Another quick trip to Antelope Island

I wanted another day to test out my new 500mm lens, so I headed off to Antelope Island. The forecast was for sunny skies and low winds, so I thought it would be nice to catch some of the migrating waterfowl at sunrise.

As you can tell from this picture, the sun is a good ways above the mountains, and yet it is cloudy and dark out.  Also, there is a good one foot chop on the Great Salt Lake.  Good call guys!  These are the same weathermen (and women) who screw up the snow forecasts all the time.

When my mom was here in early winter, we had to look long and hard to find this bird, a Chukar.  Now they are everywhere, sitting up on top of rocks so you can see them. He's actually a long ways off, but I sure do love having a nice super telephoto lens.

If you couldn't see them, they would start calling so that even a blind man could find them.

The bison were all over the island.  As usual, the males were off by themselves or in groups of two or three.  The ladies were in a pretty large herd.

I wonder if this is the same porcupine I saw in November.  He was in roughly the same spot. His fur and spikes seemed pretty and fluffy, but his scabby face is one only his mom could love.

He was gnawing the hell out of this tree.  His long, gnarly yellow teeth seemed tailor-made for the job.  I should have captured video of him moving around in the tree to find new branches. Given that this is how he lives, he really is a klutz.

I ended up seeing four coyotes.  They were in the same general area of the island, but they weren't traveling together.  Down by the water, they were hunting for birds or whatever dead thing washed in. Up in the grassland, they were hunting for mice, moles, or anything remotely similar.

I think this is a Golden Eagle.  I kept watching him, hoping he would dive on something, but he just floated around. 

My prize find for the day didn't result in a good picture, but it is my first photo of an owl.  He was tucked way back in the trees, and try as I might, there was no angle that got all the branches out of the way. To get this, I was sitting on a slope with my feet in the edge of a swamp.

It's a Great Horned Owl and if you haven't seen one, they are quite large, about two feet tall, with a 4 foot wingspan.

I'll head back later in the year to try and get him with his wife and hopefully, children. There are two other owl species living on the island, but I haven't found them yet.  During nesting season, they tend to hunker down and in the blustery winds everything was hiding.

Sage Grouse

I have two days to test out my new lens for problems, so I decided to try it out on something practical.  This time of year, the Sage Grouse gather at a place called a "lek" to find mates for the year. If you haven't seen a male Sage Grouse do his mating dance, you are missing out.

This is a fairly crude video I shot with my DLSR.  I have no idea where all the background noise was coming from, so please ignore that.  The video gives you an idea of the male's show.

It's all about strutting your stuff, and strut they do.  This is quite a show for a bird that is closely related to a chicken.

But these birds have big moobs (man boobs).  They have advantages over humans in that their moobs can be inflated to huge sizes, and then put away when they aren't needed.

The snow in the area has all melted, but the nights are still cold enough to freeze all the puddles, and freeze my hands on the metal camera lens.  Almost all of these shots were done with me using the Honda Pilot as a blind and popping my head through the sunroof.

They have decorations everywhere, including dainty little feathers around their head.  They reminded me way too much of England's queen.

This seemed to be a tribute shot to women getting older. I don't know how old he is, but his moobs are sagging big time.

All puffed up and ready to flash cleavage...

I was struggling to follow the birds in flight with such a long lens.  This is about as good as I got. Practice, practice, practice.

You never know where your shots will come from.  This was taken from the gas station on the drive home.  He was hanging out at the top of the tree while I was filling up.

Tomorrow's trip:  Antelope Island for waterfowl and some owls (hopefully)

No more photography excuses

If you read my blog, you know that I occasionally whine about not having a big enough telephoto lens for the wildlife photography I do.  Fortunately I have a loving, supportive wife who suggested I go ahead and alleviate my source of whining.

Here we see four of my main lenses, from left to right:

• 35mm
• 10-24mm zoom
• 24-70mm zoom
• 70-200mm zoom

Now add the new big boy.  It's a 500mm f4 super telephoto.  Awesome!

This is the lens with its lens hood on, attached to my seemingly tiny camera.

I actually picked the 500mm f4 over its two brothers, the 400mm f2.8 and the 600mm f4, because the 500 is "smaller and easier to carry".

Lots of good pictures in my future!

Really spring?

Everyone has their own way to mark the end of winter and the beginning of spring.  In DC, it is the Cherry Blossom Festival.  In Wilmington, NC it is the Azalea Festival. For me, I finally went out and unplugged the timer for my outdoor Christmas lights.

Winter, I declare thee over!!

Norm and Ginny bring good tidings

Two of our Raleigh friends, Norman and Ginny, stopped by Park City for a few days after a week of skiing in Colorado.  Fortunately, they brought some great things with them. Most importantly, they brought snow.  Last week we had days in the 50s with brilliant sunshine.  It was cooking off the snow so fast that it was starting to look like May.  When they arrived on Saturday, it was actually raining, which is much worse for the snow pack than sun.

However, over the next few days, we got about 20 inches of snow in Park City.  Alta had closer to 4 feet. Sunday was a nice day at Canyons, but the snow was still a bit heavy.  Monday at Deer Valley was the best ski day of the year!

Julie, enjoying an overnight foot of fluff.

And Ginny enjoying the same.

Julie and I have both adopted a new fashion on the mountain.  No more blacks, blues and browns that you can't see.  Julie has two new pairs of ski pants, one pink and one yellow.  Both are easy to spot even on cloudy days.  In addition, they just look a lot better than black from head to toe.

Yesterday was a fantastic groomer day at DV.  The sun was out.  It was warmer, without being warm enough to melt the snow.  The food was great at Royal Street and the skiing was wonderful.

The other nice thing they brought, although you can never be certain how much credit all the fans should get, is a basketball win for NC State!  The game was being played on Sunday while we were skiing.  I had the TiVo set to record the game, but I can't tell you how hard it was to stay oblivious of the results.  There was a TV in the restaurant at lunch.  There was a TV in the locker room at the end of the day.  Friends sent me texts,  My phone gives me automatic score updates.  But through all that, we got to see the Wolfpack down the number three seeded Georgetown.

Go Pack!

Park City goes Hollywood

It's a very long, very ugly story about property rights, zoning, self righteous state representatives and senators and campaign contributions (bribes), but Park City is getting a movie studio complex.  More accurately, Park City is getting a movie studio shoved down its throat. The short version:

There's a guy who owns some property just outside of Park City, at the intersection of 248 and 40, over by the new hospital.  The land was zoned for some minimal development, but he wanted to build a lot more.  Meanwhile, the Utah government wanted to encourage the movie industry to expand in the state.  So the landowner went out and found Raleigh Studios who wanted to build a new studio. To make this work, all you need is the wonderful state government threatening to pass legislation that completely ignores and overrides the local zoning.

Rather than getting absolutely no say in the matter, Park City and Summit County succumbed and are allowing the zoning changes.  Of course, this isn't just a studio building.  It's a studio, hotel and retail space.  Park City really needs another hotel?

I went out when the planning commission and city council did a site visit with the builder.  I think they will end up building something decent, but because of all the legal bullshit that went on, the builder isn't having to follow the same rules for set backs, open space, trails and density that everyone else in Park City does. Must be nice to be so special.

Several lessons:

• It's not what you know, it's who you make campaign contributions to.  Again, I would prefer to be honest and just call them bribes.  If you want something unusual, start bribing the politicians early and often.
• As much as the Utah government talks about keeping the federal government out of the way and making decisions locally, they only mean that when they get to have their way.  They are more than happy to override local zoning. "Make decisions locally, unless you aren't deciding the same thing I would."

Given that it's going to happen, I hope they do it well and make it successful. It could be a nice addition to the city, but the way it was done leaves everyone with bitter feelings about the whole deal.

My first time lapse effort

I decided to learn a new photography skill today, time lapse. It took me two tries and some education on the PC, but here is what I ended up with.  This trial is quite boring.  There's no music,  I edited it oddly and it ends abruptly.  But I did learn a lot!

If you click on the little YouTube icon, you can watch it in HD.

To do this, I...

• Shot about 1000 photos, one every 5 seconds.  Thank goodness this is very, very easy to automate on my camera. Unfortunately, the 40+ mph winds we were having kept blowing the camera around, even using a very strong tripod with a full ski boot hanging from it for ballast.
• Loaded them into Lightroom on my laptop
• Edited the pictures and the movement using Lightroom and a tool called LRtimelapse
• Waited what felt like a day for Lightroom to spit out the results

It's a long, slow process and my hope is that after trying a few more time lapse series, I won't have to iterate as often.

Now I am building a long list of interesting time lapse subjects.

What the melting snow leaves behind

Last year we had our lawn aerated and I pointed out how the little grass nuggets looked like dog poop.

This year the snow is melting pretty quickly and unfortunately, the dog poop also looks like dog poop.  I was wondering where Jasper was putting all that food we gave him.  Now I know.

It still seems like there should be some sort of Park City event for this.  Instead of rolling Easter eggs, we roll poop?  Everyone donates their collected dog poop as manure for the community gardens?  In a town where over 50 percent of the households have dogs, poop should be part of celebrating spring!

Sabre versus Champagne

Thanks to Rob Schumacher for inviting us to join he, his wife Theresa, and friend John Wells to visit the St Regis Deer Valley for the hotel's daily champagne toast.  Every evening around sunset, one of the bar's employees comes out with a short sabre in one hand and a bottle of champagne in the other.  First he tells a story going back to Napoleon's time to explain the tradition.

Then he takes the sabre, quickly runs it along the edge of the bottle, and literally lops the top of the bottle, cork and all. Even though it breaks the glass, the pressure from the champagne blows all the debris away from the beverage, leaving a nice bottle to pour.

All the better, they offer free champagne to all the guests for a toast.  Very unique and fun to watch.

Enjoy skiing PCMR? Do it soon or miss out!

I would normally make a comment like this post's title because of the rapidly melting snow.  The base is low and the temperatures are quite warm.  However, this gets a lot more interesting than that.

Park City Mountain Resort is like a lot of ski resorts, where they don't actually own the property they sit on.  Many resorts lease land from the National Forest Service or some other derivative of the US government.  Park City is an old silver mining town and even though the mining has been stopped for quite some time, United Park City Mines owned a lot of the land in the mountains.  While PCMR owns the land at its base, most (or all) of the ski runs run across land that was leased from the mining company.

Now the rub....  A few years ago, a private Canadian company named Talisker decided to start investing heavily in Park City.  They have built several subdivisions, both on the mountains and outside town.  They bought the Canyons ski resort when American Ski Corp went into bankruptcy (outbidding Vail).  Now the funny part....  they also bought the land from the mining company where PCMR's ski runs are.

This week Park City sued Talisker. Apparently Talisker has told PCMR that their lease expired and that they need to negotiate a new one.  Park City seems to think that they extended the lease they had. Unfortunately, with both negotiations and a legal case both being held in secret, it's hard to tell exactly what's going on.  PCMR is screaming that the world is ending, that Talisker is cheating, and that they did everything they were supposed to.  Talisker quietly says "nope".

My completely uneducated, uniformed guess is that PCMR screwed up somehow on extending their lease.  They are going to court and immediately started a big campaign about "Talisker is trying to shut down PCMR!"  They even created a web site called Support PCMR.

Should be an interesting series of events, but of course, all the good stuff will be behind closed doors unless the court records become public.

UPDATE:  Oops.  Sure enough.  Seems PCMR forgot to mail the letter saying they wanted to extend the lease.

"Both Talisker and PCMR are sophisticated parties who obviously had copies of the leases. Both are chargeable with knowledge of the covenants contained therein," Cronheim notes. "PCMR's complaint all but concedes it failed to give the required formal written notice of its intention to extend the leases prior to their expiration. If this is the case, PCMR made a major and inexcusable mistake. Before commencing $7 million worth of infrastructure improvements, it should have been 100% certain that the Talisker tracts were still under lease. That said, PCMR has highlighted the inference that Talisker's ownership of nearby Canyons Resort led it to deal underhandedly with PCMR in an effort to damage its major competitor. The court might be sympathetic to the argument that Talisker strung PCMR along with the intention of pulling the rug out from underneath them or otherwise wreaking havoc on PCMR's operations.

ANOTHER UPDATE:  Bored, read through the actual court document.