People have praised my photography. I love taking pictures while hiking, but I am pretty sure I deserve very little credit. Almost fifteen years ago, world famous landscape photographer Ken Duncan told me, without any sense of false humility, that he was a very average photographer with a very great God. Let me tell you a brief story of my own experience that confirmed for me the truth of what Ken was saying.
In the late 1990s, I had set my sights on some of the high peaks in the west. In June 1998, I spent five days on Mt Rainer summiting the mountain on an early overcast morning. After that, I turned south to the High Sierras and Mt Whitney, the highest peak in the lower forty-eight.
In the summer months, Whitney is a two-day walkup, but in April, the mountain has accumulated an entire winter of snow pack, causing the summer trail to be much more difficult and time consuming. The route we chose was a more direct assault on the summit cone from a plateau called Boy Scout Lake. It took two days of climbing with heavy winter gear to reach our “base camp” beneath the one-thousand-foot head wall of the summit. Here we were surrounded on three sides by sharp, jutting peaks, but out toward the east, we had unobstructed views of the town of Lone Pine and the desert region that leads toward Death Valley.
On day three, we ascended Whitney by heading up a long, steep, snow-filled shoot to the right of the headwall. About five hundred feet below the summit, we clamped onto fixed ropes for the final push. It was a beautifully clear day, and so, before descending, we enjoyed the views of the surrounding world from the highest point in America south of Alaska.
I awoke the next morning just before sunrise to begin the job of packing for the descent. At this elevation the world before sunrise can be a cold, grey, and forbidding place. But when the emerging light of the rising sun hit the dormant rocks of the surrounding peaks, the rocks seemed to jump to life, catching fire in something like a joyful dance.
Just south of our tent site stood the Needles, four sculptured spires that rise up as if they had been built as part of a partially completed cathedral standing guard against the brutal natural forces attacking it.
At first, I was preoccupied with packing up, but then, I noticed how the rock walls of the spires were being transformed into luminous, serrated bulwarks set against the deep blow of the morning sky.
I immediately dropped everything, realizing that this vision would last only a fleeting moment. I found my point-and-shoot camera and took five or six frames before the light was lost forever. Ironically, the only film I had was black & white.
After returning home, I had the film developed and was astonished to find that the pictures of the golden rock towers had captured the living quality of the rocks in just the right way at just the right moment. If I had hesitated, the light would have changed, and instead of an exceptional picture of rare mountain beauty, my camera would have rendered images of mere rock formations, impressive, but without the light and life that had caught my eye by chance. And so, to paraphrase Ken Duncan once again: I had the good fortune to be a very average photographer who recorded the work of a very great God.