Post #2: The Night Sky
I have to pee. There’s just a couple of problems with that. It’s one of those nights in the desert where the temperature plummets down into the mid-’20s after being a balmy 65+ during the day. I’m mummified in my sleeping bag with only a little hole in the top so I can get fresh air. It’s pitch black to the point where my eyes are just enough adjusted to see my breath escape my self-made warmth cocoon. I check my phone, its 3:00 am. “Do I just hold it and wait until the morning? Can I even fall back asleep at this point? Dammit, all of this thinking is making it worse.”
To go do my business I quietly unzip my sleeping bag and flap to my rooftop tent as to not disturb my friend John who’s sleeping in his bag a little closer to me than I normally like any person to be. Next, I scale the frigid metal ladder from my tent down to the ground, I’m shivering at this point. I turn my headlamp on as I hopelessly try to find the plastic grocery bag containing my shoes. I finally find them and begin the unpleasant and very nerve-racking process of checking the shoes for creepy crawlies like scorpions and tarantulas. Phew, none this time.
Now I begin the 200-foot trek in the moonless night to the shack of an outhouse. My entire journey walking to my non-porcelain destination is spent thinking about the note that was left on a ripped cardboard pizza box inside the outhouse. “BEWARE, a black widow is living in a nest under the seat,” said the sign. I think to myself “Will my doom really be getting wiped out by a black widow in a barely structurally integral outhouse 100 miles from the nearest paved road?” I reach the door of the outhouse, take a deep breath, and quickly execute my mission. As I’m briskly making my way back to my car and tent, shivering in shorts as a biting, dusty, November wind spits grains of sand on my bare legs, I finally take in the surrounding environment. Desert grasses rusting in the wind, a miscellaneous grouping of tents at the dispersed campground, dark 700-foot sand dunes towering above it all. Then I look up, and I see every star in the sky.
Night sky in Oregon with the milky way peeping in.
This isn’t me exaggerating. I can see into space, there are layers to it. Normally, if you’re looking at the night sky it usually looks flat, like if someone had just poked a bunch of holes in a black piece of paper and put it over the sun. No, this was different. Some stars are so bright and seem so close they can light the path back to my tent. Others just seem to slightly twinkle in the background. It’s not just a sporadic sprinkling of lights dusted across the sky as I’ve seen before. There are stars behind stars, from horizon to horizon every dark spot is filled with magical glowing stardust. That sounds quite sappy I know but trust me, you won’t understand until you go out and see for yourself.
When I was getting into photography early on in high school, I got fixated on those photos you see on Instagram of a perfectly clear milky way rising over some grand landscape like a mountain, rock formation, or an old abandoned ghost town. None of this was possible for me. Why? Because, like 80% of Americans, I too cannot see the milky way with a naked eye thanks to light pollution. What is light pollution you ask? Well, it’s that disgusting brownish haze emitted from streetlights, buildings, signs, etc. that cloud out our ability to see stars. In a 3-year span, I naively attempted to take “star photos” around my horribly light-polluted suburb. I got some cool shots in this period but nothing to say I was proud of. Then I got my driver's license, and with that came freedom.
I drove further out from the sprawling urban areas of Indianapolis, found dark skies but other challenges. Issues that could’ve been avoided with a little online research, but what the hell. I was young and stupid, so I had all the time in the world to learn the hard way. Here’s a couple of things I learned about while choosing the latter. The moon, while beautiful, adds a great deal of unwelcome light into the sky. Thus, polluting it and blocking out the milky way from view. Another drawback, the photogenic part of the milky way is only visible in the northern hemisphere in the summer months. After many more failed attempts and education on these variables, I finally was able to capture the milky way rising over the cornfields of Indiana in June of 2017. It was 1000% worth the years of failure and planning. There’s a certain awe you get from seeing something that’s not on planet earth and yet just as beautiful as anything on the third rock from the sun.
My first Milky Way shot in Indiana.
Since that first experience of capturing the unblemished night sky, I’ve been lucky enough to encounter many moments of similar splendor. You’ve already read about the time somewhere in Death Valley during November of 2018 when I saw the darkest sky I’ve ever seen. I thought I would share a few more that have left a vivid memory in my mind.
The second story comes from my travels alone. Traveling cross-country by yourself is an extremely introspective experience. During May and June of 2019, I experienced this while trekking 11,000 miles alone. I found my photography had vastly improved during this period. I was able to sit four hours in the same place waiting for the perfect lighting or spend time fine-tuning my composition without having the distraction to entertain others. Of course, traveling alone has its drawbacks as well but that’s for a completely different post.
Standing on an ash-covered ridge face to face with the barren remains of Mt. St. Helens has to be one of the more intimidating experiences you can come across when it comes to United States Geography. It was golden hour too. Not to mention there was a plethora of wildflowers peeking through the ashen ground as the icing on the cake. I meant to be taking pictures, but I wasn’t paying attention to the incredible landscape in front of me. I was hoisting my phone up to the sky trying to squeeze a little more than just a bar of 3G cell service. I needed the weather reports for another, more intact, volcano 50 miles to the north. If the forecast called for clear skies I was going to be in for a long night. I jumped up onto a massive boulder probably launched by the eruption of Mt. St. Helens 39 years before. The forecast finally loads on my phone. Clear skies, looks like I’m driving north.
Wildflowers!
I pack up my gear into my car, eat a quick lunch, and start descending the windy road I came from just as dusk sets in. Google Maps isn’t working but there are somewhere around 4 hours of driving ahead of me. Hopefully, I’ll arrive at my planned destination at around 2 in the morning. The roads are dark and windy, but I keep pushing forward even though I’m not sure I’m going the right way. Finally, I see the park entrance and the road I need to go down. It’s closed because of snow. Damn, time to come up with plan B. I grab a paper map from the kiosk at the closed ranger station and find a new spot. It takes me 45 minutes to drive there but it seems promising. Hell, the place I’m headed to is even called paradise. It has to be a good spot, right? I pull up to an overlook that’s said to have sweeping views. It’s 3 in the morning now, and I’ve gone up 6,000 feet in elevation so it’s a bit nippy outside my warm car. I can’t see any of the landscape around me because of the glare coming off my dashboard. I grab my camera, hop out into the cold darkness, and look up.
Mt. Rainier National Park Milky Way… Wow.
There it is the clearest milky way rising over pines to the southeast. I can see the whole thing with my bare eyes and it’s amazing. I start snapping pictures left and right too excited to think about any type of composition. Getting bored with the extremely cool milky way but lacking compositional features. I start looking towards the massive feature to my north. Towering over me is the 14,411-foot Mt. Rainier. The north star and tons of star constellations glisten behind it while the headlamps of early rising mountain climbers’ shimmer on the face of the stratovolcano. I frame up my camera up with a great composition, refresh it with a new battery, and prep my settings to take a timelapse. The camera starts clicking away but I am spent. I crawl into my makeshift sleeping area in the back of my car and quickly fall asleep.
Next thing I know I hear voices outside my car and there’s sunlight piercing through the windows. The masses of daily tourists have arrived to enjoy the same views I had enjoyed in a different light. They curiously look at the camera positioned next to my car still clicking. I attempt to sneak into the front seat of my car as to not freak them out that a crazy college student was sleeping at a national park overlook. My knee hits my horn and the cover is blown. I get out of my car still dazed and apologize while explaining what I was doing. The startled couple had been traveling the country in their camper and were very interested to see the photos I had taken. Having not seen the timelapse the camera had captured the hours before, all of us shared a communal thrill of seeing the photos for the first time. My night sky mission had been accomplished. I said goodbye to the couple and went to find a quieter spot to catch some Zs.
Sometimes you find yourself grinding out 20-hour days in pursuit of an amazing night sky shot, other times everything just falls into place. Three friends and I had taken an ambitious 8-day road trip out to see some iconic spots in the west. Along the way, we had enjoyed the splendors of the Badlands, Black Hills, Tetons, Yellowstone, and Glacier. Nothing had gone our way on this trip though. We had been plagued with soaking 45-degree rain, two inches on snow on June 20th, and I had even managed to get an entire can of bear spray emptied into my eyes. Through all of this we had managed to keep a positive attitude and now found ourselves sitting at a campsite outside of Glacier National Park.
This was no ordinary campsite though. It is definitely on my list of coolest campsites I’ve stayed at, that top ten list is on a post later to come. This spot was on an elevated ridgeline about 1,500 feet above the valley below us. Said valley sprawled out to the east in such an iconic form you could have slapped it onto any tourism ad. That’s because the valley contained Saint Mary Lake. The picturesque glacial blue body of water welcoming travelers into Glacier National Park from the east. From the spot, we had set up. We were able to peer all the way down the valley into the heart of the park and its sweeping peaks.
My car and tent set up on this ridge campsite outside Glacier.
It had been raining all day but mother nature gave a gift and rid the sky of clouds by sunset. It had been windy the night before, shaking our tents so violently that sleeping was near impossible, but the fresh mountain air stood still as alpenglow took over. It had been busy with other campers at our spot the night before, but it had cleared out and we had the place to ourselves. Of course, we took advantage of this peace after what had seemed like an endlessly chaotic trip. My friend Eric built a fire and my other friend cooked hamburgers over the stove. We sat around the glowing campfire reminiscing about the craziness we had all endured, past experiences, and future goals. You know, cliché campfire talk. And as dusk turned to darkness we looked up.
There it all was. Glistening stars, a vibrant milky way, and sporadic shooting stars to tie it all off. The same things you see every time you look up into an unscathed night sky, but it never gets old. A reminder that no matter how crazy and off-plan life can get, the stars will always come out when the sun goes down. We did not talk much after that, just enjoyed the pristine beauty that surrounded us.