Like a flower opening its petals to greet the sun, this anemone had its tentacles unfurled at sunrise to greet not the sun but the ocean. There is a chiton to the upper left of the anemone that I hadn’t noticed until I got home and looked at the pictures.
On my journey to the redwoods, I expected to work mostly with the widest angles of my lens, highlighting the immense size and height of these ancient trees. However, my plans changed instantly the moment I stepped on the trails. I was struck both by the myriad colors and textures of the trees as well as their tenacity in hanging onto life despite fire and storm damage. This is one of my favorite pictures from the trip and also one of my earliest, I stopped off for a quick hike around the Simpson-Reed Trail in Jedediah Smith Redwoods State Park before continuing on to my hotel in Crescent City.
The bark of this redwood was colored green by moss, while on the right of the picture where the bark has been stripped away, you can see the red pulp that gives the redwoods their name.
A little experiment with form and color using a young elk bull in Prairie Creek Redwoods State Park in northern California.
I was pretty excited on this morning, it’s not every day that I get to discover alien life right here on our own planet! As soon as I saw this sea star, it was so much larger than the other stars, with so many more legs, that I knew it was from out of this world.
I set my tripod into the soft sand but I could hear a voice in my head telling me not to take the picture. I picked up my tripod and began to walk away before I rejected the star’s mind control and reset the tripod onto the wet beach. Sadly, when I got back home from my trip to Redwood National Park, I discovered that this is not a newly discovered star from the stars, but rather an already discovered terrestrial variety with latent Jedi powers.
Like the ochre sea star, the sunflower sea star also comes in shades of red, orange, and the purple seen here. With a few of the legs upturned, you can see the tube feet that let the stars grip the rocks on the beach, move about the tide pool, and grip their prey. At the time I thought it was sitting still, but looking at the pictures when I got home I could see it was slowly moving its legs.
I’m lucky I escaped with my life.
This patch of barnacles reminded me of a group of whales breaching the surface. There are real whales just offshore in the Pacific, but these mini-whales live their lives in the tide pools of Redwood National Park.