved by the glacier. Between each cirque there was sky-piercing peaks, which I had to negotiate.

Pear Lake

Just like what Google Earth showed, only 100 times more impressive.

The Shoot

A rule has presented itself during this project’s shoots: the first few shots always suck.

And of course, what did I expect to make any kind of nice exposure at ISO 204800? Well, these were just tests to see how viable it was to project Andromeda 400 feet across, on granite darker that a 18% gray card. It was horribly grainy, but it overexposed. At ISO 102400, a correct exposure was achieved.

That meant, I could expose at ISO 16000, with 10 multiple exposures set at ADD mode, to accumulate enough exposure and avoid excessive grains.

The very faint exposures of the galaxy were accumulated to _DSC5226 to a perfect exposure. Then with the confidence on a tightly locked Manfrotto tripod head, I made an exposure for the ambient light without the projection at the luxury of ISO 800. It was moonless, so the ambient light was from astronomical twilight.

These all sound easy when I write about it. At the moment, it was two hours’ work at the end of a day’s hike. Did I get what I set out to do? Without a laptop, I zoomed in on the camera’s review, checked and rechecked to make sure no mistakes were made. Everything looked fine. Time to call it a day!

The threat from bear was not as real as the threat from marmot. A fellow hiker told me that they eat up everything slightly salty, so clothings or gears that touched our sweat were in danger. I kept the two tripod standing, and hung my stuff like a hammock between them, so these fat and cute rodents wouldn’t get to them. I did not take a photo when it swaggered by my foot, but this is how they looked:

I squished myself into the single person tent, took my clothes off and slipped into the sleeping bag.

The Encounters

A brief moment of snow made me worried. It was beautiful in the dawn, but I got my beauty last night and I didn’t need a challenge to keep me from delivering that beauty to civilization.

Soon after I departed Pear Lake, a young woman walked towards me on the trail. It was still early, so she much have started early, or she must have been walking fast. Her face gradually resolved into a brilliant smile as we approached. She was there for a day hike to Heather Lake. Lightly equipped and looking fit, I didn’t have a doubt that she would accomplish her plan. We parted in opposite direction.

Going down on the Hump was not much better than going up. The heart didn’t strain as much; that’s physics: if I wasn’t gaining potential energy by going up, my heart didn’t have to pump that much fuel to the muscles. But the fact that I didn’t shape like a ball, rolling down the hill freely, hence I had to brake my fall by fighting the downward momentum, was also physics. Very quickly the muscles on the legs got fatigued, while I smiled and cheered on the upward hikers, who must have thought that I had such a great time going downward.

Soon after the Hump and the easy flat walk turned soporific, I thought of the young lady fast on feet. She must have turned back, and she might be passing me, the old man with two tripods and a huge backpack, soon. And there she was! Whizzing me by. Hmm, not even saying bye?

Minutes after that a man in the opposite direction approached me with a concerned look.

“There are a couple bears, one brown and one black. They are right around the trail. I told the young woman to wait for you so you two can handle this together.”

I sped up and saw her crouching on a piece of rock.

“Oh, hi there,” she said. “So the bears are right there” she pointed. “One black and one brown. That’s tricky, you know, because we are supposed to scare the black ones away and play dead to the brown. What should we do?”

Hell would I know. But I did have a bear horn.

The bears, either an interracial couple, or adoption, or whatever, were moving away from the trails. So we walked, slowly and observantly. More hikers joined up with us.

“There’s no brown bear in California,” one hiker said. “I’ve just talked to a rangers about this.”

I suggested we all gang up and walk pass the bears together. We made noises. I had the bear horn in my hand, ready to blow out some bear, and human ear drums.

Black and Fake Brown were not a bit interested in us. They pushed the trees, rolled on the ground and yawned. All of us lived to tell the tale.

Andromeda and Pear Lake

In a hotel room in Fresno, CA, where tap water tasted like sewage water in comparison to Pear Lake’s, I fired up my laptop and edited my shots from the night before.

I smiled and I started looking for the local 5 star restaurant on Yelp.