these large birds appear to have infinite patience as they stand motionless for hours waiting for their meal to swim by.

At the local gardens, they not only have a wonderful display of flora, but they also have many woodsy paths that are well maintained for easy walking.

I planned my passage through southern Arizona when the giant saguaros would be in bloom. I always enjoy shooting flowers, but these blooms posed a new problem for me - they were all twenty to thirty feet above ground. As I hiked around exposing film on all sorts of life, I not only came across a good steep hill, but it had a large healthy cactus growing right next to it. Thanking mother nature for making this possible, I set up on the side of the hill and maxed out my largest zoom lens to capture these blooms.

peeking up under the nodding flowers of imperial fritillaria stalks (lutea maxima)

as the snow accumulates in the high mountains, it stacks up and begins to slide down the mountain side as a glacier. as the glacier continues to get pushed from behind (from more incoming snow), it becomes packed into a very dense ice and can travel decades across the country side. sometimes they end by finally giving way to the heat, and turn into a stream of icy cold water. other times they end by crumbling into an ocean like this one.

hot mineral springs in Wyoming

dense bamboo forest in southern Maui

an 80-foot waterdrop along the McKenzie River in Willamette National Forest