Last year, I spent several very pleasant days exploring the Flat Tops Wilderness.  I backpacked up onto the big plateau and found myself a nice campsite, nestled in a small valley near a couple little lakes.  To my delight, the little lakes were full of salamanders, which, along with the marmots, pika, wildflowers, grassland communities, and topography, gave me plenty to explore and photograph.  Oh, there were lots of mosquitoes, too, but not in a way that ruined the experience.

This year, I talked Kim into accompanying me back to the same site.  “It’ll be great,” I told her, “you can go run trails during the day and I’ll wander around with my camera!”  (Kim runs ultramarathons and is always looking for something other than the mostly-flat trails around us here in central Nebraska to use for training.)  I showed her a map of where I’d camped last year, along with photos.  I think the chance to see the salamanders probably closed the deal.

We made a plan.  It was a good plan. 

I had a packing list and made some tough decisions about what camera gear I could carry in my backpack.  Kim picked out some tasty-sounding meals.  Looking at the trails map, we talked through a variety of trails she could run on and places we might explore together.  We even accounted for issues related to the high elevation – we took a few days to acclimate and also tried a prescription medication that alleviates symptoms of altitude sickness.  And, just in case the mosquitoes were bad enough to warrant it, we packed some head nets.

On the way west, we spent a day and a half in eastern Colorado.  We volunteered to run an aid station for the Summit 200, a 200 mile ultramarathon in the mountains of Summit County.  It was a nice way to spend some time getting acclimated to higher elevation (we were at about 9,000 feet) and soak in the supportive culture of ultramarathon runners and race organizers.  There were no mosquitoes at the aid station.

After a day of feeding and cheering on runners, we headed further west and camped at 10,000 feet at Stillwater Reservoir, right by the trail head into the Flat Tops Wilderness.  It was a terrific little campground I’d stayed at last year, right next to a waterfall and little lake.  The weather was pleasantly cool, though not so cool that it didn’t have mosquitoes.  “Gee,” said Kim, “there are a lot of mosquitoes here!”

I guess so.  It depends on what you consider “a lot.”

After a night of mediocre sleep, we got up and get ready to hit the trail.  The overnight temperatures left a light frost on the ground, and when I rolled of my tent, there were no mosquitoes about.  By the time we were ready to hike, though, the mosquitoes were up and moving again.  “You’ll hardly notice them after a while,” I said, as I brushed a small horde of them off Kim’s shirt. 

Kim is in better shape than I am.  She runs ultramarathons, after all.  I play soccer once a week (most weeks) and wander around in prairies.  I’m not in bad shape, but Kim was nice enough not to comment on how many times I stopped to “admire the flowers” on the way up the trail.  Once we hit the top, though, I took the lead because I knew the location of my secret campsite and how to get there. 

“Um, where’s the trail?” Kim asked. 

“Oh, we’re not going to follow the trail from here,” I said, “the campsite is off the beaten path.”

“What?” Kim shouted, “I can’t hear you over the sound of all these mosquitoes!”

This is where I made a big mistake.  I remembered that we had to follow a ridge to the west to find my little lakeside campsite. Unfortunately, I picked the wrong ridge to follow.  In my defense, there are two ridges running parallel to each other, and they both lead to basically the same place.  On the other hand, the path I chose went through a lot of dense willows and little creek and the other one wouldn’t have. 

As we walked, Kim asked me again why we weren’t following a trail.  “We don’t need a trail,” I said, “that’s the advantage of camping in a wilderness area – you can find your own path!”

“Hmph,” Kim replied, as she cleared a path through the mosquitoes and shrubs and squished along in her soggy trail-running shoes

Eventually, we found the little lake and set up camp on the little hill just above it.  There were only slightly more mosquitoes at the campsite than there’d been on the trail.  Periodically, a breeze would clear enough of them away that we could actually see the lake.

“So,” Kim asked, “how far is it from here to the trails I’m going to run?”

And that, my friends, was where things fell apart.  After all our planning, we’d both failed to fully realize how far from the trails our campsite really was.  Actually, it wasn’t the distance, so much as the steep topography in-between that was the biggest issue.  In retrospect, I think we’d partitioned our planning too much.  I was focused on the camp site and photography opportunities and Kim was scoping out the trails and where they led.  Neither of us spent time thinking about the connection between those two parts of the scheme.

After some discussion, we ended up bailing on the whole project the following morning and backpacking down the same trail we’d climbed the day before. Poor access to trails was one factor, but there were others – including, to be honest, an impressive number of mosquitoes. I’m pretty sure one particularly discreditable swarm of them tried to steal my boots overnight.

As confirmation of our bad planning, it took us about an hour and half just to get to the nearest trail, including some pretty arduous uphill climbing.  Between that and the previous days’ trek, my legs were exhausted by the time we reached the rim of the plateau and prepared to hike the four miles down to the trailhead. 

Kim, however, decided she didn’t want to leave the Flat Tops without doing at least a little trail running at 11,500 feet elevation.  As a result, I ended up resting and doing a little photography while Kim knocked out a “quick seven mile run” over to the Devil’s Causeway (a popular feature of the Flat Tops) and back.  A charming legion of mosquitoes hung out with me while I waited, though a brief hailstorm subdued them for a little while.  After Kim returned, we heaved our packs back on and trudged downhill to our vehicle.

During the next few ways, we tested a few different ideas that might lead to a mutually-enjoyable vacation.  We found a nice campground at nearby Stagecoach State Park, where Kim had access to some nearby trails and I had enough photography opportunities to keep me happy.  There was also a great pizza place in nearby Oak Creek that provided a nice break from trail mix, beef jerky, and freeze-dried meals.  We had a great time.

After much productive discussion, I think we’ve got some workable options for next year’s vacation figured out.  We’re not ruling out backpacking but have established some better ground rules for how it would need to work.  What we really want is a quiet campsite close to good running trails and photographic opportunities.  Kim wants hills and at least some trees (for some shade).  I want open country (for light) and good plant diversity.  Relatively high elevation is nice because of the cool temperatures, but we don’t need to be at elevations that take a week to acclimate to.  There should be lots of options, right? 

(Suggestions are welcome!)

I apologize for not sharing more photos from my square meter plot today (trust me, I’ve got plenty to show you!) but I made a quick trip to the Niobrara Valley Preserve this week. There were only a couple of short windows of time for photography, but I tried my best to take advantage of them. On Monday evening, I wandered around a sand blowout (bowl-shaped depression caused by wind erosion). I saw a lot of activity, only some of which I managed to photograph. I missed the sand wasps and robber flies, but did manage to get some photos of a big beetle, a tiger beetle, and a very accommodating lizard.

I had to follow the tiger beetle around for a while before finally getting a good photo, and the beetle didn’t stick around long. The lizard, though, was surprisingly willing to hang out. That happens sometimes, but I don’t know why. I’d like to think it’s my charming personality but it’s possible other factors are involved.

After a while, I decide that if the lizard was going to be that comfortable with my camera, I’d go for broke. I switched from my macro lens to a wide-angle lens with the ability to focus almost up to the glass (Canon RF 15-30mm). Approaching veeerrrry slowly, I managed to get the lens within an inch or so of the lizard and get a few photos. It backed off, but I managed a couple other shots before leaving him alone to enjoy the rest of the evening.

The big show going on in the Nebraska Sandhills right now features fourpoint evening primrose (Oenothera rhombipetala). It’s an incredibly showy biennial plant that is blooming throughout the landscape. As a biennial, a flush of fourpoint evening primrose is a good indicator of events that happened two years ago. In this case, that included drought conditions that made vegetation relatively sparse, let a lot of light hit the ground, and stimulated the germination of a lot of evening primroses.

The drought enabled primrose germination in many locations across the Sandhills, but they are particularly dense where grazing or other disturbances helped create even more bare ground and/or less vigorous grass competition. Those plants then spent last year (a wet year) as low-growing rosettes of leaves before bolting up this year and popping out profusions of large yellow blossoms. They’ll die at the end of this growing season, but they’ll each leave behind thousands of seeds to fuel the next primrose explosion whenever favorable conditions return.

As the evening sun disappeared behind clouds Monday night, I photographed a few primroses along the edge of the blowout. The light was subtle (drab?) but the flowers were showy enough to make some nice images. I decided that if Tuesday morning’s sunrise allowed it, I’d go out and try to photograph some of the bigger patches nearby.

There were lots of clouds Tuesday morning, and the sun popped in and out of them as it rose, creating some fun light for landscape photography. It wasn’t hard to decide what to feature in the foreground.

I headed for the bison pasture, guessing that the year-round grazing there had created some nice patches of primroses. I was right, though later in the day, I found much larger and more dense areas of primroses – long after the both the good light and my time had run out. Oh well. It’s hard to complain.

As the sun moved in and out of the clouds, I took advantage of the variable light to try lots of angles and compositions. I circled around within a few acres, often returning to the same plants to shoot them from a different perspective and/or under different lighting conditions. The two photos below show how much difference light makes.

I find that yellow flowers can be particularly challenging to photograph in bright light. They can easily get washed out and lose detail in images. That made things tricky as the sun rose higher because I liked the rich color and contrast with full light but also appreciated the diffusion caused by thin layers of clouds. I had plenty of time and subject matter, so I kept playing around for an hour or so before I finally had to go get ready for some actual work.

The Sandhills is a landscape of about 12 million acres of prairie. That expanse, along with the hills and (in many places) numerous wetlands and lakes, makes it a pretty spectacular place. When you add in profusions of big showy flowers, though, it’s out of this world. If you’ve never driven through north-central Nebraska, I’d politely suggest you add it to whatever list you have to keep track of the important experiences you want to have in your life.

If you do make the trip, be sure to stop and hike the trail at the Niobrara Valley Preserve. There are some other great options for exploration as well, though, including the Valentine, Crescent Lake, and Fort Niobrara National Wildlife Refuges and the Halsey and McKelvie units of the U.S. Forest Service, among others. There’s no bad time to visit the Sandhills, but if you can time your trip to coincide with big blooms of primroses or sunflowers, you’re living right.