Wildlife photography

Buffalo photo taken from the car with
a pocket digital amera.

The great Northwest abounds with wildlife: deer, elk, moose, antelope, bears, mountain goats and coyotes, to name a few animals. The area has many national parks (think Yellowstone) and forests where it is easy to see animals in the wild. It's also not uncommon to see deer and other animals grazing in farmers' fields as you drive through rural areas.

Sometimes the animals are as close as your yard. One time I was visiting my sister in northwestern Montana when I heard a strange sound outside the window in the middle of the night. I looked out to see two deer snacking on her shrubs. Another time a bear cub took up residence in a tree about 20 feet from her house. After a couple of days the mother came and "talked" it down.

Parks, forests, farms, and mountain roads all provide opportunities to get photographs of wildlife. Getting great photographs of wildlife in something else. When I was in Yellowstone last year, I met with Pam Talasco, an up-and-coming West Yellowstone wildlife photographer who has taken some pretty fantastic photos of Yellowstone wildlife. She offers two tips to get good wildlife photos:

• Be patient. Study the animal until you can anticipate its next move, She sometimes watches an animal for an hour or so until it is in just the right setting.
• Be mindful of your safety. Take photos from your car. If you do get out, keep your distance from wild animals. You never know when they'll come after you.

I can attest to the second tip. When I lived in Alaska, I was always looking for the perfect moose picture. While driving one evening, I saw a moose grazing in a pond about 100 feet off the highway. I stopped my car, grabbed my camera and got out. I watched the moose for awhile and when it didn't lift its head toward me, I yelled, "Hey! Moose!" which was not a very bright thing to do as it lifted its head and charged toward me. Luckily, I was not very far from my car and had left the door open so I reached my car before Mr. Moose did.

Patience is a virtue also extolled by Judy Shuler, author of the Alaska Travel Planning Guide, which contains a chapter on wildlife photography. She advises photographers to move slowly or just sit and blend into nature; after awhile, the animals will ignore you. IN her book, she also gives tips on how to tell when an animal has sensed your presence and doesn't like it. These signs  include the animal looking directly at you with ears alert on hair raised.



Buffalo from a distance, photo taken with
a pocket digital camera with telephoto lense.

Camera equipment
Pam Talasco uses 35mm digital cameras with high-powered telephoto lenses to capture her animals. If you want pictures you can enlarge to poster size that's what you'll need.

However, you can get acceptable photographs with pocket digital cameras, as long as you realize their limitations. Their built-in telephone lenses don't have a very far reach, so you won't be able to get decent photographs of animals that are far away.

I am a big fan of pocket digital cameras. I held out a long time before getting one as I didn't want to give up my 35mm cameras and telephoto lenses that I'd invested thousands of dollars in. However, I never used some of the lenses that much because I didn't like hauling everything, including a tripod, around. I was forced into digital when print film became nearly impossible to find or have developed. I got a small digital camera as an experiment, and four pocket digitals later, I would never go back to print or the 35mm digitals and auxiliary lenses.

You can get good wildlife photos with a pocket digital, many of which will enlarge quite nicely. I've had enlargements made from a 5.1 mp camera big as 10" x 13" inches, and the detail is incredible. You can see every fine silken hair on a butterfly's wings. Of course, it helped that I was about nine inches away from the butterfly when I snapped the picture. But I've also gotten some pretty good photos of buffalo at Yellowstone and deer at Wallowa Lake in northeastern Oregon.

Show 'n shine under the sun

This tail light says it all about classic cars.

The summer car show season is underway in Eastern Washington and Eastern Oregon, as well as elsewhere around the country.

We went to our first show of the season today, an annual event on the Parkade in downtown Kennewick. We go to a lot of shows throughout the region every season, like most Saturdays between late April and September. Sometimes it seems we see the same cars over and over. Today was different, as there were a lot of cars we'd never seen before.

My favorite car today was a white Mercury, probably from the late 1940s. I loved the tail lights: big dollar signs. That says it all. Restoring old cars is expensive, even if owners do most of the work themselves. Restored classic cars sell for many times the original price. One beautiful car carried a price tag of $32,000; it probably cost under a thousand dollars when the first owner drove it off the lot.

The big car show in this area is Cool Desert Nights, which attracts hundreds of cars to Richland the last weekend in June every year.  My favorite car show is the one in Joseph, Oregon, which we just happened upon since I had to be in the nearby town of Enterprise for a work assignment, and wanted to drive over to Wallowa Lake for lunch.

We never made it to Wallowa Lake because of the car show. Joseph is a small Western-themed town that has the most amazing outdoor sculpture museum that I've ever seen. Bronze statues of horses, cowboys, cougars and Indians line both sides of the town's main street.

Wagons, ho!

A diorama at the Oregon Trail Interpretive Center.

We've spent the last couple of weeks watching Wagon Train, a popular Western that aired for 276 episodes starting in 1957, on DVD. When I was growing up, it was must-see TV for me.

Even in grade school, I had an interest in the pioneers who crossed the United States to find a new life in Oregon, California and Washington.

I can still remember a couple of great-aunts talking about their grandfather (my great-great-grandfather) who left France to build a new life in the American West, crossing first the Atlantic Ocean by boat and then this country by wagon train. My aunts used to talk about how his wagon train was attacked by Indians on the trip, but didn't find it ironic that when he arrived in Washington Territory he married a woman who was the daughter of a French-Canadian fur trapper and a Chinook Indian woman. No one seems to know when he crossed the country, only that he was married in Astoria, Oregon, in the spring of 1863.

Many years ago, I drove sections of the Oregon Trail through Wyoming and marveled how it only took me 15 minutes to drive as far as the pioneers did in one day. I remember stopping at Guernsey, Wyoming, where, more than 100 years later, deep wagon wheel ruts still existed.

Closer to home, the wagon trail is still visible at the Whitman Mission in Walla Walla, Washington,  and the Oregon Trail Interpretive Center at Baker City, Oregon. If you're ever driving Interstate 84 through eastern Oregon, definitely make time for a stop at the interpretive center. The center sits on Flagstaff Hill about five miles off the freeway. Paved trails lead downhill to the ruts, although you can also see ruts a short distance from the road at the bottom of the hill.

Wagon wheel ruts in Oregon

The center has excellent dioramas that are so realistic you'd swear you were on the trail with the pioneers, who were dirty and dusty from the trail. Not at all like the pioneers on Wagon Train who frequently wore suits and ties or, if they were women, snowy white blouses. The wagons on the television show were large and roomy, but the wagons on display at the center are narrow and difficult to move around upright for adults inside.

The center also puts on interpretive programs on various facets of life along the trail. These, too, are well worth attending if one is taking place during your visit. One program that I attended featured one woman portraying four women in different stages of their lives and journeys over the Oregon Trail. The actress was so realistic in her portrayals she had the audience in tears by the end of the hour.

"Yellowstone on a motor scooter:" another great review

Chalk up another great review for my latest Cheryl's Guide, Yellowstone on a motor scooter.

Featured on Review Harbor, this review noted my "Yellowstone guide is so comprehensive and has bits of valuable information for a fellow scooter rider that you won’t find anywhere else."

It added, "Probst guides you through everything, from the beginning to the end of your trip of your trip."

The author, who uses the pen name Snurre, also rides a motor scooter.

You can read the full review at Review Harbor.

Earlier, Ron Arnold,  the Detroit motor scooter Examiner, gave my book a great review, calling it "excellent and wonderfully detailed."

Yellowstone on a motor scooter is available in text-only from Amazon Kindle or with full-color photographs and illustrations from GuideGecko.

A soldier salutes



Statue of General Jonathan Wainwright

My husband receives much of his medical care through the Veterans Administration. Usually he goes to the Richland outpatient clinic, but sometimes he has to go to the Jonathan Wainwright Medical Center in Walla Walla when he needs to see a specialist.

I usually go with him when he goes to Walla Walla as it provides a great excuse to get out of the house and away from the computer for a few hours.

The last time he went, it was a beautiful spring day out, so I decided to wander around the grounds instead of sitting inside a stuffy waiting room. The medical center goes back more than 100 years, with some of the original buildings still in use.  It was a great day for a leisurely stroll.

Buildings are located around a huge rectangular field that is punctuated with a large statue of Army General Wainwright in front of a flagpole with the U.S. and MIA flags that happened to be blowing in the breeze that day.

General Wainwright was born in Walla Walla in 1883, and was a career Army officer. After graduating from West Point in 1906, he joined the cavalry, and was later stationed in the Philippines. He served in France during World War I. He returned to the Philippines in 1940 and became a prisoner of the Japanese when he surrendered at Corregidor. A four-star general, he received the Medal of Honor. He retired from the Army in 1947 and died in Texas in 1953.

Great review on "Yellowstone on a motor scooter"

Ron Arnold, Detroit motor scooter examiner, gave my latest book, Yellowstone on a motor scooter, a thumb's up review in his column.

Here's a little bit about what he had to say:

Guides like Cheryl's are a great resource for knowing a lot about the place that you are going, and can really make a big difference in how effectively you spend your time at your destination without worrying about what to do or where to go once you're there.

You can read the full review in Ron's column.

Yellowstone on a motor scooter is available from the Amazon Kindle Store in text only format, and from GuideGecko in PDF format with photographs. The PDF book also works on Kindles, but the photos won't be in color unless you have a color reader.

The price is $3.99. Says Ron, "It's a cheap way to make sure that you have a great time on your scooter in Yellowstone! "

Tips on visiting Yellowstone

Fantastic views at Yellowstone

I can't remember how many times I've been to Yellowstone National Park, but it's a lot of times, maybe six to eight, beginning when I was eight years old.

I've pretty much always gone in the summer, because that was when school was out or it was the only time I could get away from work. This last time we went in early September. The weather was cooperative and the park not as crowded as it would have been in July.

Timing your vacation is probably the most important thing you can do when you''re planning to visit America's most-loved park. But there are other things you can do to enhance your trip there, and I've written about them in an article for Travelhoppers, an online travel magazine that I frequently write for.

En route to Yellowstone, we overnighted at Big Timber, which had the only RV campground between Livingston and Billings. We stayed at the Spring Creek Campground that I thought was a bit expensive for what it offered, though some people will tell you you can't put a price on peace and quiet. The site was very peaceful and clean; you can read more about it in this article. On the way home, we stayed at a campground outside of Missoula that was just off the freeway and train tracks and was so noisy, we barely got any sleep. It really made me appreciate Spring Creek that much more.

Yellowstone on a Motor Scooter

More people are riding their motor scooters in Yellowstone. If you think you'd like to be one of them, then you need to read my latest book, Yellowstone on a Motor Scooter. It's filled with tips on how to make the most out of your riding, like when to get gas (whenever you see a gas station as scooters gulp gas going up the steep hills).

The book is available through the Amazon Kindle store in text-only. If you like pictures and maps with your books, surf on over to Guidegecko for a PDF version. I'm told PDF books also work on Kindle, through the pictures aren't in color.