It pays to seek out the interesting folks you can find on the road. Pulling into the small town of Whitehall, Montana, I spied a bicycle weighed down with cross-country packs, resting outside the town’s cafe. Liz and I decided to stop for lunch and ordered a couple burgers from a harried waitress while absorbing the stares of tables full of locals. We found our seats, and I panned the room for the owner of the bike.

I found a tanned woman with gray hair, wearing spandex. I walked over and asked if she’d like to sit with us, and she courteously accepted. Through our conversation I found out she was on the tail end of a solo trip from Virginia to Idaho. Her name was Jan, and she had more adventure stories than would fit into one lunch. For one, if I remember right, she had ridden a train through Mongolia while pregnant. After finishing her burger and tall chocolate milkshake she gave me her card, which had a link to her blog.

Before she left, Jan also mentioned visiting nearby Lewis and Clark Caverns, which we had completely overlooked while planning our trip. The state park was only a few miles away. It was lucky that we ran into Jan, because otherwise we wouldn’t have backtracked and spent the afternoon crawling through stalagmites hundreds of feet under Montana.

Touring the West – Lewis and Clark Caverns – Images by Will Parson

Don’t go to Yellowstone. At least, don’t go in July. This year the park set a new July record for visitors with close to a million. I think any more weight from so many tourists might force the Yellowstone caldera down into the magma that powers all those geysers. In any case they’re already getting into all sorts of accidents.

Those million visitors drove over 320,000 cars through Yellowstone’s five entrances. The next time I visit, I think I will go in Spring when much of the park is open to bicycles but not cars.

Touring the West – Yellowstone National Park – Images by Will Parson

Highway 24 in Utah on the way to Capitol Reef National Park. Photos by Will Parson.

Between Cedar Breaks and Capitol Reef National Park stretches the red open road of Utah. My girlfriend Liz and I skipped famously scenic Highway 12, which Serena ended up taking on her own way through Utah. Instead we took the somewhat scenic Highway 24 instead.

Capitol Reef is like a mini Zion. Not as tall, not as wide, but also fewer people to muck up the scenery. Though, we still caught a boy vandalizing a rock while his family admired the sunset at aptly-named Sunset Point.

Several of the original buildings of the Mormon settlement town of Fruita are preserved, as are the orchards of apricot and pear trees. Visitors are free to pick their own fruit, and during my stay I harvested some of the tastiest apricots I’ve ever had.

Capitol Reef National Park is home to the former Mormon settlement town of Fruita, Utah.

Enjoy these photos of Capitol Reef while I prepare to serve up some photos from Yellowstone National Park, coming at you soon enough.

Touring the West – Capitol Reef National Park – Images by Will Parson

“Touring the West” is an ongoing travel series by Will Parson on MeridianCollective.org that will feature photos, text and video from his three weeks on the road in July. Find previous installments below.

• Part one – San Diego to Zion National Park
• Part two – Zion National Park
• Part three – Angel’s Landing
• Part four – Cedar Breaks National Monument

When it’s 100 degrees in most of Utah you might do well to make the steep drive to Cedar Breaks National Monument just for the cool mountain air. The heat at Zion National Park in the middle of July makes it worth struggling up a windy road through Dixie National Forest to reach Cedar Breaks at an elevation of 10,000 feet. I welcomed the change in scenery — Cedar Breaks was crisp and more peaceful than heavily-populated Zion.

There were only a couple cars in the parking lot the morning we left Zion and reached Cedar Breaks. Liz and I were passing by on the way from Zion to Capitol Reef, but were enticed to join a wildflower tour guided by a young National Park Service ranger named Russ. Russ admitted he wasn’t an expert on flowers, but we were more than happy with his extensive knowledge of the area’s natural history.

Cedar Breaks is an interesting sight (just look it through the Google satellite). The 1500-year-old Bristlecone Pine trees tumble into the slowly eroding limestone breaks at a pace measured in centuries. These Bristlecones are just middle-aged compared to the 4,000-year-old specimens in California’s White Mountains, but at least anyone can approach the trees at Cedar Breaks and feel their stubby needles.

A Bristlecone Pine attracts a butterfly at Cedar Breaks National Monument in Utah.

Passing the Bristlecones prompted a discussion with Ranger Russ about ancient trees. Though individual Bristlecones can live to 5,000 years, clonal species like Aspen and Spruce can live much longer. Cedar Breaks is home to Quaking Aspen, which is the same species as a grove in Utah’s Fishlake National Forest that is at least 80,000 years old. Actually, that Aspen grove, known as Pando, may be as much as a million years old. And, at 6,615 pounds, Pando is the largest living organism on the planet.

If you’re into old trees and photography you’ll love The Oldest Living Things in the World project by artist/photographer Rachel Sussman. She goes around the world with biologists and documents organisms of all kinds that are at least 2,000 years old. I tried to find footage of Sussman’s recent TED talk (coincidentally held the same week I visited Cedar Breaks). Here is her website.

“Touring the West” is an ongoing travel series by Will Parson on MeridianCollective.org that will feature photos, text and video from his three weeks on the road in July. Find previous installments below.

• Part one
• Part two
• Part three

Many visitors to Zion National Park undertake the vertigo-inducing hike to the peak of Angel’s Landing despite it being one of the more grueling trails. It takes most people five hours to complete the five mile journey to the top of Angel’s Landing and back. I did it in half that and still took a bit of video now and then, admittedly while sucking in much-needed oxygen.

I stopped at Weeping Wall on the way back toward camp, and continued on to the town of Springdale, a tourist haven full of ice cream cones and souvenir minerals. The hotels and lodges in Springdale seemed to be doing brisk business, but for me sunset meant back to my tent.

In case you haven’t noticed, touring the West is an ongoing series. It’s been almost a week since my last installment, but posts should be more frequent from here on. One thing that’s for sure is I won’t be doing a “one day to one post” ratio for the three weeks of material. I can’t imagine anyone wants to see that much of my summer vacation.

Here’s Day 1 and Day 2 of Touring the West.

And here’s a video I made of Angel’s Landing in Zion National Park.

Touring the West – Angel’s Landing from Will Parson on Vimeo.

Zion National Park ranger Colton Winder holds a photo of Brigham Young while delivering a talk about the early history of Zion National Park.

“The story of Zion begins in New York, with a man named Joseph Smith and a new religion, called the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter Day Saints,” began the ranger, in a sweltering outdoor amphitheater. “You may know it as the Mormon church,” he continued. A campground bulletin board billed the ranger’s program as the story of four lost boys of Zion. Maybe “lost boys” was a religious metaphor that had escaped me.

My girlfriend Liz and I had decided to cap an exhausting day of hiking the famous Narrows with a more passive activity. We walked gingerly on tired feet over to the amphitheater, collapsing on an aluminum bench in time for the nightly presentation.

South Campground at Zion National Park has 127 campsites. They usually fill up early on a July afternoon, yet I counted only eight people including myself in the audience for that night’s program. We were greeted by a polite young ranger named Colton. He had a boyish face and could have passed for 16 if not for the ranger uniform and his wedding ring, which he absently twisted now and then. His speech was evenly-paced and formal.

Colton’s Mormon-themed introduction set me into panic mode. Had I stumbled onto a sales pitch for the Mormon church, disguised as a ranger talk? With such a small audience I knew I couldn’t leave unnoticed in the first two minutes of the program. I decided to hold out, at least long enough to politely excuse myself and act like I had enjoyed myself.

I eased when Colton got to the heart of his story. The Mormons had been run out of the Midwest and some settled in Zion, so the story went. One day four local boys went hunting, climbed up the famous Watchman peak, and decided they didn’t want to climb down the same steep path. The boys got lost and spent days on the rim of Zion Canyon with just their rifles before remembering stories of a Native American footpath near what’s now called Echo Canyon. They rediscovered the route and returned safely home.

“One of those boys was my great-grandfather, John Winder,” added Colton.

I squinted at his name tag. Colton Winder. Now he really had my attention. Out of the millions of park visitors every year I wondered how many could trace their family to Zion’s Mormon settlers. And out of those how many felt a glowing personal nostalgia for a place that become a tourist destination?

John Winder in Echo Canyon, 1913.

Just Colton, for all I knew. He passed around some more photos, including one of his great-grandfather standing on his horse’s saddle while the horse stood in Echo Canyon. The eldest Winder of Zion had several accomplishments, including turning that Native American footpath he had found as a boy into the East Rim Trail.

After the photos Colton passed around some family artifacts, including John Winder’s cattle brand, with pocked iron letters spelling “JW.” The heavy tool was still in good shape, though Colton pointed out his family switched to a different cattle brand decades ago.

The iron looked just like the ones my family still uses. My great-grandfather had also owned cattle. Only no one turned my family’s ranch into a national park.

Another one of those four lost boys, David Flanigan, eventually built a massive cable to the top of the East Rim, which delivered lumber to the settlers below. This, Colton said, fulfilled an 1863 prophecy declared by Brigham Young that timber would be delivered down Zion canyon “like a hawk flying.” The rest of the ranger talk delved into the story of Flanigan’s cable, which eventually deteriorated and crushed some school children in the 30s.

After the talk Colton initiated the two children in the audience as junior rangers. As I left I couldn’t help imagine the Winder homestead sealed underneath a parking lot somewhere, near the ranger station perhaps.

The first week of July I was in San Diego, itching with wanderlust. I had been craving a road trip for weeks, and having left on my own grand tour abroad exactly a year beforehand, my restlessness was at a peak. Europe a year ago was a vivid memory even as I completely forgot my relationship’s anniversary, which my girlfriend and I spent in Dusseldorf last year. The two of us packed our bags and bicycles and headed north the first week of last month.

I’ve now spent the last two Julys tucked in a car, traveling hundreds of miles a day for weeks on end. This year’s trip was dwarfed by last year’s 10,000-mile saga, but at three weeks long it was like reuniting with an old friend that had settled down and lost some weight.

San Diego in July is not at its best. The dreary weather has barely recovered from what locals call May gray and June gloom. We left early enough on a Sunday that I never found out if the thick marine layer happened to burn off that day or decided to blot the sun well into the afternoon.

My day belonged to the desert. The sun quickly gained strength and our car was a bottle of hot moisture floating across the Mojave. We sweated past Las Vegas without stopping, kept watch for racist Arizonans for 30 miles, then popped into Utah and a geologist’s wonderland of canyons and exposed sedimentary layers. Zion National Park that afternoon was a patchwork of rust red and verdant green. With the baked rusty sediment and the cool leafy trees it would have made a fairly accurate thermal infrared image. After finding a shady campsite coated a dusty iron-rich monochrome we waded into the Virgin River. Our remaining energy flowed downstream, so the rest of the day was filled with books and macaroni.

Here’s a video of day 1 on the road.

Touring the West – Day 1 – San Diego to Zion from Will Parson on Vimeo.

Touring the West – Day one through Zion National Park from Will Parson on Vimeo.

“Touring the West” is an ongoing travel series by Will Parson on MeridianCollective.org that will feature photos, video and text over the next three weeks. Look for a post from day two of Will’s travels tomorrow.

Artificial Predators from Will Parson on Vimeo.

This is my first video-only project — albeit a quick-and-dirty one — where my primary objective was making a video and not taking still photos. It’s about an interesting marine research project my friend has started at the Scripps Institution of Oceanography. The project is really cool and has implications for the conservation of fish species that are directly and indirectly affected by fishing pressure.

I’m happy with the video learning experience, considering I didn’t really have a plan going into a noisy lab that was really just a glorified closet full of fish tanks.

One very important concept I thought I understood before making this video, and that I really grasp now even though I completely ignored it at the time, was that audio comes before everything else. Good video and multimedia revolve around good audio (just ask duckrabbit), and I think the sound in this video suffers.

This was shot with a Canon 5DMKII, with audio recorded in-camera without an external microphone. If I had to do it again, I would pull my friend into a quiet office for the interview and record audio separately with something really nice like the Zoom H4n recorder. Or maybe a shotgun mic like the Rode VideoMic.

Battle on the Bank III from Will Parson on Vimeo.

Here are a few of my favorite still photos from the bout.

Battle on the Bank III – Images by Will Parson

Us judges weren’t given any parameters – we just had to choose the best photos, whatever that meant to us. There was no explicit theme in mind, but it being a CityBeat contest I looked for images that carried the spirit of the alt-weekly.

Looking at all 905 entries gave me a rough idea of the visual interests of the submitting photographers. I used the entire swath as a preliminary vote of sorts – from their photos, I surmised that CityBeat readers loved landscapes, dogs, portraits and color. There were not many examples of photojournalism or documentary photography, so story-telling capacity and the presence of a decisive moment did not become strong criteria in my votes.

The first sweep of judging cleared away the rubbish. I nominated 75 or so images that were technically satisfactory and also interesting to some degree. Gone was any image that either failed on its own terms due to poor execution or set the bar so low that even though the photographer’s intent came across, nobody cared to notice. To some degree I favored novelty even if there were flaws in an image and I knew it would never win. I strongly ignored cliches even if they were technically flawless.

And there were a lot of cliches – dogs, cats, beaches, sunsets, over-saturated skies, Photoshop filters. One heavily Photoshopped cat somehow made it as far as the top 21.

On top of the submitters’ persuasions I layered my own knowledge of photographic theory, history and practice and tried to ignore my biases. Photos that resonated with me had at least one very strong quality above and beyond technical mastery – enough to set it apart from a multitude of images with otherwise similar style and subject matter. This quality could be color, composition or an engaging subject. At this point I’m talking about a dozen photos out of 905.

The hardest part of judging was that the best photos weren’t flukes and at least a couple photographers had multiple submissions in the final rounds. It was difficult to weigh a photographer’s work against itself when their submissions often went in different directions – a strong color vs. a strong monochrome, for example.

The winning photos and honorable mentions clearly exhibited strong formal elements – line, shape, color, tone – and had some sort of mood. The best were original yet evocative of classic images. I had qualms with some winners because they exhibited well-worn subjects, such as landscapes and travel. They were ‘safe’ images, which tend to do well in amateur contests because they have broad appeal. Some of the winners would have fallen into this category without some saving grace – a train adds a smear of color to a typical architecture photo, a sleeping dog punctuates a resting man in colorful garb. For a contest of this scale I was hoping for but not exactly expecting novel explorations of the medium.

My favorite image from the contest is an intimate portrait of photographer Chris Barnette’s daughter, entitled “Daniela Dreams.” It’s taken from a unique camera angle that plays with the literal scene – a girl floating calmly in a pool of crisply blue water – and inserts metaphor. The water could be sky, and the girl adrift could be flying. The lighting is simple, natural and effortless, just like the girl’s serene expression as she rests suspended. To me it’s reminiscent of some of the portraits Harry Callahan took of his wife Eleanor – excellent photography borne from a strong personal relationship. The great photographers from photo history are often adept at connecting with a multitude of subjects ranging from famous to familiar, but images like Barnette’s remind us that it just takes one special connection to make a great photograph.

"Daniela Dreams" by Chris Parnette won second place in the 2010 San Diego CityBeat photo contest.