Author Archives: Mark Bailey

San Juan River minus two

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That’s funny, when we went to bed last night there were four boats.

It is not an adventure until something you would rather not happen happens. And you always want a good adventure. So it was good of two of our boat owners to oblige.

On a Thursday in mid June Kirsten and I drove from Torrey to the Sand Island campground in Bluff to meet up with a gang of pals from Durango. We arrived in the evening before the others and happily found plenty of camp sites available. Kirsten had her usual picnic feast ready and we sat at a table by the river noticing above all else a lot of water. Everything was damp and the river was swollen above its banks. We have had a wet May and June in the Southwest and the San Juan Mountains still had a lot of snow. Add the recent unseasonal rains and the river that in mid May had been running at 1800 cubic feet per second was now at 8,000 cfs. In fact we had experienced two separate pulses of moisture from tropical storms already by mid June, an unprecedented event for so early in the year. Global weirding.

Ronni and Mark

Not wanting to take any chances I brought our camp stove and coffee pot for the first morning even though it was planned that a grab and go breakfast would be ready. The grab and go food was great but our coffee pot was mysteriously popular. I went with Ronni, our venerable boat captain, down to her camper to get her crew sized coffee pot but we seemed a tad slow in getting coffee going in it. We never did.

With the river high it was also fast. We only floated five miles the first day but stopped often to visit several terrific petroglyph panels including Butler Wash and another massive wall near our camp site. During the day the two adult sons, Sean and Casey, joked with their dad Mark about his paranoia about losing his boat. The next morning on the river Sean woke us up early saying we needed to get going. Their dad’s boat had disappeared during the night, “no joke.”  Minus one.

Breezy camp dinner.

Rose and Sean

We hustled to get going but still lined up eagerly for coffee at the well stocked camp kitchen. Tristen offered Kirsten some tea. Kirsten said no thanks, I’ll have coffee. Without missing a beat Tristen said, “The coffee went down the river. Would you like some tea?” Ah, missing a boat is no problem, kinda fun in fact, assuming we find it. But no coffee? Minus two.
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Casey, a young man born for action and endurance was already headed downstream on a paddle-board by 6:30AM when we got up. We were on the river by nine and floated the remaining 22 miles to our planned takeout for the next day at Mexican Hat. It was a fast and beautiful trip. When we got to Mexican Hat Casey was there waiting for us. Besides one oar tangled in the flooded brush there had been no sign of the boat. We pulled all but one of the boats out while Mark and Casey took that boat on down the next 55 miles to the next and last takeout before the river runs a waterfall and meets its doom at Lake Powell.

Jeff and Tristen

Back in Torrey we learned they found the boat tied up another seven miles down the river. We had Ronni, who coincidentally has recently moved to Teasdale, over for dinner in Torrey. We only found out then from Ronni that the chief menu planner, who’s name I omit to protect the guilty, had forgotten to pack the coffee. Totally minus two. Adventure indeed. A regular bullet past the head. Was the lost boat a mere ruse to cover up? Be careful what you wish for. Good times. Thanks to all who made it happen.

Admiring the empty beach.

Tegan

The Caineville Wash west of Hanksville on the way back to Torrey, normally dry. More signs of weird weather.

M104, Sombrero Galaxy

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M104, Sombrero Galaxy 4/20/2015.

I was inspired to shoot this object with about twice the usual exposure by Scott Rosen of Astronomers Do It In the Dark.com. You can see his award winning image of the same object here.  Scott primarily uses the same Celestron C8 Schmidt–Cassegrain reflector telescope that I use and he seems to be well known in the amateur astro-photography world. So much for excuses. He has the same general equipment but also obviously possesses some processing skills and software I don’t have. But one other factor I noticed is that he gets in a lot of exposure time, usually two to four times as much as I have been getting. On this shot I got about six hours and tried for nine but, as Joni Mitchell might say, clouds got in the way.

I realized another technology step to make shooting life a little easier. Rather than traipsing back out during the shoot to see if all the tech goodies are properly functioning I started using TeamViewer on an iPad to stay on the couch and check on the PC running the show out in the driveway. Better to prolong a nap until shooting is completed.

The Sombrero Galaxy is a spiral galaxy with an unusual central bulge and a prominent dark dust lane, thus the sombrero moniker, and is known to have a super massive black hole at its center. The light that reached my little camera sensor is about 28 million years old. M104 is located in the constellation Virgo.

My M104 Sombrero image is a six hour and three minute exposure made up of 121 three minute subs. I used 20 flat, dark and bias frames.
• Lens: Celestron Orange Tube C8 Schmidt-Cassegrain, 8″ diameter, focal length 80.0″ (2032mm), f/10 with f/6.3 reducer
• Mount: Losmandy G11
• Autoguider: Orion Starshoot
• Guide-scope: ShortTube 80mm f/5.0 refractor telescope
• Camera: Gary-Honis full-spectrum modified Canon T1i (500D)
• White Balance: Daylight
• Mode: Raw
• ISO: 1600
• Location: Torrey, UT
• Date: 4/18-20/2015
• Guiding software: BackyardEOS, PHD Guiding
• Calibration: Deep Sky Stacker
• Processing: Photoshop CS5, Picasa

Butler Fork

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Butler Fork

Note to self – get out more. I have never gone out less than since we started an environment oriented publishing company. We did manage to get out this week for a short hike. These shots are up Big Cottonwood Canyon in the Wasatch Mountains in early June. The trail moves quickly into the Mt. Olympus Wilderness Area, one of Utah’s first wilderness areas. Signs remind you that logging and grazing have been eliminated for 100 years and the place is riotous with spring life and growth. There is nothing like this in the southern Utah national forests where logging and grazing still run rampant.

Darlene Avery hiked with us. She was in town from Colorado Springs to prep for Kirsten’s daughter’s wedding. I will have to formulate my thoughts to express more but we spent  some good time talking about loss, being, becoming, and beauty. Some of the time was with a camera. These are shots with my brother’s point and shoot.

I hope to go back up and shoot more of the abundance and compare with the forests in southern Utah.

This weekend is a three day river trip on the San Juan River.

Napa and Point Reyes

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Kirsten and drove the A6 to Truckee and then on to Napa and Pt. Reyes leaving Saturday March 28 and back to Salt Lake the next Friday. Kirsten was meeting with our latest author, Sasha Paulsen for an editing session on Dancing on the Spider’s Web. Now back in SLC I notice that I did not take many photos and did not take any notes. Thinking about it I decided to combine this blog with my previous entries from THP Green Adventures and change the site title here to Notes and Shots. I will use it both as a travel and conservation journal in the  blog and a place to keep my best photos in the galleries.  That way I can feel more free to take notes and shots without thinking they need to be interesting and good enough for National Geographic.  Even though I will make the site available to the public I think of the audience as my kids, Kristen and Nick, my uncle, Ted Kehl, and maybe my grand-kids some day. Hi guys.

View of tidal Napa River from our room

Truckee was conspicuous with the absence of snow. No shots, but resorts that look like they should be closed with mostly dirt showing still have skiers working their way down presumably man made snow ribbons.  California’s Gov. Brown ordered mandatory water use reductions for the first time in the state’s history while we were there. Residents are required to cut back, but big farms, which use 80% of the water, are only required to write reports — but that may be another blog.

In Napa we continued with my suggestion that Kirsten find us nice places to stay and not tell me what they cost. Works in the short run, time will tell about the finances. We had dinner that night with Sasha and her adult daughter Ariel at an equally elegant place nearby. The food in Marin county is nonstop amazing. I was thinking that I would throttle back while away from the fridge, but not-so-much.

On Monday we met up  in Petaluma with Lise Soloman, our Torrey House Consortium sales rep with Karel/Dutton Group, and drove up to Sebastopol to have lunch with Sheryl Cotleur, the adult book buyer for Copperfield’s Books. Both women are a forces in books sales. Lise is credited by author Paul Harding as the impetus behind his winning a Pulitzer for his debut novel Tinkers. Tinkers was published by a sister publisher at Consortium, Bellevue Literary Press.  Kirsten and I always say the best thing about publishing is the people and with women like these two out there we will keep saying it. At one point during lunch I told Sheryl about how our author Mary Sojourner feels no hope about the West and conservation. Mary gave that response when asked about Stegner’s phrase, “The geography of hope.” I told Sheryl how Mary thinks writing about nature and the West is dead and wondered if she agreed. Sheryl sat back and said she “100 percent” did not agree. She encouraged us to keep going and started telling us we needed to meet Steve Costa and Kate Levinson, owners of Pt. Reyes Books and asked if we had ever been there. In fact, that is where we were going next anyway.

Our B&B in Pt. Reyes

Kirsten had already made another excellent arrangement at a B&B in the small town of Inverness in Pt. Reyes. We poked our heads in the bookstore but Steve and Kate were out. Fabulously, Sheryl and Lise had forewarned them we were heading their way. Kirsten left a card at the bookstore and Steve and Kate got back to her asking us to please come by. When we showed up the next day they interrupted some poor sales rep’s pitch to say hello, suggested that we should have dinner together, and even insisted that we should do so at their home and stay with them. There goes those great publishing people again. The Bailey in me was appalled at the imposition, but of course it all turned out great. I hope somehow we can return the favor with a stay in Torrey.

At dinner with Kate and Steve we asked them a lot of questions about their biannual conference. It seemed natural that Terry Tempest Williams had been involved in the area for some time including with the conference.  The most recent called The 2015 Geography of Hope Conference after Wallace Stegner’s phrase in his Wilderness Letter — major sections of which were read at Kirsten’s and my wedding.  Kate and Steve were our kind of nice, smart people but way, way ahead of us in the world of connections and conferences. Kate encouraged us to stay regional if we try a conference and perhaps to consider starting with just the LDS enviro authors we are interested in supporting.

K’s smart phone shot of Shell Beach

Point Reyes was astonishing. On the last morning, April 2, a day before my brother’s would be birthday, at sunrise on Shell Beach near Steven and Kate’s place I was overwhelmed by the beauty and the loss of Mike. Mike, the world is beautiful, it is worth protecting, and I wish you were here to help.

Horsehead Nebula, Torrey 2/17/2015

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Horsehead Nebula, Torrey, February 17, 2015

The Horsehead Nebula is part of the vast Orion Nebula complex. Just below the first star in Orion’s belt the head itself is actually a dust cloud obscuring the bright red nebula behind it. This dark molecular cloud is about 1500 light years away.

It was pretty much a perfect night for viewing in Torrey. 35 degrees and wind mostly calm. Later there seemed to be some high thin clouds but for most of the time I was out the sky was black, the Milky Way was prominent, the stars were so bright that even with no moon I could see my shadow, and Orion ruled. It was the kind of night where there are so many stars it is hard to pick out the constellations. 35 degrees is not quite cold enough that I wear insulated pants, but I do have on thick hiking boots, a puffy down parka I bought in maybe 1976 with the hood up over a ski hat, a headlamp set to red light, and finger-less fishing gloves. I still get a little chilly.

I usually set up to the east of my home in Torrey in the driveway in order to stay out of the prevailing westerly winds. The house is 2 stories high there and is an effective wind break but also gets in the way of viewing. I didn’t quite have 2 hours left to shoot after I set up before the belt wheeled behind the roof.


The Horsehead image is a one hour and 45 minute exposure made up of 21 five minute subs. I used 8 flat and dark frames and forgot to get the bias shots.

  • Lens: Celestron Orange Tube C8 Schmidt-Cassegrain, 8″ diameter, focal length 80.0″ (2032mm),  f/10
    • With f/6.3 reducer
  • Mount: Losmandy G11
  • Autoguider: Orion Starshoot
  • Guide-scope:  ShortTube 80mm f/5.0 refractor telescope
  • Camera: Gary-Honis full-spectrum modified Canon T1i (500D)
  • White Balance: Daylight
  • Mode: Raw
  • ISO: 1600
  • Location: Torrey, UT
  • Date: 2/17/2015
  • Time: 8pm-10pm
  • Guiding software: BackyardEOS, PHD Guiding
  • Calibration:  Deep Sky Stacker
  • Processing:  Photoshop CS5, Star Spikes Pro 3

Rosette Nebula

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Rosette Nebula, Torrey, 2/16/2015

This is my first deep sky object capture in a while and the first after modifying my camera to accept more red in the Ha wavelength. This cosmic rose is about 5,000 light years away near Orion in Monoceros. The red is nebula matter (hydrogen?) that is heated up by the hot stars in the center of the Rosette which formed from the same matter. I love the feedback loop here, sort of like we mortals becoming conscious. The stars form from the cosmic matter and then shine back on it, making it beautiful. The stardust that is we humans becomes conscious and looks out on the heavens, becoming the cosmos aware of itself, and is beautiful.

I tried to get this picture Sunday night but got blanked out by a strange, stuck cloud. A rare failure in the forecast by the amazing Mr. A. Danko at ClearDarkSky.com.  As part of the weird weather we are having (very weird, exactly as predicted by the global warming models), the jet stream is distorted and was blasting down with much turbulence in the upper atmosphere out of due north and created a standing lenticular cloud exactly in the way of where I needed to observe.  Monday night was much better although it did not clear up until after dusk. Good of it. In fact, Monday night was great, clear and calm, but a surprisingly cold 24 degrees. For the first time the laptop PC I was using to run the exposures quit on me at the end of the session, apparently from cold, and would not start back up. I took it inside for half an hour, fired it up, and was able to go back out and get the rest of the compensating sub frames (darks, flats and bias).

This exposure is what the hobbyists call “first light.” I recently sent my Canon Rebel T1i off to Gary Honis for his full spectrum modification which replaces the internal stock infrared filter with a special clear glass filter. Many nebula have a red wavelength called hydrogen-alpha that is filtered out by the stock camera filter. I chose the Rosette as my first object to gather some of that red I was missing. In fact, in an attempt years ago to acquire the Rosette with my stock Canon 10D, I either missed the thing altogether, something that is entirely possible, or all the red was filtered out.

I shot through the guide-scope and guided with the normal telescope, the reverse of what is normal. The guide-scope is a relatively simple and inexpensive telescope that is not meant for astrophotography. The stars are much fatter and distorted than they would be and the little blue circles around the stars are from the various color wavelengths not converging all in the same place. Still, as long as you aren’t experienced at such efforts, the end result is purty.

This exposure is 2 hours and 32 minutes comprised of 4 minute subs and using 8 each of darks, flats and bias frames.

  • Lens: ShortTube 80mm f/5.0 refractor telescope
  • Mount: Losmandy G11
  • Autoguider: Orion Starshoot
  • Guide-scope:  Celestron Orange Tube C8 Schmidt-Cassegrain, 8″ diameter, focal length 80.0″ (2032mm),  f10
    • With f6.3 reducer
  • Camera: Gary-Honis full-spectrum modified Canon T1i (500D)
  • White Balance: Daylight
  • Mode: Raw
  • ISO: 1600
  • Location: Torrey, UT
  • Date: 2/16/2015
  • Time: 8pm-11pm
  • Guiding: BackyardEOS software
  • Calibration:  Deep Sky Stacker
  • Processing:  Photoshop CS5

Light on the Colorado Plateau

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Kirsten in Capitol Reef NP

My wife, Kirsten Allen, and I are fortunate to live, at least part time, in Torrey, Utah in the north central part of the Colorado Plateau. Here there are both the beautiful landscape and very dark, light pollution free skies.  On the “Astrophotos” tab above you can see the deep sky object photos I have gathered taking advantage of these high, dry, dark sky conditions. I also plan to add photos I have taken during the day (mostly) of the inspiring landscape on the Plateau. I have a small start on the “Landscape” tab above.

The (unequal justice) Code of the West

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Cowboy Chris

Cowboy anarchist Cliven Bundy and Utah San Juan County Commissioner Phil Lyman remain free. I have been writing to Utah 2nd District Congressman Chris Stewart expressing my alarm at the situation. My point to Stewart is that if conservationist Tim DeChristopher goes straight to federal prison for violating BLM law, and is given a stiff two year sentence precisely because he is exercising his First Amendment right of free speech, then certainly these cowboys need some jail time for doing the same thing. Stewart, ever the right wing politician, doesn’t get it.

Stewart’s response:

I grew up on a dairy farm. My wife’s family still ranches in Northern Utah and Southern Idaho. I understand the importance of obeying the law, including paying grazing fees. Notwithstanding this, I was shocked as the situation played out in Nevada to see the show of force by the BLM and the National Park Service agents. I had no idea that these agencies had special tactical teams that appear more like paramilitary groups than park rangers.

It is true that America loves the cowboy. I increasingly do not. The fact that Stewart likes to wear his cowboy hat does not impress me. His sentence on the importance of obeying the law is his only acknowledgement of the issue in a full one page letter. The rest is about the citizens not respecting the federal government because it can’t be trusted. He has his facts all wrong. The BLM does not have paramilitary force. That level of force that showed up at Bunkerville was the Las Vegas Sheriff Department SWAT team. Ironically, Stewart is pressing the point in his letter to me that law enforcement ought to be local. He is ignoring the fact that it was. And the law was still outgunned by the cowboy militia and had to back off to avoid a blood bath. Overwhelming force, Stewart?

Rural cowboy militia

Subsequently, on May 10, Utah’s San Juan County Commissioner Phil Lyman led a heavily armed vigilante gang on ATV’s into Recapture Canyon, a sacred Navajo site in San Juan County that the BLM has closed to motorized vehicles. In part Lyman chose the anniversary date to publicly object to white, Mormon, San Juan County citizens not being allowed to continue to rob Navajo graves unmolested by the law.  Sheriffs from five rural Utah counties showed up to make sure the heavily armed ATV riders were able to perform federal trespass without interference. They need not have worried. The unarmed conservation community was in reasonable fear for their lives and prudently did not show up. And, I sadly point out to you Chris Stewart, neither did the BLM.

Stewart is worried about an undue show of force.  By whom, Chris?

In the West we do not practice equal justice under the law. Around Utah, if you are white, Republican, Mormon, wear a cowboy hat and are heavily armed you can break the law with impunity. You can even have the local sheriff, on horse and with hat, make way for you. On the contrary, if you interrupt the BLM in the name of conservation, without a hat and without a weapon, you go straight to prison with a maximum sentence. Such is the case today.

Happily there is a petition going around by the more sober citizens at Alliance for a Better Utah to hold the trespassers accountable.   I am gratified to see I am not the only one alarmed at the cowboy behavior going unanswered by the law.

Cliven Bundy Opens the Anarchy Door

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The BLM has got its tit in a wringer. From an environmental standpoint the BLM is a classic captured agency run locally both by and for ranchers. The agency has long overlooked grazing permit infractions of all sorts. Often outside nongovernmental organizations have to sue to win enforcement of  standing laws and regulations.  The BLM’s action of enforcement has been so lax that when they do try to enforce a decades old egregious and blatant defiance of U.S. law and multiple court orders, like the unanswered defiance by Cliven Bundy, they are unable to do so.  Which opens more than one door in a good news – bad news sort of way.

That bad news is that the government is inviting anarchy.  If one guy, like Cliven Bundy with his delusions of grandeur, can defy the government by going loud with right wing media and inviting a bunch of gun toting friends to gather around, why can’t everyone start making up their own laws?  Already Utah San Juan County Commissioner Phil Lyman  is rallying a group to flout federal law and ride their ATV’s into a closed canyon next month.  Presumably they will take notes from Bundy and bring their guns.  Mike Noel, a Utah legislator, did the same in Paria Canyon in 2012 with no repercussions. Yet when environmental activist Tim DeChristopher practiced civil disobedience by waving a bid paddle at what turned out to be an energy auction held illegally by the BLM, he was promptly sentenced to two years in federal prison.  Utah’s federal judge Dee Benson did not allow DeChristopher’s motives to be discussed in court, only whether or not he technically broke the law.  “Equal Justice Under Law” is engraved on the front of the U.S. Supreme Court building.  When special interest groups like livestock and energy producers or rural county commissioners on ATVs can crony up with the federal courts and agencies to manage legal outcomes, we are knocking on the door of fascism.

The good news for the BLM’s tit is that Cliven Bundy appears to be a lunatic to the vast majority of rational Americans.  All the media attention on public land grazing abuse will shine some light on BLM practices and might encourage the agency to toe the line and regularly enforce existing regulations.  This attention can open the door to a little public awareness to the otherwise boring issue of public land management, particularly the damage done by livestock grazing and the irony that this grazing would largely come to and end if it were not subsidized and/or if ranchers were permitted to sell and thereby retire their permits.

It will be up to non-governmental organizations and writers alike to go through the good news door.  I’ll see what we can do at Torrey House Press with some appropriate Green Shorts.