Monthly Archives: January 2013

Scenic Pictures


This post contains a variety of scenic pictures taken on hiking trips around the world. If you click on the picture you will zoom in – and if you click again, zoom again. It’s fun and brings a greater sense of immediacy and reality to your viewing – give it a try.

Patagonia  - Swans 1 Restored 1Black Necked Swans, in a lake near Puerto Natales, Chile. We stopped here on our way to Torres Del Paine National Park. It was a windy, cool day and the glare of the sun on the waves at that time of day made it difficult to get a good picture.

Ama Dablam from the northwestThis is a picture of Ama Dablam, a 22,300′ mountain in Nepal on the way to the Everest Base Camp. To quote from Wikipedia, “Ama Dablam means “Mother’s necklace”; the long ridges on each side like the arms of a mother (ama) protecting her child, and the hanging glacier thought of as the dablam, the traditional double-pendant containing pictures of the gods, worn by Sherpa women.[2] For several days, Ama Dablam dominates the eastern sky for anyone trekking to Mount Everest basecamp.”  If you click on the picture to enlarge it, you’ll see that I happened to catch an avalanche in progress near the top of the mountain on the left side.

IMG_0549_0109_edited-1Here is another picture of Ama Dablam taken from the other side of the mountain. Notice the heavy overhang of snow 1/3 of the way down from the peak, ready for avalanche.

DSCN0430This is a picture of the Fairmont Chateau Lake Louise, Alberta, taken on the return from a hike to the nearby glacier. The hotel is located in Banff National Park.

DSCN0431This is another picture of the hotel taken from a greater distance, near the far end of Lake Louise.

DSCN0432This is the view further up the trail away from Chateau Lake Louise. The gravel ridge in the middle of the frame is a terminal morraine formed by an advancing glacier.

DSCN0483This is a view of the glacier and the morraine. The picture was taken from higher up and closer to the glacier, from a Tea House in the park where we had a sandwich for lunch. We hiked about halfway from here up the morraine towards the glacier.

Patagonia This picture was taken in Torres Del Paine National Park in southern Chile at the end of a day hike to one of the glaciers in the park. The boat is arriving at a camp ground in the park, delivering supplies to the hotel and bringing hikers back to the end of the road at the other end of the lake.

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This is a picture of the Mer De Glace glacier above Chamonix, France. Several glaciers come together around the bend, outside the field of vision. The bare rock on the valley walls show how much the glacier has shrunk in the last 100+ years.

Everest and LhotseThis picture was taken from the National Park just above Namche Bazaar looking at Mt Everest, the pyramid-shaped mountain left of center behind the ridge in front of it called the Nuptse Lohtse wall. Lohtse is the peak to the right. The Everest base camp was about 8 days hiking from this spot. If you click on the photo you can see the spindrift blowing off Everest and Nuptse.

Alaska 2011 121 - CopyThis is Glacier Bay, Alaska. The day was so bright and the reflections off the glacier and snow so strong it was difficult to get a good picture with the automatic camera I was using.