We spent Wednesday and Thursday in Capitol Reef National Park. It’s about 300 miles from my house but has almost identical elevation I’m about 4500′ and CRNP is about 5000′ (in fact, it might be even a bit higher). But on Wednesday when we arrived, it was 94°.

Good news is that next week I’m heading east with my fishing buddy Dan. His brother needs some help driving his truck from Virginia to Utah. So we’re flying to Tennessee, fishing the Smokies, then up to Virginia to fish the Rapidan and Moormans. We’re hunting out the southern and northern Appalachian strains of native brookies. Lets hope the weather is more cooperative.

Here are some photos of Capitol Reef:

Down-drafting night winds cool the canyons. And the plants are shaken. It’s like another spring with everything awakening, only this time rousing from the slumber of hazy summer doldrums. Chilly nights, warm, dry days prep the mountains for fall’s color burst. But now, here at the cusp of autumn, it only flirts with a glimpse of what will come. As many as can busily store energy for the long winter ahead.

The seasons twine about, precessing around each year which are mocked at by the *Jardine Juniper looking down at us from another four miles up the trail. The young-looking aspen surrounds the juniper’s mountain and taunts Jardine’s **youth—Quakies’ braided trunks nothing in comparison to its own roots coursing through acres of soil.

Now, at the end of summer, age spots appear—holes eaten through like so many moths on wool—in stark contrast to the smooth white skin of its bark. Other trees are creased and scarred with branch nodes—millions of eyes turned to our every move. These riddled leaves are a temporary condition, remedied every year for generations.

I will go home and turn my thoughts to cool night air breezing through my windows. To the sun marching southward along the 9000′ spine of mountains a mile from my house. I will hope for the colors splattered across its canvas. And I will dream of cutthroats, their orange slash a reminder year round of autumns that have been and will be.

** Quaking Aspen (Populus tremuloides) reproduce through both sexual reproduction and cloning. Stands of them here in the Great Basin are thought be as old as the last glacial period, 10,000-13,000 years ago.

While I’m getting my post together about fish pain and cruelty, thought I’d drop a couple of photos to look at. Hopefully I’ll be fishing for an hour or two later this afternoon on the Blacksmith Fork River.

I’m learning about HDR and tone mapping. So here are some (mostly) overdone tone mapped images that I took on Easter. (Except the sunrises, I took those the day before, and I had to include some fishy pics.)

I’ll learn some restraint, but it’s kind of fun to just blast them out like this. Check out Trey Ratcliff’s website, Stuck in Customs (that link takes you to his HDR tutorial, which has some nice samples of this type of thing) for more of this type of post-processing (except he goes to much cooler places than I do).

Anybody else out there messing with HDR and tone mapping? What photo techniques are you learning/working on?

As I was preparing them for the web, I got a wild hair and decided to make them all (almost) sepia tone vignettes.

I hope you enjoy them.

Fishing The Basin. I snapped over 150 pictures. I had my Olympus E-510 with me (first time I took it fishing). I hope you enjoy the pictures as much as I enjoyed taking them (and fishing). Plenty of fish were caught. All cutts. Nothing under 8" and nothing over 13".

Click below to check out the gallery.

For text about this area, try Sleepless Autumn Night.