Ode to the Butt Shot

Mile 9752. Armitage Park in Eugene, OR. 892 miles from home.

Trains, trains, trains. That’s what it feels like anyway. We hit a bit of an anomaly in BC in Spences Bridge – what must be the hottest and most arid part of the province. Temperatures almost touching 100 degrees when we arrived with little cool down at night. Our campground bordered an active train track. It sat slightly below the campground and our site was on the far side, but still, when a train came through the ground rumbled. Across the river was another active railway and all night long trains traveled up and down the canyon, horns and all. These two railways, Canadian Pacific and Canadian National follow the Trans-Canada Highway through scenic Fraser Canyon, where over time man has travelled by foot, boat, mule, horse, wagon, steam tractor, automobile, train, and even camel.

A brief stop at the narrowest point on the Fraser River, 36 yards wide to be exact, to ride a descending gondola across the canyon and down to the river.

This is Hell’s Gate, the most difficult section of railway and road construction. To haul supplies upstream the stern-wheel SS Skuzzy was built and then hauled by ropes attached to the canyon walls by bolts.

A different railway bordered last night’s campground, our first back in the lower 48. This track was at the same elevation of the campground and only a chain-link fence separated us from the trains that ran all night. It was like sleeping through multiple 3.0 earthquakes. After awhile it lulled me to sleep, but Mark was not so lucky.

Between those two train stops though was our last night in Canada, a night spent with a dear friend of mine and her husband, “the guy”, Mark the Moose Man. As you can imagine, having just spent a summer in moose country, this was a topic of great interest to us. Check out his website – All About Moose. Good conversation and home cooking made the visit pass way to quickly, but a perfect way to end our visit in Canada.

As the trip winds down I imagine the blog will transition from one of history and activities to a random collection of thoughts. I wrote about cats earlier because I’m a cat owner and occasionally miss mine at home, but dogs rule on this trip. Our kind, people traveling without pets, make up a tiny percentage of campers. A neighbor in Stewart BC had five small, fluffy, white dogs in a fenced area outside their trailer. Pure bred. While I don’t know this, my feeling is that she was trying to sell a few on her road trip. That’s an extreme of course. Most campers just travel with one or two dogs, with behavior running from the super sweet dog who poked his head into our trailer one morning to say hello to the one that barked every time I left my trailer. What gets me though is cleanup. I lost count of the number of full poop bags lying around on the side of a trail or the most ridiculous, on the ground at the sani-dump, graduating or maybe demoted from hazardous waste to litter. Either way, I can’t get over how inconsiderate people are, passing the responsibility of throwing away this bag onto someone else.

Photography challenges continued throughout the trip. I blame it on inexperience, but after talking with some photographers at the observation platform in Hyder I realize it’s also the nature of this type of photography. I’m photographing a fast moving eagle using a fast shutter speed when a slow moving bear comes on the scene and I forget to change the settings making the photo so dark you can’t even see the bear. I’m using my zoom lens for bears off in the distance when one shows up right next to the car or have my wide angle lens to capture the beautiful view when a moose shows up in the distance. After awhile I started using my iPhone for my wide angle photography so that I could leave the zoom lens on the Canon.

Often I adjust brightness for a particular photo and then forget to change it back to the default. Or better yet, the settings change on their own when I bump the camera and I don’t realize this until the subject is gone. It’s too dark out or the sun is too high and behind the subject. If I’m in the car I have to account for the movement of the car.

Mark keeps telling me, “You’ll get it”, and I keep saying, “When? The trip is almost over.” After awhile it just becomes something to laugh at. And really, when I look at my body of work, I’m really quite pleased. But the one consistent issue has been my position behind the subject. So here it is, a picture poem – Ode to the Butt Shot.