Wilderness Images

Hello, I’m sorry that I have been unable to do a post for the last couple of weeks. I have been leading a photo workshop up in Canada’s North Channel. We had a great group of participants and had a wonderful time exploring this amazing location aboard Captain Bill’s sailboat the “Little Wing”. I will be talking more about this trip in a future post.

Today however I would like to talk about another amazing destination; the slot canyons of the American Southwest. A slot canyon is a canyon that is quite a bit deeper than it is wide. As little as a few feet wide and as deep as 100 feet in some places. These canyons are formed by water that, over millions of years has carved through the soft red Navajo sandstone sculpting beautiful formations.

The slot canyon that I visited was Lower Antelope Canyon just outside of Page Arizona. The entrance is literally a crack in the earth so narrow that I had to turn sideways in order to squeeze through. Once you descend into the canyon you enter into another world. A world of amazing light and beautiful graceful curves carved into the stone that surrounds you. These canyons are not for the claustrophobic often times as I walked through the canyon I was forced to remove my camera backpack to squeeze through the narrow passages.

While slot canyons are extremely beautiful they can also be very dangerous places since they are still being formed by the water that created them in the first place. In 1997 a storm which occurred 7 miles away from Lower Antelope Canyon created a flash flood which filled the canyon with rushing water 50 feet deep, unfortunately this flood swept 11 canyon visitors to their deaths.

The last few days I have been working on a fairly large proposal for a project that I am involved with. This is a project that I have been turning around in my head for a few months now, and I am now at the point where I am trying to collect my thoughts and put them into the form of a proposal. When I am working on a highly detailed project like this that one of my favorite places to work is on my screened in porch which overlooks the woods behind my home. I take my laptop out, turn on some quiet music, and try to organize my thoughts, while listening to the birds, and enjoying the nature that surrounds me.  

OK, at this point you’re probably wondering what all of this has to do with jumping spiders? Well, being a screened in porch there are not a lot of insects on the porch. But the few who do manage to find their way in, very soon fall prey to one of the jumping spiders that has decided the porch is their own personal hunting grounds. Each of the spiders has his (or her) own little territory that they hunt. One of the amazing things about this is, the spiders seem to have ‘learned’ that the insects will exhaust themselves futilely buzzing against the screen, and will eventually fall to the bottom where the spiders wait for their easy prey.

Here is a picture of one of my little distractions. This tiny guy is about the size of your pinky fingernail. I really love the iridescence in the fly’s eye.