May 20 - Denali Tundra Tour, Part II

Yet another shot of this wild and beautiful region.
This grizzly bear had two yearling cubs with her way up the mountainside. I borrow my husband's camera again and managed to get some shots, but none which included the three of them together. While this looks so close to us, it was very far away, which is fine when it comes to grizzlies...the more distance the better!
This was a Great Horned Owl nest which our guide had been watching for awhile. What a shot! Between the birds and the foliage they were living in, I was thrilled. There was another white little puff ball in the nest but that chick was not visible.
This is a Ptarmigan, it is the state bird of Alaska. In the winter time they change to all white for camouflage and in the spring develop more of the browns for the same reason. They are numerous throughout Denali, we saw lots of them.

May 20 - Denali Tundra Tour, Part I

Today we spent six hours in a tour bus, seeing the Denali Tundra area. Our driver/guide was such a wonderful guide, he had a Master's degree in Wildlife Biology and drives a Denali bus through the summer months and does research during the winter months. What a resource for information! He also was great at spotting wildlife where we would have not even known to look, so it was a great experience. Here I am starting with another Arctic Ground Squirrel. Can't resist these cuties. This one posed, showing his better side, for about five minutes.
This was a drama shot in the wild, through a digital zoom camera that was zoomed to a telephoto length. I borrowed my husband's camera since it has a better zoom. This scene played out halfway up a mountain and was incredible to see. This bald eagle had swooped down and got its prey, then this magpie kept jumping in and trying to get some of the food. Either it was a very patient and tolerant eagle or a very stupid magpie! What a thing to see!
This Dall's sheep photo was shot with my weaker zoom camera. To the naked eye and through the lens it looked more like a patch of unmelted snow that "resembled" a sheep but I took the photo anyway and thought I could figure it out later. Well, as you can see it took a credible photo of a real sheep! There were many of these way up the mountainsides in Denali.
A shot of the beautiful and wild Denali tundra. I just marveled at the beauty of this place.

May 19 - Copper River to Denali

This was our first glimpse of Mt. McKinley, or Dinali as the natives call it. It is rarely seen since it is usually enshrouded by the clouds, but we saw the bottom and top so we were fortunate today. We saw it closer when at Denali Nat'l Park the next day.

This is a little of what we saw on the Denali Highway on our way to Denali from Copper River. The term Highway is loosely associated with this gravel road, but it wasn't a bad trip....long, but not bad. Our driver was from Alaska and she offered to stop whenever anyone saw any wildlife and we could take photos. It broke up the long ride and I got some good shots. We saw bald eagles, trumpeter swans, arctic ground squirrels, herds of migrating caribou, moose, ptarmigans, and lots of small game.
A bald eagle just sitting on a ridge across the way. I was able to use the digital zoom to get this photo, no telephoto needed. Just think about how large this must have been, though, to be this noticeable from that distance.
It is time for the Trumpeter swans to migrate back for nesting here. There were quite a few of them swimming where the ice had melted on these rivers/streams.
This was an Arctic Ground Squirrel. We saw quite a few of them and they always just pop up and pose so nicely! It is as if to say "what's up"! Another critter we saw a lot of were the snowshoe bunnies, but since we have soooo many bunnies here in Arizona I didn't get very many photos of them, no big deal?

May 18 - Prince William Sound

Prince William Sound was just one of the unforgettable experiences on this cruise tour, but I think it ranks up there near or at the top as far as I am concerned. It was stunningly beautiful, colder than I have ever experienced before and just a truly unforgettable experience. It is probably also where I caught the cold/sinus infection that has plagued me ever since, but even with that it was worth it! What a place to see. Here I am holding a piece of glacial, hundreds of years old, ice that they captured off the cruise boat in a net. It was incredible to me to be doing that.
This is a rogue iceberg that among many that were floating away from the glacier at the end of PWS. The colors of these were just hypnotic, I could barely stand to look away from them. Just magical.
This was a sea lion haul-out rock. There were hundreds of them there! There was a rock away from the shore a bit from where the bull sea lion was protecting his harem and was he annoyed with us for being on his part of the planet! He was just roaring and barking away, even though we were not all that close. I don't see how the sea lions were able to sleep without falling off the face of this rock, but they all were managing to do that.
Some of the icebergs had resident sea otters. Regretfully, I did not catch any otters on their backs in the water, they were so cute. We were told they often give birth and nurse their young on these icebergs. This was a large one.

On the way back to Copper River from Valdez, this moose was on the highway and in no hurry to get out of our way, so the bus stopped and waited for it to move on. It was a large male and was the first good look at a moose while in Alaska. We saw quite a few more while there.

May 17 - Whittier to Valdez to Copper River

This was our last view of the Diamond Princess, our home for the past week. We were somewhat sad to leave her, everything about the cruise portion of the tour was wonderful....the food, the amenities, the service, everything! But, it was time to disembark the ship and board the catamaran which would take us to Valdez. Valdez is in Prince William Sound and was destroyed in the 1963 earthquake, or the subsequent Tsunami was what took out the town. They rebuilt further away from the Sound and it was an interesting little town. Valdez is the northernmost deep water harbor that does not freeze on the continent, so it is the portal for the oil exports.

Prince William Sound is magnificent. We saw it only by cruising through it on the disembarkation day from the ship on our way to Valdez. We did, however, book a Prince William Sound Cruise for the following day which was to be devoted to the Sound totally. I LOVED the photos I got that day, which will follow here. I will only add a few to the blog and will hope you will visit my Flickr site when I can get that organized and finished since it will hold many more photos that I can have here.

We boarded a tour bus and headed from Valdez to Copper River, about a two-hour leisurely tour of the areas between these two places. We stopped at a rest stop, which had obviously had a recent heavy snow, and I took the photo of this one bathroom. We were all relieved to see they had shoveled out one set of rest rooms so we could use the facilities! This was an incredible sight, in some places the depth of the snow was deeper than I was high. we aren't in Arizona anymore, Dorothy!

May 16 - College Fjord

We cruised through College Fjord on this day. The water was, indeed, that blue. We were so relieved to see this under clear skies. It would not have had the same impact with cloudy, foggy skies so we felt fortunate. There were more tidal glaciers, all named after colleges (Yale, Harvards, etc.) than the day before in Glacier Bay. This was a beautiful day, our last full day at sea before disembarking in Whittier, Alaska.

May 15 - Glacier Bay

This is a short clip of a minor glacier calving. It sounded like it was going to be huge, but by the time I got the camera over to that portion of the glacier it was just a few crumbles. I will add a still shot that shows the amazing color of the ice. If it had not been so frigid out on our balcony I would have stayed out there looking at that color all day. This was our day to cruise through Glacier Bay. It had fewer glaciers than the name implies, but they were beautiful. Tomorrow would be the cruise through College Fjord, which I enjoyed even more. Photos to follow!

May 14 - Skagway

This is the famed Yukon Suspension Bridge out of Skagway, Alaska. Tom chose to not cross over this and he took my photo doing it. It was a very wobbly feeling going so high over the river below, but Ernie and I did it together so we were fine. The problem was that once we made it to the other side it started snowing! None of these people is me, I will find the photos from his camera later. For those who don't know, I took along an Ernie (Sesame Street) doll and took his photo looking at all the sites we saw while in Alaska. He rode in my fanny pack for two weeks and saw many wonders at all the places we visited. Now that I am home, I will write a storybook for my granddaughter called "Ernie Goes to Alaska" and use the photos. So, Ernie had no choice but to accompany me, through the snow, across this bridge. He kept on smiling, though!

This is a lake in the Yukon region. It had this magical turquoise color and had most of the ice melted off it. It was beautiful!

Once back on the tour bus, we started heading down the mountain, and where on the way up there were beautiful mountain passes, all we could see was on the way down was snow, white out conditions. It was a scary trip down, but we all made it safely. Our tour bus driver looked to be about 14 years old, so it was a tense trip back, but he managed to get us back to the ship. He was a college student, but they sure do look young these days! For these two Arizona wimps, it was an experience to remember, though not want to repeat.

May 13 - Juneau

We took a photo safari on land and sea while in Juneau. Here is a Humpback Whale arching out of the water a bit. This was taken with a telephoto lens so, while it looks very close to our boat, it was a distance from it....no animals were hurt in this exercise.
Here we have a bouy that has been overtaken by these sea lions. They were barking at us loudly, although they were farther away than this looks. Their coats were just gleaming in the bit of sunshine that peeked through the clouds. Little ones would try to slide up on the bouy and the bigger ones would push them off again, but they kept trying to get up there!
This is that same Humpback, only a prized tail shot. I got better with catching these as I tried more of them. You have to set the camera on sports mode or whatever lets you take rapid-fire shots.
This is the famed Mendenhall Glacier. This site almost made me cry it was so breathtakingly beautiful. I couldn't quite believe I was actually there, seeing it in person. This is truly Alaska now!
This is Mendenhall Lake, formed by the melting glacier and snow runoff. The water was perfectly smooth and showed off the blue reflections. The darker the blue color, the fresher the iceberg is from cracking away from the glacier. Cool, huh?

May 12 - Ketchikan

We arrived at Ketchikan on Monday, boy was it cold! Here is Tom, on our way to buy him an Alaska hat to keep his ears warm. There was a very interesting, and surprisingly reasonable trading post right on the pier that had much better warm hats than we had seen in Arizona (duh).

We then toured through the Rainforest Wildlife Sanctuary. Of course, having a name like that it had to live up to it so we tried out our new raincoats from Cabela's right away. Everything was dripping in lichen and moss. They rescue and try to rehab wildlife and had some reindeer there and this bald eagle. It was huge and won't be able to be released due to damage to one wing. It was so regal-looking. I enjoyed getting such a close-up of this magnificent bird.

For our first taste of how cold Alaska really is in early May, it was indeed cold to these two Arizona wimps.
One interesting sideline to our visit to this rainforest sanctuary was that we have a friend here in Arizona who runs a wildlife rescue foundation. We knew she was going to Alaska to do some of the same work for the summer, but she didn't say where she would be. We walked in to the gift shop and there was Geni! How many thousands of miles away from Arizona were we and we met up with a friendly face we knew! It was a big surprise for all three of us. She has a manager who runs her sancutary when she is gone and she was working there for the summer, what a change for her!

May 10 Leaving Vancouver and First Day at Sea

Here we are, finally on the ship (our airline-delayed group was the last to board the ship before sailing!) and pulling away from the dock at Vancouver. How nice to be aboard!

The next photo is shot down through several deck levels through the midship atrium area. It is a gorgeous ship.

The last photo was on Sunday, May 11. It was our first full day at sea. We passed so many of these fjords, very beautiful. I am so thankful we had a room with a balcony, it was cold but just so beautiful to stand out there and take photos.

I will keep adding travelog tidbits as I have time, so there may be some interruptions until I have my husband back home from the hospital, hopefully soon!

Good News/Bad News/Hopeful News

I have no photos to share. My expectations were to be able to reconstruct our journey to Alaska when home to show what we saw at each port of call or stop along the interior tours in Alaska. Well, my husband suffered a mild "silent" heart attack on our first day back home in Arizona, necessitating a trip to Urgent Care, followed by an ambulance trip to the hospital Emergency Room, to be followed by a stay in the ICU, followed by a stay in the Telemetry Unit where he underwent dialysis, monitoring, etc. to arrive at the point tonight, where we do not know how long he will be away from home, but we do know he is making progress so I rejoice! No photos have been harmed in this exercise, they are downloaded and awaiting my time and attention to enter them in an organized fasion on this blog and in my Flickr account. Once I have my husband back at home, I will be able to stop running back and forth to the hospital and pay attention to things I HAVE to do and WANT to do here at home. I beg your patience and understanding as we do the immediate, high-priority things that must be done. In the end, I promise you photos of great beauty and links to many photos of such diversity and beauty that will share with you some of the beauty that we saw firsthand.

Blessings to all...Susan

Still in Alaska

We are still in Alaska, having difficulties making our laptop computer work with WiFi and with the limited time on the hotel's computers I haven't added anything to the blog for a while....sorry. I have thousands of photos to share so will do that when I can settle down for awhile and get it done. We will travel by train to Anchorage tonight and be there until Monday, when we we fly to Seattle, collect our van and head for home. the weather so far has been sunny this week, rainy for the cruise portion of the tour, and overall better than expected for here at this time of the year.

Until I can download some of my photos here and at Flickr, I bid you adieu and will check in later.....Susan

Washington - Day One

We arrived across the Washington State border this morning fairly early from Oregon. We chose to go toward Portland along the Washington side of the Columbia River Gorge. Two years ago we traveled the length of the Gorge along the Oregon side and found the WA side to be interesting, also. One of these shots is near the Portland end of the Gorge, another is across the river from Multnomah Falls. We saw this up close and personal two years ago on the OR side and it was magnificent.
Even though we saw it today across the expanse of the river, it was still impressive.

The Bonneville Dam is the other photo. This is remarkable due to the fact that at this time there is controversy between the Feds and the Environmentalists over the trapping/killing of seas lions who camp out every year at the base of the dam and eat a ton of salmon who use the fish ladders to go to their spawning grounds up river each year. It was so interesting because as we stopped alongside the river/dam to take these photos we saw lots of sea lion heads pop up for air, so they were there in force. I don't seem to have caught any of them in the photos, but they were there, probably munching away underwater on the many salmon.

We are staying two nights at a nice Best Western motel in Tumwater, WA (home of Olympia beer and their Artesians!) and then early Saturday morning we will head for Sea-Tac airport to fly to Vancouver to begin our Alaskan adventure. It is nice to be back in the Northwest again!

In Oregon

We have encountered some laptop/WiFi difficulties so far but found a good connection today, no trip blog entries so far, but I hope to do better now. This is a photo taken while on the road in eastern Oregon. There were many mountain peaks with snow such as this and there was a cold wind blowing. Tomorrow we hope to be at least as far as Portland for the night, and then on to Seattle on Friday. Good trip so far, but we sure miss having the convenience of a motorhome! Until next time...

Last HOT day for awhile.....

Ernie has asked if he can go along with us on our Alaskan adventure to provide personal commentary to his friend, Aubrey, and show her where we are visiting on this trip. I guess the rest of you will have to settle for keeping up with us through this blog.

You all stay well, we will try to do the same, and will check in through this blog as we travel along. Excitement rising....

South Carolina Marshland WIP

This is where I am with this painting. I am not sure whether I am submitting it now when I am pleased with it so far because I am afraid that once I start putting the water reflecitons I will ruin it or just to show a work in progress. It has lots to be done but I don't want to do more with shading, etc. until I get those dreaded water reflections done.

The ref photo was taken while we were driving along a highway on the way from Edisto Beach to Charleston, SC last summer. I don't know if this is cultivated grassland, marshland, tidal flats or what since I am unfamiliar with this area, but everything was such a nice green color and the water reflections were what prompted me to take the photos, so I guess I had better do them justice.

I don't know if I will finish this before we leave on our Alaskan adventure, but we'll see. Stay tuned for the upcoming travelogue as we journey toward our cruise fun.

Still nothing to show

I have been tying up loose ends, preparing to pack in earnest for our Alaskan adventure, so have not been painting and probably will not do any painting until we return. This trip will be all about photography and experiencing Alaska in person.

I have added a link on the sidebar to an interesting and exciting, often hilarious website I have found. Well, my husband found the site and referred me to it, I have to give credit where credit is due! He was looking at the Motorhome Forum and clicked on the forum site that discusses camping recipes and many people were following the recipes submitted by a person whose website is called "Pioneer Woman". The link is http://thepioneerwoman.com/ and it is very entertaining to read, as well as having super recipes. Her writing style is very self-effacing and often reminiscent of Lucille Ball's adventures and I love her attitude. If you are surfing the web and want to look at something unique, this one is a hoot! It is packed with recipes, a romance story, great photography and lots to explore. I am hooked.

Nothing to show....

I have no painting photos to show after yesterday's painting session at the Art Club. This is because I was painting on Yupo and was already on the second try at painting the Buchart Gardens painting on this piece of Yupo and had wiped out the first attempt and started another. I am none too pleased with Try Two, either! For some reason I am having difficulty setting the early, background values properly and it is throwing me off for the rest of the painting. So, thinking I have nothing to lose (other than yesterday's paint used!), I will try some of the lifting techniques used by George James and see what happens to this mess. If that fails, I will wipe the whole thing down again and start over. After having done two successful landscape paintings (with ponds or streams) I am not sure why I can't do this one this time that has a pond with lily pads. Must not be my time to do this scene on Yupo. If a third time fails I will not beat myself up about it but will save the photo for watercolor paper. I am just stubborn enough to want to do this beautiful scene well so will persevere and get it done properly one of these days.

Mountain Vista

This was an exercise with the mentorees (using one of their photos) to practice some different techniques, such as spattering and mass foliage. For once, I tried to raise the color in the mountains instead of trying to paint them as seen in the photo and like how they turned out. To set them back, I used washes of white gouache after they were dry and the foreground painted. I saw this method in a book and will keep it in my mind for when I inadvertently miss on the values and need to set mountains back farther for perspective.

I also was re-trying Kilamanjaro paper again. I thought I liked it before, when I had bought a 25-sheet pack of it a few years ago. After using some Arches I decided that was more the paper for me and have not used Kilamanjaro since. Interestingly, I noticed yesterday that I didn't get the unintended blossoms that I sometimes get on Arches paper, where I don't want them. In my logical mind (assuming I have one!) I think it might have something to do with the fact that Kilamanjaro is a softer, more absorbant paper and maybe it stores a bit more moisture just below the surface and doesn't let the wetter paint push the pigment, like it stays wet longer? If this is so, I may have to switch back to Kilamanjaro since painting here on the desert is a constant struggle to get washes laid down without blossoms. Hmmmm.

Image size 11x15 on Kilamanjaro watercolor paper

Yupo Petroglyphs II

Here is the second in my Yupo Petroglyphs series. I just love working with all this texture. A friend at the Art Club yesterday gave me a strip of what is called Sequin Waste. It is what is left when the machines punch out sequins and is like a round mesh. It works for both negative lifting as well as positive stamping on the Yupo, neat stuff. Thanks, Betty!

I don't know what I would do without my generous friends since I painted this in this size (12x22) to fit into a frame (19x28) given to me by another friend, who had a number of large metal frames given to him that he couldn't use so he shared them with several of us who were very pleased to get them. Thanks now go to Woody! The frame is a coppery metal, which should look great with these colors.

My goal for this one was to make the Kokopelli's and other figures sort of hidden among the texture so you have to look for them to see them. This Yupo is great fun to work with and makes for a nice change once in awhile from my more controlled efforts to create something realistic.

Rusty Ranch Bucket

This is my submission for the Watercolor Workshop's April project where everyone paints from the same photo. We all usually do a different take on the same subject, this time I made the photo more Southwestern by placing the fence and rusty pieces in a desert setting.

I tried painting foliage very loosely and flowing this time and want to return to my usual method of using a texture brush to lay in the glazes. But, I like painting rust!

This painting is available as an original painting, but also has been made into notecards. Let me know if you need some!

Newspaper Rock Final

I finished this full sheet Newspaper Rock this morning. I may have miscounted, but there seem to be 88 glyphs on this. The spattering alone took three sessions. Now to mat and frame this, hopefully without breaking my big sheet of glass. It will go into a 28 x 36 frame.

Now, on to my next victim, a desert scene I started at the Art Club Thursday.

Newspaper Rock WIP 3

Now, all the masking has been rubbed off and I will begin adding lots of textures to this. My hand hurts!

The fun part begins....

Newspaper Rock WIP 2

I have completed this to the stage where all the background color has been added. Next, I will finish removing ALL the masking, that is if my hand holds out. On a full sheet painting, with all this masking of the figures, that is a lot of rubbing! In addition to the masking on the figures, I used an old toothbrush to flick masking all over the painting so when it is removed it will look like rocky textures with light spots sprinkled. I have started removing the masking and so far I am glad I did the flicking ofn the masking fluid because it looks cool. But, like I said, that is a lot of masking to rub off. After the masking is removed, I will begin texturing the rock and the glyphs and enhancing the cracks and fissures in the rock wall. Did I mention that this is a full sheet painting?

Gina's Hollyhocks

This is a painting we finished in this morning's mentoring session. The reference photo was provided, with permission to paint, by Gina who lives in the Seattle area. These are her hollyhocks and I loved the look in the photo of the flowers against the white trellis. I like the whole painting, but wish I had gotten the trellis slats more straight. Sigh. too late for that now and I do like the rest of it.

The mentorees did a fabulous job of theirs, when I get some photos of theirs I will post them here, with their permission of course.

This was a fun one to do, I may have to do another one only apply the trellis masking tape more carefully!

Newspaper Rock WIP

This is the first WIP I am submitting of the earlier smaller study of Newspaper Rock. I am four hours into this full sheet painting, including three glazes of the yellow ochre and three hours of painting the glyphs with masking fluid. I am using Pebeo Drawing Gum for masking and it is a gray color when dry, the masking will be removed once I glaze on all the rock colors, leaving the ochre colored glyphs.

Seeing as there is a Vanguard Artists meeting this afternoon at the museum and a weekend ArtChix sale, I will probably not do anything with this for a few days. Once I start glazing the rock colors, it usually goes fairly rapidly from that point.

Have a good weekend, all!