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Columns

Hiking With All My Toys

The Big Boys versus the iPhone

If it’s summer, you’ll find Ol’ Basic in the high country of the Sierra Nevada. I’m camped at 10,000 feet, surrounded by peaks and meadows, granite and wildflowers. Even with a new hatch of Sierra mosquitoes, it’s about as close to heaven as you can get.

I’m here for almost a week with all my photo gear, plenty of food and even a roll-up table and a folding chair. Before you try and imagine what kind of shape Ol’ Basic must be in, I’ll let you in on a little secret. My gear arrived here, not on my back, but on the backs of mules. A miracle for the aging photographer, packers in Mammoth, Calif., hauled in the gear while I “scampered” over the passes with naught but a daypack. Now, with my base camp established, I’m free to day-hike the surrounding peaks and shoot to my heart’s content.

Which brings me to the real subject of this column: today’s hike. I said that mules allowed me to bring my camera gear up to the high country. Well, I did bring it—all of it. I brought my 35mm kit (gear that I now call my “Big Boy” cameras), a tripod sturdy enough to take down a bear at close range (or hold a long zoom lens steady), plus four other pocket cameras (one with a 28-500mm lens, one with a super-wide-angle, one for infrared, even one that shoots underwater) and, of course, my iPhone.

As I headed off this morning, I couldn’t bear to leave any of it. My daypack topped out around 30 pounds, not horrible, but it did crimp my scampering a little. About 27 of those pounds was my 35mm gear, the other three pounds being my pocket cameras and my iPhone.

Now let me tell you about my three favorite photos of the day and how they came to be.

Photo #1 was taken with my Pentax Optio W60, a tiny 10-megapixel camera that’s waterproof to 13 feet. It also has a macro that focuses to one centimeter.

I had just topped a ridge around 11,000, and as I sat there taken aback both by the view and the lack of oxygen, I noticed a patch of small-flowered penstemons (Penstemon procerus) not more than a couple of inches high, growing out of a crack in the granite.

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