The bobbing of the taxing plane on an uneven tarmac meant I have finally landed in Petropavlovsk-Kamchatsky, Kamchatka. My stop here was only temporary. After a few days of waiting in an old Soviet-built hotel for the weather to clear, I was given the green light. The MI-8 helicopter, the workhorse of the Russian aviation of the Russian Far East, was taking me to Ozernovsky, […]
Kamchatka: the MI-8 helicopter Read
In the summer of 2011, I spent over a month on Kamchatka Peninsula in the Russian Far East. For the most part, I was working as as a fisheries sustainability expert in a fishing town of Ozernovsky, population 2,000. The Ozernaya River, born at Kurilskoe Lake about 40 kilometers inland, and emptying into the Sea of Okhotsk just past the town, has the largest sockeye
Continued from Olympic Peninsula – an aerial view. Part I. We were stranded on an abandoned airstrip 20 miles from the nearest town. Even at this remote location we had cell phone reception. Jane, our pilot, called her husband. They had a second plane, a tiny Piper, with a front seat for the pilot and a back seat for two people, with one seat belt to share
Olympic Peninsula, Part II Read
As I’ve mentioned in the last post, I made a couple of flights last fall over the Olympic Peninsula, Washington to photograph some of the key rivers the Wild Salmon Center has been working on. It was a gray, foggy morning, which cleared by mid-day, when the sun was high up, making the scenery below rather contrasty. What did stand out on that trip was
Olympic Peninsula – an aerial view. Part I. Read
A winter trip to Juneau isn’t complete without a walk to the face of the Mendenhall Glacier on frozen Mendenhall Lake. After an especially cold spell earlier in the month that captured a few icebergs in awkward places around the lake, Carl, Jane, his canine companion, and I set off early one morning. We were looking for ice caves we could explore. Several of my colleagues, along
Carl, Jane, and an Iceberg Read