Weekend Getaway - Painted Hills

It didn’t take us very long after we got back from our May expedition to be mentally raring to get out again.  It took us a couple of good weekends to clean Beast  after 3 weeks on the road, but by the end of that second weekend we were starting to go stir crazy.  So where to?  The Painted Hills naturally.

This was the first of what we hope will become the normal pattern with Beast - a long weekend to somewhere nearby that gives us an opportunity to focus on photography and generally get away from it all.  That’s why we bought the Sportsmobile, so we could easily get up and go.

We were so ready to be gone that we decided to leave after work on Thursday.  Since I’d put in long days during the 4 day work week, we left rather late in the day and the sky was getting dark just as we were approaching the monument.  On the road in, we passed by our backup camping site.  It was full, with about a dozen vehicles organized like they were in a convoy.  It wasn’t hopeful.

But our destination was on a patch of BLM land that you have to drive through the Painted Hills Unit to get to.  As we crossed the cattle guard at the edge of the unit, darkness had set in and . . . bingo!  Spot open.  We pulled over and set up camp.  

Since it was so late, and the forecast was for cloudy weather with possible drizzles during the night, we decided to sleep in and start the trip refreshed.  The next morning we woke up on our own, still comparatively early for most folks, and were greeted by some new neighbors.

I guess you can’t really ask for much when it’s a free site.  After about 20 minutes of staring at us, they must have decided we were no threat (or were pretty boring) and they went on their way.

We took our time getting out to photograph the hills.  Things were pretty overcast and it was rather difficult to make a strong landscape image because the light was so flat.

After making several images I followed Ann and started making my way up the hill.  The wind had picked up too and would blow in heavy gusts at times, so it started to feel like things weren’t going to work out that morning.

However, at one point I found myself out on a bluff I’d photographed from before and, after another photograph I felt would have been much better in different lighting, I noticed one of the many barren small trees on the bluff and asked myself, “What Len would do with that?”  Len has this wonderful way of focusing very close on the detail of an object - a leaf on a branch, a blooming flower, etc. - and throwing everything else out of focus.  I suddenly started seeing things differently.  Then I asked myself, “Now, what would you do with that?” It dawned on me that the wind blowing the long grasses was no different than waves on the ocean, and started thinking of the image as capturing that movement over time, and this is what I came up with:

After a few moments I was no longer thinking of the grand landscape, but at the landscape around my feet.  And it turned into a field day.  These dandelion-type things were all around me, except instead of one inch in diameter, they were more like 6 inches in diameter - easily photographed with my 90mm lens.  However the wind was now an issue, so I used a ground-cloth to block the wind, waited for the wind to die down, and made several different closeup images of these poof-balls (I'm sure this plant has a scientific and a practical name, but it can't be nearly as interesting as "poof-balls".  I not only like saying it, I like writing it - poof-ball, poof-ball, poof-ball!  You can't not smile when you say it!):

I kept at it a while longer, and returned to the movement of the wind concept:

We eventually called it a morning and made breakfast.

The rest of the day we explored different locations we had visited previously and wanted to visit again, but I wound up not making any decent images.  It remained cloudy and there wasn’t much of a sunset, so we returned to our still-available campsite just out the Painted Hills’ back door to get ready for the next morning.

As usual, the day started very early.  Surprisingly a vehicle pulled into the parking area as I was making coffee, waiting for twilight to come.  It was another photographer, and he headed off in the other direction towards the main hills.  (Glad to know we're not the only nutters around here.)  Ann and I had decided we were going to start with a plateau to the east of the main hills and take it from there.

It was yet another cloudy morning, although threatening to clear, so the predawn light was really funky.

When we make these images, the eye can’t always tell what we’re going to get.  However the camera can see in all kinds of details that we can’t even with just a bit of light, so we’ve learned to at least start exposing earlier rather than later.  

We’d arrived perhaps a bit too soon and had to wait quite a while for conditions to really change (and start that race with the sun), so I’d been around a while when the photographer who had arrived earlier came over to ask a few questions.  Andrew was his name, and he was on his way through, moving back home to the UK after 17 years in Australia, with a short stop in the US to photograph in Oregon and Washington.  While we were chatting, the light turned a strange reddish color and I started photographing while talking to him (well, he was an interesting fellow, and it was interesting light so I had to do both . . . I think he understood).

As is so often the case, such bizarre light lasts only a few moments so we quickly got back to our conversation.  I wound up gave him a couple of ideas for locations, wished him luck on his travels and then he set off to head down the hill to photograph some other formations.  

I got back to looking for new images, but like the previous day, the overcast skies made photographing compelling images difficult.  Some subjects are exceptional under overcast skies, others not so much.

Somewhat frustrated, Ann and I headed down to the picnic area for breakfast.  By the time we were done, the clouds had broken up and we were getting some lovely shadows in the hills.  I used the opportunity to hop on top of Beast to get a view I hadn’t been able to get previously because of a small hill in front of the parking area.

It’s nice to be able to get 10 feet+ above ground to make an image.  

We decided to go to an area we’d scouted the day before and to hike into some hills that are somewhat off the road.  Last time we were at the Painted Hills a Ranger informed us that we could walk anywhere there is vegetation, just stay off the bare hills.  So Ann and I hiked in about half a mile onto a flat area between several hills that you could barely see from the road.

It wound up not being nearly as interesting as we’d hoped, and the light was getting pretty harsh when not covered by clouds, but I still managed to make a couple of images.

After we got back to Beast, we headed out to go exploring.  We wound up driving some back roads by the John Day River, and then finding a splendid tight, rocky valley where Girds Creek runs.  The sun was pretty harsh, but we marked it on our maps to return to later in the fall or early spring when the sun would be lower and casting more interesting shadows on the rock faces.

After stopping in Mitchell to grab some ice-cream, we made it back to the Painted Hills Unit in late afternoon as the clouds were rolling back in.  Ann and I did a bit more photography, and then decided to call it a day as it became apparent that yet again there wouldn’t be an interesting sunset.

The biggest problem with dry camping on BLM land is that there’s no guarantee that your place will be free.  We found that out on the Grand Staircase Escalante and had that happen again in the Painted Hills.  There was not one, but two vehicles where we had camped the past couple of nights.  Time for the fall-back sites. 

We drove down the road for about a mile (just before the locked BLM gate) and lucked out, our first alternative was vacant.  We looked around for a fairly level area, and found one at the extreme end of the campsite.  We set up camp (i.e. popped the top) and made dinner.

While we were getting ready for bed, we could hear vehicles pull up, then turn around no doubt frustrated that the site was taken.  At one point, a truck returned and a 20-ish woman and man approached us and asked if we knew of any places they could camp.  She’d camped at this location several times in the past and was surprised to find someone here.  I told them of a couple of places we knew of (one near the two other vehicles) as well as along the entrance road.  

They then made some comment about just wanting to make dinner, eat and crash after a hard day’s work.  I asked them what they were working on.  They mentioned that they’d been volunteering doing habitat restoration for the Nature Conservancy.  At that point I said, “If you’re volunteering for them, you’re welcome to set up camp here and not waste your time looking for another site.”  They were surprised, but very thankful.  So while they lit up their fire and started dinner, Ann and I started getting ready for the next morning’s shoot.

Which, you know the refrain now, started very early.  

We decided we wanted to start the day at the same plateau we did the previous morning, but to make our way farther out and see what we could do with some formations that are most clearly seen from the eastern end.  The hike out gave us some different perspectives on some familiar subjects in the pre-dawn light. 

As the sun made its way towards us, I looked back and realized we had subjects in both directions,

so I kept turning back and forth as I thought about the types of images I wanted to make.

Eventually, the sun rose high enough to remove the color from the sky, and then peeked over the hills behind us giving strange streaks of sun across the landscape.  After giving it a while to rise (and a lot of “well, maybe it won’t look so bad” photographs that look, well, pretty bad), the sun rose enough to start making interesting images again.

And, in time, the landscape became more of a landscape.  And as pleasing as this image is, it let us know that this shot is probably better done in the early spring or late fall because of the dominant shadow from the near-by hill top.  I often fail to remember how far north the sun will get in the summer compared to the winter here in Oregon.  Some things you just have to be reminded of byseeing it.

The hike back to Beast gave us a whole new photographic environment.  Same landscape, entirely different light.

So we took our time working our way back to the parking lot. 

When we got to Beast, I told Ann I wanted to check out what the main hills looked like.  I wasn’t expecting much because we would be looking directly into the sun and the hills were rich with moisture, which meant that the colors were deeper.  But what that did was make the white areas (salt?) and light grasses appear much more prominent than usual. 

So instead of photographing the familiar hillside, I pulled out my longest lens and focused on the pan in front of it.

Eventually, it was time to call it a weekend and we packed up to head home.

As a weekend photo trip it was pretty much all we could hope for.  You can’t complain too much about an opportunity to get out in a beautiful environment for a few days of photographing.  Because the place is so familiar, we don’t want to just make the same images over and over, which forces us to dig deeper in how we see the landscape.  That, plus the less-than-ideal skies for much of the time, helped me feel ok about pointing the camera in directions and at things I probably would not have otherwise.  Call it play, call it experimentation, but that’s how we learn.  It sure beats sitting in a classroom or in front of a computer monitor.  

Now to just get out and play more often!