[sic]

I’ve only been to the 5,475-foot-high Dante’s View in Death Valley once (in 2002) but it is a spectacular place in a park full of spectacles that leaves an indelible impression. One not quite as indelible as the national park’s 11,049-foot Telescope Peak that I summited in 2006, but enough so that when I saw this advertisement in the April issue of a magazine, I had no doubt as to the vista in the final photograph (most likely a composite of a stock image taken at Dante’s View and a studio shot of the woman):

The ad’s headline “Let Your Worries Go,” could be the slogan for Death Valley what with its unmatched, beauty, solitude and serenity. Got to find a way to get back there this year.

Though channelized since the 1930s the concrete banks of Ballona Creek can be surprisingly serene — especially the stretch flowing across Culver City near Overland Avenue. Many have been the times I’ve pedaled through there along its bikeway either on my way to work or on my way home and I’ve wanted to dismount and just hang a spell. Well yesterday I did so, stopping on the way home so that the bike and I could go bellies-up by the water’s edge — for several reasons:

• In celebration of putting another issue of the magazine to bed.
• In gratitude of it now actually being daylight when I leave the office thanks to Daylight Savings Time.
• As an attaboy for biking every day to and from work this week.
• And because on a bike, as opposed to in a car, opportunities such asthis are just inherently accessible.

You don’t need me wasting keystrokes attempting to explain just vast and magnificent Tanzania’s most famous national park is, when this picture will do just fine:

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Snapped from the saddle Saturday biking back home from a trip to the Sherman Oaks batting cages with Blogdowntown’s Eric Richardson. Eric wisely opted to subway it back to town from the North Hollywood Red Line station. I on the otherhand didn’t and subsequently got drenched when the rains that weren’t supposed to come until later, came early…. about a mile after I took this picture.

P.S. The only thing the batting cages showed me was that if I can’t hit for shit against a machine, how the hell do I think I can make contact against a human?

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Isn’t it funny how we forget about stuff. I was cruising through the back end of the ridiculous amount of photos I have online at Flickr, and these two Santa Cruz island foxes showed up, bringing back a flood of good memories of the days I spent in November 2004 with a crew of docents from the Los Angeles Zoo. We were there as guests of the Nature Conservancy and as part of their island fox recovery program our purpose was to assemble captive breeding pens for the island’s decimated island fox population.

In looking further around my Flickr stream I was disturbed that this was pretty much the only photo from the excursion. What had happened to the others? Had they been deleted? OMGWTF? Then, from the cobwebby recesses of my memory I pulled out the recollection that I never uploaded any to Flickr. I put them up on shutterfly.com because back then I was all into making keepsake books for my photos. Here’s the link if you want to check it out. Or you can view a slideshow of all the photos here.

It was a remarkable experience and I’m glad not only that I was reminded of it, but relieved that I was able to remember where I’d stored the memories.

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Once again, a little sumpthin’ from the archives, taken at the south rim of the Grand Canyon that was remarkably and gloriously lousy with one of my favorite creatures on the planet on the last day of our 4,500-mile roadtrip in 2006. Susan and I had seen condors via binoculars a long way off the previous day at Vermillion Cliffs, and I had seen my first wild one back in 2003 biking north of San Luis Obispo on our way from San Francisco to Los Angeles, but this was just jaw dropping to be this close to the majestic ethereal birds in such a soul-opening place.

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Just one from the archives, snapped late December.

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Just a random photo upload to break up the text monotony — this one being one of the first photos I took upon arrival with Susan at the Serengeti in Tanzania during our everything-we-could-ask-for African honeymoon odyssey in the summer of 2005. Their attentions were toward a solitary warthog whose scent this previously lounging hunting party of five had just picked up. The warthog was making its way over the bottom of a dry wash a couple hundred yards to the right and moving further away from the lions who made something of an effort to stalk and flank the creature but soon realized it would be too much effort for too little a meal.

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Instead of Jefferson up past the Target, I now roll home up Sepulveda to the Ballona Creek Bikeway and come across it to either Overland or Duquesne.  Last night in the near-pitch black I was struck by the curving course of the waterway under the arching ped/bike bridge spanning it and stopped about midway between Sepulveda and Overland to brace the cam against the ragged chainlink for this 15-second exposure.

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