At the end of a dry fall season, the golden brown grasses of the steppes sweep across the plains met in the distance by even drier looking, more rugged mountains. The monolithic Fitz Roy and the crystalline-looking spire Cerro Torre rise up at the distant opposite edge of the fifty- mile long linear Lago Viedma, like a woman admiring her newly polished fingernails on the back of her outstretched arm.
The charismatic mountains overlook the glacial waters of the Rio Fitz Roy, overshadowing a slight hill covered with what looks like a landscaped yard: rounded blue-grey shrubs, blades of grass waving their inflorescences in the chill breeze of sunset, dime-sized star-shaped clusters of green hugging rocks like tight fitting clothes; orchestrated in a pattern that repeats itself up the slope of the hill, each repetition of the pattern separated by sharp black rock trim, with colors slightly muted in the twilight.
Emptied knots,
twisted, bent,
the forensics of a lifestyle that I can’t imagine,
or a death that I don’t want to ,
repeated in a ghostly grey and charred forest graveyard,
in the golden remains of the summer grasses.
A new tree, growing out of the skeleton of another tree, its former self.
A thick trunk fanning out into a dozen thick arms, their joints swollen into a spherical knobby basketball-sized nodes at its many bent elbows, signpost thick forearms extending to the sky, infected with incurable disease to yearn for the unreachable.
Brilliant yellow leaves stitched together like an open hand, contrasted perfectly against its black trunk.
A two-toned tree: thick black trunks, light grey branches, a tree trying to find a new identity for itself as it grows.
Dead trees, twisted and barren, the pain of their death still on their faces, standing as monuments to themselves.
Wind blasts the rock covered with orange splotches and black hand-shaped dendrites of lichen, shrubs turned into dwarf bonsai versions of themselves under the constant assault of the weather. Heroic miniature plants grow in overlooked crevices, living in their own moment of zen with the mountain.
Proposed definition for Logogenic: like photogenic. Photogenic subjects look good in pictures, logogenic subjects sound good in words.
I add the nuance that the subject is difficult to capture in a photo in any way that is interesting or charismatic. I did not try to photograph most of the images described above as they don’t frame well in a photograph. The couple I did try, the experts all looked at me like I was an amateur.
fix my foot on the spot, and lift myself up the next rocky stair. I’ve been stair climbing for the last forty five minutes for nearly a kilometer, not switchbacks mind you, but uneven makeshift boulder stairs, ascending past the red and yellow and green and orange lenga beech forests, past the underachieving lenga beech shrubs that hide dripping little brooks of ice melt, onto slippery boot packed snow passing the tree line, and into a debris field of broken grey rocks like god accidentally dropped a mountain that splattered like a broken dish. I’ve shed my hat, gloves, neck cover and a couple of shirts on this thousand foot ascent, still heating up as the air cools with altitude.
The trail cuts left, through a doorway of two boulders, past a position marker that tells me latitude, longitude, and altitude and finally out into an opening. I made it! My ascent is complete. I raise my hiking poles over my head pumping in exultation.
I don’t waste anytime getting the shots. I compose shots of the lagoon with its reflections and the spires in the background. I think it is a beautiful composition, a photographer’s dream.
The high altitude makes for a much colder night than below sea level campground of Death Valley. Brooke has taken all the food north to San Francisco, so Chris and I dine on the Ramun noodles and each drink a bottle of wine, the only food we can fit in our saddlebags, admiring the intensity of the starlight in the clear night sky and taking on such topics as abuse of electronics and the value of DIY and how far we are from anything like civilization. Just as we are about to call it a night, three van loads of UCSC students camping on their spring break pull in, and in the dark, setup their camp, destroying our short-lived illusion of solitude. But they settle in quickly, I am not sure if they even know we are here.
Flowers dot the landscape, but I wouldn’t use the word carpet the landscape, we probably missed the peak of the once in a decade bloom, flowers already seeding the sands for their next decade festival.
These hardy species have adapted themselves as the salt lake in Death Valley evaporated giving way to the salt flats we already visited. The trail is a boardwalk that thoughtfully keeps the foot traffic up and off the salt marsh that these fish need to survive.
And this is where we part ways, Max, Brooke, and Ian off to Northern California, Brooke wanting to get back on Saturday, so she has a day of off. Chris and I head South, our only plan is to avoid the freeway on the way back.