Blacktooth From Highland Park

Throughout this past spring, I constantly told my wife that I planned to spend some considerable time in the Cloud Peak Wilderness during the first portion of July, focusing on capturing images of my own backyard.  I know that I have wanderlust and am drawn to far off places, often neglecting the wonderful imagery found near Sheridan.  I also, as my business has grown, have been asked for more and more images of the local area for use in Dr's offices, local banks and even the homes of friends and acquaintances.  Therefore, I purposed to work hard at spending more of my photographic energies closer to home.

Despite my best laid plans, throughout the spring, snow flew heavy and often in the Bighorns, accumulating impressive amounts of snowpack that were above 1000% of normal (that's not a typo!) in early June.  I knew then that my plans for July were in serious jeopardy.

Once my busy June wedding schedule ended, I caved into my wanderlust and headed west and north, abandoning my plans for the wilderness due to the still lingering snowpack.  I wouldn't think about those plans until school started again in the fall.

Once school began again in August, I started lamenting the fact that I had not made it into the wilderness over the summer, so after I finished working through wedding photos on September 4th, I left home at 1:00 and rode my 4 wheeler to the end of Little Goose road and trekked the 5 miles into Highland Park.  I got there at 4:43 after lugging my 60# pack up over the two passes along the route, sometimes cursing the extra 30#s of photo equipment, including my array of lenses, a Manfrotto 303 spherical panoramic head, tripod, filters and other misc. stuff.  The views, though, were worth the price of admission.  I'll share some of them here.

When I got to Highland Park, a cloudless sky greeted me.  I trekked about the ridge above the park and shot several panoramic sequences, later stitching them together with software.

The image below is an amazing shot in that it is actually a 3 row panorama.  I shot 11 images across for 3 different levels of this image.  Once it was all stitched together, the file size is actually 1GB and reveals crazy detail even when zoomed all the way in.  I could print this image 8 feet tall and over 25' wide with little image degradation at all.

As the sun settled below the ridgetops, golden light painted Blacktooth and Mt. Woolsey with vivid Alpenglow.  The image directly below is an HDR image, done using Nik HDR efex pro software.  I'm not sure I like it.  Others similar to it down the page were done using graduated filters and are not HDR images.

I climbed into my sleeping bag at 9:00 that evening and I slept under the stars, setting my alarm for 11:00PM.  I knew that by then the moon would have set, leaving a black sky for maximum star impact.  I'm still muttering under my breath as I forgot to pack my long exposure remote control for the trip.  I had brought my small remote, but not the one to allow for extended exposure times beyond the 30 seconds my camera would allow.  If I had brought the correct remote, I could have had some incredible star trail images.  I guess what it means is that I'm just going to have to go back next summer!  Meanwhile, you can glimpse the milky way below.  I believe that the extremely bright star in the last images is actually Jupiter.

After heading back to bed after shooting a number of star images, I set my alarm for 5:30 to catch the rising sun.  When I awoke, I knew the hazy outline of Blacktooth was not just from gloopy contacts.  Sometime after I had gone to bed the second time, a bank of smoke had climbed over the distant peaks.  A think pall of the stuff clung to the peaks, making for less than ideal sunrise images.  I'll leave you with these, letting them speak much more than I can to the effects of the smoke.

All in all, it was a great one night trip and I look forward to another similar adventure (with the right remote) next summer!  Goodness we live in a beautiful location.