We all have a special place that we feel is our own secret place. It might only be a few short steps from a well known and photographed spot but we've found a nook or view we call our own. I will start with a new favorite spot that takes a bit of effort and permissions to get to. How much you want to tell us of the location is entirely up to you. So, Let's see your secret place.
I refer to this secret place as The Potholes. I feel very fortunate to have had a friend tell me about it. Fortunately for him, I suffer from CRS We are hoping for a good monsoon to replenish the waterholes.
I still don't have a good photo from this location but hopefully I'll get one this summer. This is a place I found deep in my backyard that for some reason has really captured my attention. It takes me about 5.5 hours of hiking to reach this spot. Perhaps it is just the solitude that makes it seem so special. I find myself referring to this area as "my tarn". One of these days I'll come up with a real name for it.
I stumbled upon this milky white slot canyon while lost and searching for something completely different. Its walls are easily 100 feet high and slowly narrow until it becomes a very dark tunnel at the end. The walls are like chalk and parts of it could crumble off just by being touched. So I don't plan to reveal the location. Unlike Erik, I really don't have a very good shot of this place ... at least nothing that comes close to doing justice to it.
Posted by John Freeman on June 29, 2014 at 11:11 PM
I call this shot "Isolation and Solitude". This was taken some 7 miles North-Northwest of Keeline, WY near the farm & ranch where I grew up. I had not been to this location since I was 16 or 17 years old. That was some 47 years ago. My Grade School and High School buddy and I used to spend many a summer day scouring these hills and buttes for fossils and arrow heads. We have climbed to the very tip at the right hand side of the largest butte which is some 80-100 ft high. We would spend hours around this pond trying to catch tadpoles. I hadn't seen my buddy for some 35 years and this past Saturday I drove out to their ranch and visited him and asked permission to go back to the location to photograph it. Today I got up about 5am and drove back into the hills to the location. It was a dead calm morning and the reflections I remembered from my childhood greeted me. This is one of my Gigapan photos. Made up of a 3 bracketed HDR processed image, it is 36,245 x 16,217 pixels, or about 121" x 57" @ 300dpi.
Gotta emerge from hibernation to slip a couple in here. I feel like a lot of the places I go are sort of open secrets, areas people sometimes hear about, but few visit and fewer photograph. But here are a couple so obscure that I don't even know of anyone else who's hiked them, and I'd be surprised if even this very well-traveled forum can guess the locations.
This first is a region of some of the most convoluted badlands I've ever seen, but with a twist: while such badlands are usually formed from soft sedimentary layers or volcanic ash, this maze is carved out of pure granite.
And here's another place I really like, in some ways just a typical random spot in the Great Basin, but with views and big volcanic pinnacles rearing up out of the high sage desert, it has tons more potential. I suspect it could also get great spring flowers in a good season.
Discussion
10 repliesThis first is a region of some of the most convoluted badlands I've ever seen, but with a twist: while such badlands are usually formed from soft sedimentary layers or volcanic ash, this maze is carved out of pure granite.