Chasing my Tent

It's windy in the Inland Northwest. That wonderful area of Washington and Oregon that is high in sunshine and low in rain. We are talking prairies plateaus, deserts, and sagebrush. The wind can whip through the landscape as if scouring the land of any ability hold forest roots and create a nice wind block. Even when trees are rooted in the soil, they sway in the wind, bending to it's will.

It was this wind that I traveled into on my recent road trip through Eastern Oregon. A wind so strong, it felt as if it might suck the moisture from the soil.

My 1st night was spent in the Columbia River Gorge. Known for it's winds that attract sail-boarders and wind surfers from around the world, I should have expected the wind swirling around the wind-breaks in the campground.

But there I was staring at the wind - looking at it as it pressed against my face as if I could stare down the gusts. I was trying to put up my tent. I sighed and started the task, in the wrong order - stake down first THEN put in the poles. I however, erected the tent 1st and then tried staking it down. I barely had the stake in the ground when a gust happily snatched the tent away from me and started dribbling it like a ball across the lawn. I took off at a run to steal my tent back and played tug of war with the wind back to my tent-site to finally get it secured into the ground.

My second bout with wind came as I was driving through the Malhuer National Wildlife Refuge south of Burns, OR. The winds huffed & puffed against my car from the west. My car labored to move forward and between gusts shot forward in it's freedom. I the distance I saw a dust cloud stretching from a plowed field across the highway. I have driven through dust storms before and smoke from forest fires - I never enjoyed them as your sight is limited even farther than most fog I had grown up with in the Snohomish River Valley. I soon entered the cloud and my heart immediately began racing. "Holy SHIT!" No visibility. None. if I continued I would crash and die. If I stopped, someone would crash into me & I would die. But the wind, being fickle, lifted the dust cloud enough to keep me moving forward. My heart continued to beat fast as I raced beyond the dust cloud to my next destination . . . and more wind.

I have enjoyed images of the Alvord Desert for a couple of years and wanted to see it for myself, so my road trip of course included a stop here and hopefully I'd be able to catch star trails and a tranquil desert sunrise. What I get was wind gusts coming across Steens Mountain that jostled and shoved my car all night. I set up my camera to try & catch  the last light of day on the clouds that hung over Steens Mountain to the west. But when I turned my back to grab a filter from the car, a gust pushed the tripod with camera over into the cracked & crusted soil. Damn! My camera is already held together with pink duct tape! but the camera was fine. The tripod however, the one I borrowed from my boss, was broken. I had the pink duct tape stowed in my car and quickly tried my best to stabilize the head, but any ability for real long exposures for the rest of the trip was gone. No star trails. No cotton candy clouds in the sky. No silky waterfalls. And I had to figure out a way to apologize to my boss.

My morning project, I wanted the sun peeking over the distant hills. When I woke up, clouds screened out the horizon. But I watched as the sun rose behind the clouds and I was able to make the image above. I stood between the worst of the gusts and the camera & tripod. Even with the issues I experienced or maybe because of them I am just as happy with this image than if everything had gone according to plan.