Liechtenstein has always been a fixation. It is likely due to its mystical Disneyland allure, where everything is perfect, minstrels frolic while baking strudel, and life is as ignorant Americans imagine it should be in perfect little feudal European kingdoms. Perhaps it was when the people protested a few decades ago, about how perfect things weren’t. Or, in the intervening period, how there was a “constitutional crisis,” where the king wanted to edit the constitution to make it more friendly to monarchies, for which he threatened to “sell all the royal properties and move to Austria” if the people didn’t agree. They agreed.

One can’t help but to love the fact that, if Switzerland is a haven for ill-gotten funds, Liechtenstein is the place where the Swiss hide their money. Is Brexit or Trump’s America not xenophobic enough for you? Liechtenstein admits no more than 56 immigrants per year. 56. Then there is the fact that any neighboring country could have, at any time, in the past 500 years, simply told Liechtenstein that they shall no longer exist on their own. For some odd reason, a country the size of a large town still exists, when there is no good sense for it. But it does.

When we first came to Europe, it took 2 months to drive to Liechtenstein. I had to experience it and taste its illustrious, smug, self-righteous glory. I decided I wanted to live there, despite the 56-person limit (I thought I was cool enough). Then I realized there is no airport, so that put an end to that. 61 months later, and I had a chance to fly there.

So, there you have it. Country number 11 for “the 11” (as my grandfather called the PA-11).

Above Adelboden.

Interlaken.

Stucklistock north and east slope.

North of Andermatt, looking south.

Reuss River valley, emptying into the Vierwaldstättersee. One can thank this region for the existence of Switzerland. Some hillbillies in the late 1200s gave the middle finger to the Hapsburgs and it worked.

Clariden (10,718′). There is a sizable glacier under all this snow. The ridge in the foreground comprises the border between cantons Glarus and Uri.

Eastern ridge of Bifertenstock (11,217′). Some glaciers on both sides. The razor sharp ridge is the border between Glarus and Grisons.

Glarus. They don’t like foreigners here, even though lots of them moved to New Glarus, Wisconsin in the 1840s. I would take this valley, even if they all hated me, over Wisconsin.

Piz Dolf (9,934′), border of cantons St. Gallen and Grisons. It was time to begin descending.

Gigerwaldsee, one mile below nearly vertical mountainsides. It was quite tight and took some time to work my way down and out past the dam.

Some sort of mountain above Vättis.

Following the valley to Bad Ragaz.

Bad Ragaz with the Rhine River. Bad Ragaz Flugplatz is in the middle left, a tiny little field with interesting winds and a cantankerous airport operator. I could not land there on this day due to Pentecost. Flugverbot!

Liechtenstein! To the right of the Rhine. Ends just behind me and just past the mountain, also borders Austria on the right, outside of the image. The country is so small that it gets one image.

Gamsberg. Per Wikipedia, “not to be confused with the mountain of the same name in Namibia.”

Möllis, canton Glarus. This little airport is a personal favorite on Google Earth in flight simulator mode. For over a decade, when I have “flown” using said flight simulator, it is always in this valley. I shall return once I get around the fact that I need a sponsor to land at the airport in this image.

Obersee, before fueling.

Glarner Alpen, after fueling, looking south.

Druesberg, looking north, canton Schwyz.

Alpler Torstock, canton Uri.

Fulen, border of Schwyz and Uri.

Clump of mountains on the western slope of the Reuss River valley.

Border of the “half cantons” of Obwalden and Nidwalden. 

Aare River Valley, canton Bern. Lots of glaciers hiding in those valleys.

Lauterbrunnen, valley of death with the Jungfrau.

On approach to Saanen with a sore ass. 

A quick note to recent subscribers, who have come over after abundant international press about glacier flying. This particular book is a one of a kind off subject post. The flying continues….

In May of 2014, two months before I started this aviation-themed blog, I sat with my MacBook by the Blue River in Breckenridge, Colorado and wrote the opening scene for a novel. I had two explicit goals in mind: the novel would end with a specific scene, a conversation between two characters. It would also, to the extent the story allowed, highlight the as yet uncelebrated subtle richness of the countryside in an esoteric, one-of-a-kind small town where I grew up in Upstate New York.

It was implicit to the storyline that I was going to address much deeper topics. The novel began with three main characters, newly out of high school, facing the world woefully unarmed by an upbringing in a somewhat odd group. That belies the history of Upstate New York. While it is presently a “politically progressive, socially conservative, religiously apathetic place,” it was once called the “Second Burned Over District,” due to the prevalence of street preachers consistently converting the masses to new movements and ideas, most pronounced in the 19^th century. By the time I exited the womb, religion was relegated to Italian, Irish, and Polish descendants of immigrants who [might] go to church on Sunday, maybe, in sweatpants with a large Buffalo Bills logo on them. The “Burned Over” idea implies that the people got sick of it and gave up religion to a large extent.

East Aurora, New York is not known as a religious place. It is celebrated as the birthplace of the Roycroft Movement, the world headquarters of Fisher Price, and as an “artistic and literary town.” Perhaps its trendy nature, resulting from inundations of dot com era capital from a shrewd developer, or the presence of a Native American reservation in the days of yore, which separated the town from the nearby City of Buffalo, made the place unique. Maybe it was the fact that it will always hold the throne as being the first small town in America to successfully, once and for all, fight off Walmart from coming into town. Or, as of the time I left, perhaps it is its rather surprising racial homogeny. In any case, it is a small town with a unique aura, of which I am surprised hasn’t been the feature of something larger already.

Driving down Main Street, itself an eponymous fixture, one notices an astonishing variety of churches: many mainstream, many not. Yet, day to day life features virtually no religious significance amongst the townspeople. What is in other areas of the world a way of life is a definitive subculture, where vivid renditions of the universe around them are carried out in groups, creeds, acts of worship, and churches, without anyone else knowing or caring. After having lived in other places, where these realities play out more so in the public sphere, it was unique.

I would like to broad brush the subject and mention that I grew up in a “very religious household.” That cannot possibly do the matter justice, along with its concordant influence on the content of the novel. My father was a bankrupt, washed out dairy farmer turned landscaper who really would have been utterly at home performing traveling revivals in tents in the Midwest, to the point that no less than three family summer vacations were spent literally in the depths of the rural Upper Midwest, preaching to farmers while outrunning tornadoes on two occasions. Running into some money later in life only added righteous fuel to the flames. He never did say that God told him to build golf courses, but I wouldn’t be surprised if a vision was involved in the bidding process.

One of my coping mechanisms was, at the age of 18, to flee to Ecuador to perform voluntary missionary service. I saved up money, quit my job, and to make matters worse, had to go to battle with the same street preacher who disagreed with the idea (I reluctantly admit he might have had a point). Like Moses scorned by the Israelites he came to save, I waged righteous warfare with my parents, bent their will, boarded a plane, and disappeared into the tropical slums of Ecuador, during a revolution.

I must at this point note that it was just a foretaste of my adventures in 2016, fleeing the repression of the German Fatherland by moving to Catalunya, just before an independence vote in 2017 that, as we all know, went to shit. How did I handle that situation? I made sure I was in the air in the Cub when independence was pseudo declared.

By this point, one is likely presuming that the novel is autobiographical. When it comes to the group for which I was raised, there is an unspoken rule that the only acceptable content to consume, negative or positive, about the religion should come from the religion itself, and particularly from the area that regularly produces ecclesiastical content. Thus, a book, even if fiction, written about this group would be written to an audience of none.

This brings up another reality, which is itself a literary opportunity. Amongst my missionary activities, I seemed to develop an aura, as though I had a cross stamped onto my forehead, which subconsciously advertised to holy rollers of all faiths: “this man needs Jesus.” As if I did not have enough already, in a revolution, on the dirty, malaria-infested, dengue-ridden, gang plagued streets of Ecuador, spreading the word of Jesus myself, apparently Christians felt that I needed more.

I cannot keep track of the quantity of conversations that I have had with Christians of every conceivable denomination, where the intent was mutual conversion. As I understood it, they were misguided by the Devil. As they understood it, I was an ideal zealot candidate damned to hell unless they intervened. That presented a mathematical problem, as by some estimates, there are 37,000 denominations of Christianity, the bulk of which believe that all the others are wrong and worse, are from Satan.

That brings up some very complex philosophies. While belief in the western world is a matter of personal choice, the institutional framework of how these beliefs is played out is anything but. While many ordinary, large mainstream faiths are at this point non-dogmatic and apathetic, the terms of belief for a significant quantity of them is that, once a framework is agreed to, the freedom not to believe without significant consequence has been abnegated.

I chose to approach the path of fiction as a mashup of a variety of factors. Long, drawn out conversations with zealots of innumerable faiths is an education, not only into official dogma for countless faiths, but also into how individuals think and reason on such matters. It is one thing to research what a faith believes; it is another to hear a person try to convince another why and how those beliefs should play out.

While the reality of faith plays out all over the world, I can only seem to interpret it from an American lens, where it is intense and homegrown. Denominations, street preachers, and odd groups spring up all the time, all over the country, rather convinced in their correctness, to the point that the most recent Supreme Court justice came from such a faith in Indiana. In any case, it is a form of a divine wager played out in the lives of practitioners and foisted on the next generation, one that is doomed to clash, sometimes spectacularly. All one has to do is look at America and, well, does any of this surprise?

The fun part of such individual and national dysfunction is that it produces the most hilarious of outcomes, and that is a theme that carried through the story. Time and time again during the writing process, I would burst out laughing at the narrative hitting the pages, as I am doing now just thinking about it. To foist teenagers with an impossible divine belief wager, tell them they can’t have sex, and then deny chemical substances that would allow the steam to blow off does one thing: it pressurizes the system. With that comes alarming amounts of drama, resulting in what I hope to be the newest addition to classic American literature.

While I have not once mentioned this project on the blog, it has gone with me everywhere this blog as gone. Every country, seashore, rushing river and pensive location, strewn all over the places I have lived, has featured me sitting in the same folding chair with my MacBook, on poor flying days, chipping away at a story that had to write itself as it went. I hope those that read it enjoy it as much as I enjoyed writing it.

There is a phenomenon present in Europe that is relatively persistent and pervasive that required years to properly appreciate. As I ranted about “that damn inversion” in the foothills of the Pyrenees of Catalunya, I had been interpreting a stalled airmass as a failure of the primary function of a cold front: to clear out humid and polluted air. Seeing the world through the lens of a North American pilot, it appeared that the fronts were stalling out upon passage through the mountains, which is a somewhat logical presumption, as similar events would occur in the Southeastern United States in the summer. Strong fronts would decrease in frequency, effectively retreating north, leaving the South to marinate in its humidified filth. I thought south of the Pyrenees became a similar “South,” as the air in the mountains was often fresh, with clouds and other weather bunched up against the range, usually going all the way to Atlantic France. It would not be a far stretch to compare the phenomenon crossing the Pyrenees to the same thing that exists when drawing a line from Charleston, West Virginia to Winston-Salem, North Carolina.

That false metaphor served as effective blinders for a theoretical pursuit behind what was actually happening. Flight after flight, I would see fog and other remnants of air mass impurity to the south, where I scoffed in altitude-supremacist disdain, failing to notice a wonderful, playful mystique in play.

It took some years to do the obvious: fly just above these fogged in valleys, enjoying the view. At first, I thought it was a rarity. Later, I began to understand it was somewhat common, particularly in the winter. In the latter part of my Iberian pursuits, the inversion became a positive that I sought. In photographs of the occasions where I flew along the northern edge of the Pyrenees in France, which are rather sharp, one can see a similar inversion on the north side, tucked safely down below. I overwhelmingly ignored it the entire time, failing to consider the artistic virtues of such features. It likely had to do with the fact that finding an ideal day without raging north winds was infrequent, so I visited the summits, which were harder to do.

In Switzerland, I knew that the Swiss Plateau (Geneva to Zürich) had terrible inversions during late autumn and early winter, to the point that I would never consider living there. Where I operate out of now is above said inversions 95% of the time. That resulted in a virtual celebration of these features: solid overcast below, a perfectly flat top to these clouds, with them set against steep Swiss terrain, with the Alps as a background. What’s not to like? (Perhaps the very things I didn’t like about it for years in Spain).

These inversions can happen in summer, after a strong, cold storm system, followed by a strong high. Residual moisture gets trapped below when the high-pressure inversion sets in, and a day or so of perfect clouds fills in valleys with massive mountains bursting through. It also happens in Italy any time of year, though it is much farther, so it seems nefarious. Anyhow, I grew to treasure these events and seek them out.

The thing is, because they are common in winter and happen on occasion in summer does not mean that they are uniform. Spring is a time of interesting transition, where at one moment, winter is continuing – not only with snow and an ice ass cold cockpit, but also similar inversions. Then, all of a sudden, a sharp, cold day after a storm features boiling clouds off the hills that turn into showers and other activity, only to die off 20 minutes after sunset, a sure sign that its halfway between winter and summer. A few flights recently demonstrated that inversions sometimes try to defy their form and grow, which makes for an amorphous experience up in the flight levels when the clouds below change their mind.

Classic late autumn inversion. It is somewhat complex and risky to get above the inversion and hope it doesn’t close. 

Classic midwinter inversion. Unbelievably, painfully cold.

Classic late winter inversion.

Italian inversion from 15,000 feet, with the summit of the Matterhorn in the foreground. As usual, it looks somewhat nefarious. Why go down there…?

Early spring inversion. Not quite flat on top.

Same flight, with clouds doing sneaky things.

Mid spring clouds. While it looks inversion-ish, it really isn’t.

Same flight from above. Clearly not an inversion, but clouds with thermally influenced vertical intentions.

Same flight, now from 13,500′, with Mont Blanc sticking out. Rather “bubbly” up top. Forecast called for “isolated cumulonimbus to 17,000 feet,” which I at first though was spooky, until I realized I’d be at 15,000 feet.

Down at 9,000 feet. While the ground looks wintry, the clouds are getting ready for summer.

Over the pass and under the soup. Always a surprise when one gets down low. I was greeted by a rain shower which changed winds in the circuit, so I did a rare go around.

I was going to hold off until the 501(c)(3) exemption application was complete; however, landing oneself on the front page of The Guardian is a way of letting the cat out of the bag. So here it goes: I have launched a nonprofit called the Global Glacier Initiative. The purpose will be to fly to and photograph as many non-polar glaciers on earth as possible, before they melt or before I die, whichever comes first. Photographs at present will be offered for nonprofit use for free. I am largely taking them for future generations that will be born into a world with very few glaciers or none at all.

While I have effectively “dabbled” with my American Rockies and alpine adventures, these are merely a prologue to whet my appetite and develop sufficient skills as an aviator to execute this kind of plan. The quantity of glaciers that are in my crosshairs is something rather exponential compared to what I have accomplished to date. Bring it on.

The pragmatic reality is that the mission will require more than a decade, and up to four aircraft in total, stationed in four separate continents. The areas of focus are: rest of the Alps, Scandinavian Mountains, Iceland, Canadian Rockies, Canadian Coastal Range, American Pacific Northwest, Alaska, a few glaciers in Mexico, a few in Colombia, a few in Ecuador, quite a bit in Peru, Bolivia, years of pleasure in Chile and Argentina, and New Zealand. For the time being, I am skipping on the small icefields of equatorial Africa, the Himalayas (American with a plane and camera = jail), and the Caucasus Mountains.

Difficulty can be measured in a number of fronts: overall quantity of glaciers (Alaska), distance for which they are spread (Canada, tropics), altitude (roughly 20,000 feet in Alaska and up to 23,000 feet in South America), weather (polar storms, tropical fickleness), wind (Patagonia), and local jurisdictions (South America).

It is particularly challenging that glacier photography is best done in the summer, as seasonal snowfalls blur about 90% of the utility photographing them. That means that most of the year will be life as normal, until a blistering war cry attacking them with a vengeance on sunny days, snarling when it rains in August, bitching up a storm when forest fire smoke blocks the view, and back at it when the sun comes out. As my experiences in 2015 prove, there is little in the way of satisfaction like completing a massive glacier binge just before winter sets in, even though I ended up with a rather sore ass from sitting in the Cub for 65 hours in one month. Perhaps a better seat cushion is in order?

The Southern Hemisphere does aid in balancing the glacial pursuit, as generally glaciers are best pursued from December to February. That is, at least, the case in New Zealand, Colombia, Chile, and Argentina. For some enigmatic reason, Ecuador, Peru, and Bolivia are best done June to September, due to the Humboldt Current and moody tropical weather.

In any case, this is something I will be doing no matter what, for personal reasons. If fundraising is a success, then I will be able to do more of it and do it faster (yes, you can send me cash!). If not, it’s still happening, just at the pace I can pull off.

The website for the Global Glacier Initiative, Inc is here: http://globalglacierinitiative.org. There is more to come content-wise, inclusive of some outreach initiatives and a hopefully very sexy map with images added to it as time goes by. In the meantime, this summer hopefully shall feature a conquest of as much of the Alps as I can muster.

The Jura Mountains featured in my early fantasies not too long after coming to Europe. When viewing the Alps on Google Earth, one notes a secondary mountain range to the north, which straddles France and Switzerland. It looks like something out of Appalachia, with long ridges similar to what one would find in Pennsylvania. Oddly, I grew up not far from Pennsylvania, thought the place was a dump, and never went there. Then I did finally fly there, over one of those Allegheny ridges that seemed so curious, and the airplane blew most of the oil out of the engine, so I limped into Maryland and that was that.

Well, its Europe. So, the same thing that exists in redneck Appalachia is now suddenly laced with mystique, culture, and intrigue. At any rate, my first chance to go near the Jura Mountains failed spectacularly when I was escaping Germany in 2016. A low-pressure system was stacked up against the range, so I had to weasel my way toward the Rhône River while gazing in wonder at a pile of clouds that came all the way to the ground, wondering about this Appalachian promised land that I wasn’t able to see. For some reason I blocked the Alps out of my mind. I might admit that I am capable of fear.

Fast forward a few years, with added evening sessions staring at Google Earth, and I grew ever more convinced that I would fly this range at some point, especially “when I am in the Alps.” Perhaps I was bamboozled by a drive through Switzerland from Chamonix in 2016, where I saw a decent snowpack on the range, in early April, despite a rather warm winter. What appeared to be potentially insipid from a distance now had a seemingly subtle erotic appeal, as though the range was rugged as well as Appalachian.

Did I fly to it? Of course not! What reasoning person, when presented with a choice to spend the same time, money, and fuel, would choose the Jura Mountains over the Jungfrau, Mont Blanc, or the Matterhorn? It would be idiocy to think that such a trip would make sense, my sessions of cartographical musings aside.

It is not to say that one can ever get enough of Mont Blanc. It is to say that I drove to Spain and stared at the Jura Mountains from the car, for the umpteenth time, and said to myself: “Enough! You must fly to that damn mountain range!” If anything, I get a certain perverse pride pointing out from the car that “I flew to that mountain” to which my wife says [proportionally as repeated as I say it]: “I know.” That, and there was still some snow, which would soon disappear. Time to get it over with.  It is no irony, by the way, that I can see the Jura Mountains almost every time I go flying in the Alps. They sit on the horizon, which, unsurprisingly, means that the Alps sit on the horizon from the perspective of the Jura. How novel.

So, I did it. It was a mildly flat light midday April day. Haze was a tad more than I like but not bad. It was explicitly not an artistic flight, which I seem to be doing nothing but these days; it was a flight to actually, you know, go somewhere…. the main reason people seem to have airplanes.

It turned out to be quite a pleasure. It reminded me of the first reasons I started authoring photography books back in 2013 in Colorado: it is the joy of seeing a new place and sharing it, of crossing over the horizon, of exploring what I have never seen before. Not everything is National Geographic, nor is a glacier exploding in overwhelming beauty. Not every photograph needs to be illustrious artwork either. Sometimes it is just interesting, and that is delightful enough.

Of course, I have set myself to visit the Jura next winter, when the Swiss Plateau usually is fogged over. That should make quite some artistic images of the two ranges with fog in between.

Rochers de Naye & Dent du Jaman.

Lake Geneva with Vevey below. There is a sculpture of a large fork on the waterfront.

Lake Geneva with the Jura Mountains on the horizon. One can understand why they are an itch that must be scratched.

Lake Geneva, looking south, with Mont Blanc on the horizon. Why go here, when one can fly there (and freeze important body parts at 15,000′)?

The Jura Mountains with the west end of Lake Geneva.

Jura Mountains looking southwest in France. This scene is more like something I would expect to see in the foothills of the Pyrenees.

Jura Mountains, Mont Blanc on the horizon, Geneva in the middle, with a dense forest of scrubby pines. Pinus mugo uncinata, how I miss you. They are the dominant tree in the Pyrenees which, at the time, I deemed as too “scrubby” and wished the trees looked like “normal” pines, of which proliferate the Alps, for which I am now bored and get excited every time I see a single pinus mugo uncinata (which is admittedly rare). 

Base of the Jura Mountains with Geneva. The Large Hadron Collider lurks in here. That is one of many things that differentiates this area from Appalachia.

Not pinus mugo uncinata. “Normal” pine trees. Yawn. Elevation about 5,000 feet.

Looking the other way, into French Appalachia. One difference is that this is mostly coniferous, whereas Appalachia is mostly deciduous. This scene is more likely to be viewed in the timberlands of Montana than Pennsylvania, but I digress. It is a very wet area, which is why is does not burst into flames annually.

One of the few places that had a glacier in ancient times in the Jura.

Jura, Lake Neuchâtel, and the Alps. The view is typically the other way around.

Descending over Lake Neuchâtel. This mysterious boat must be doing some sort of dredging activity. It probably involves money. It’s Switzerland.

Climbout from Neuchâtel Airport. Yes, I finally bothered to land somewhere else.

Crossing Lake Neuchâtel. If the engine quit, I would have gotten wet.

Schiffenensee, near Fribourg. 

The Alps got a lot of snow this year.

Dolomiten von Saanenland.

Les Rodomonts, Rougemont. Another buried chalet. Gstaad Airport is in the abyss on the other side of the chalet, about a mile below.

Sometime in the last month or so, a rather eerie sandstorm from the western Sahara blew into the Alps, turning the sky a grayish brown haze. I wanted to get a chance to see more of it, so I investigated web cams, only to find a salacious apocalyptic Martian orange on the other side of the Bernese Alps. It was unfortunate that winds were gusting to 50 knots at all observation stations on the ridge, including that of Evionnaz, down in the valley below, so I couldn’t get over there to see the orange as I would have hoped. I suppose it was consistent with adequate wind energy to transport sand from another continent.

I ended up flying that day, staying on the north side of the Alps, wandering around in what became a sand-filled fog of delightfully orange disorientation, hugging Class G airspace to remain legal in light of atmospheric conditions. Needless to say, it was a lesson in why pilots tend not to fly in sandstorms, as one cannot see very well. The airplane got a new air filter afterward and remained covered in so much dust that I washed it sometime later.

In the ensuing weeks, one would expect some classic midwinter alpine weather, which tends to consist either of snowfall or pleasant sunshine. That did not materialize. Sand lingered in the air for days, albeit toned down from the “book of Revelation” setting to merely “Arabia.” That gave way to cloudy and foul weather which, in turn, gave way to an early bout of unfortunately classic early spring weather in central Europe: a vile, opaque, filthy airmass from the German fatherland and Poland. I am not sure if it is humidity, coal exhaust, wood burning smoke, or what; the point is that it is gross and puts me in a foul mood just looking at it. When it is “supposed” to be sunny after a storm system, an ill-placed high-pressure zone ruins it all, sending air from behind the Iron Curtain to foul my expectations of visual purity.

It is intriguing that I have yet to speak to a local that notices the condition. It does not cumulatively last more than a few weeks per year, though for four out of five years in either Germany or Switzerland, whether living or visiting, I have run into smog that would make residents of Los Angeles proud, typically in early April. Anyway, that ruined flying for even more time.

Then the Sahara spewed more light dust, followed by another bout of foul light precipitation, resulting, finally, in a nice day. I could tell looking out the window that it was clear, so I set my mind to head to the Matterhorn. I hadn’t flown above it in some time, and I was in the mood to look down on the summit.

Checking the weather, all was swell for the flight, with no mention of deleterious particulates suspended in the air. It was due to be sunny, so I took off. As I was approaching the Bernese Alps on an illustrious sunny day, something seemed off. Grand Combin, a peak on the Italian border in excess of 14,000 feet, appeared to be cloaked in haze. “Perhaps it is the sun reflecting,” I thought, briefly. “No, something is up as it should be clearer.” Surpassing Plaine Morte Glacier, I discovered the problem: there was a thick layer of Saharan dust at 12,000 feet and higher, with a pronounced base. It was occluding all of the peaks I wanted to go to.

As the layer was incoming from the west, and since it was quite clear what it was doing there, whereas it was much lighter over the Matterhorn, I decided to avoid having to wash the plane again, right after having done it before, by heading west and ducking under the dust. Dismayed that my little scheme to go to the Matterhorn didn’t work, I did have the chance to see Mont Blanc ensconced in dust while I skulked around the glaciers below.

Grand Combin on the left horizon, hiding in the haze.

Mont Blanc, hiding in the dust to the right horizon.

Kind of a delightful view, if you ask me.

Looking up the north slope of Mont Blanc. A bit more visible from directly below it.

Toward the northwest, with a cloud layer moving in above the dust.

Tongue of a glacier to an avalanche path down into Chamonix. I normally don’t fly at this altitude; however, the dust forced the perspective.

Chamonix in the valley, Glacier des Bossons at the bottom of the image. Since the atmosphere looked like Pennsylvania in February, I made it black and white.

Mont Blanc summit, looking the other way, also black and white. It is virtually indistinguishable from the “color” version. Sand does wonders.

Mer de Glace, Grandes Jorasses, et Dent du Géant. Note the orange color in the foreground. That is from the prior sandstorm. One can see a bit of teal color, which is the glacier showing through winter snow (and dust).

To the northwest, above Mer de Glace.

Glacier du Tour with some Saharan sand on it. 

Mont Blanc in quiet respose, hiding in the sand, to the left.

It is an understatement to admit that airplanes are expensive. In a twist of irony, the preceding months have featured a nagging itch to upgrade my equipment. Why? To produce more profit, or otherwise make some financial sense? Try this on for size: the overarching rationale was that I am spending so much damn money on this airplane, I might as well get good enough photographs to match. I am not sure if that is cynical, brilliant, stupid, or all of the above.

Part of the problem stems from a camera malfunction over Chamonix, France. I was using a Canon EOS 77D, about a $900 camera package, which I had bought as, 14 months before, my Canon Rebel 7ti ($750) failed ingloriously above St. Moritz, Switzerland. If anything, I am amassing a collection of world class destinations to have camera failures. In each case, I swapped lenses in flight from my secondary zoom lens camera, a Canon Rebel 6ti ($650), and carried on, using a prior camera as a backup.

I ran into an issue a year ago where the 6ti just was not getting the crispness I wanted for focus, although it has the same sensor and lens. “Perhaps it is the Dual Pixel AF technology on the 7ti and 77D” I thought to myself, and tried to have less dynamic motion while flying, which didn’t amount to a hill of beans. After taking my 550,000^th photograph recently, it being out of focus, I decided that “enough was enough, time for another camera,” though that old sensation of making good on my prodigious bloodbath of money (by spending more) came to mind. Is it not time to upgrade to something that is commensurate with my level of aerial fanaticism?

I went on a bender researching high end Canons, and nothing jumped out from the models costing thousands of dollars that made any sense. Megapixels were the same, features similar, processor generations sometimes older. I almost bought a low- to mid-range camera again, until a friend suggested the Sony Alpha series, which at minimum, achieve the goal of breaking the bank.

I went to a big box camera store to defecate roughly $3,000, and they would not allow me to see the camera before purchasing it. “Um, I would like to compare lens field of view in the store to my existing camera.” “That is against policy.” “But I’d like to see how it works before buying it.” “That is against policy.” “You don’t have a floor model, so can I return it 5 seconds after I buy it if I don’t like what happens when I open the box?” “There is a restocking fee as it is not a floor item.”

Walking out of there, I went to a traditional camera shop, spoke to a British chap, and got the lowdown of why sub-$1000 Canon cameras are an insult to my profligate expenditures on aviation. Build quality and longevity is a significant element, though it boils down to the sensor. Quality is vastly superior with expensive cameras. I decided to spring for it and buy the body somewhat on a whim.

It is a significant deviation from my current workflow, as the Sony Alpha 7r III is mirrorless, which means that there is an OLED sensor in the viewfinder. Finding it hideous on the first flight, from the second onward, it was glorious. The field of view is massively larger than SLRs, to the point that my SLR camera looks like a somewhat silly eye-exam machine, where the viewing area seems small and projected far away, which explains why I would often find intriguing details after downloading photographs taken from the zoom lens camera – I simply couldn’t detect them in such a small visual field in the air.

The journey wasn’t over with the camera purchase. I left with a rental lens, a 24mm full frame fixed focal length piece, which equates to much wider than my field of view with an APS-C 18mm, though I thought that the “grandness” of such a wide-angle lens would make up for it. Aside from including the wing and propeller in 90% of images, it had the reverse effect. The reality is that a massive scene is compressed into the same size image, which ironically makes things look smaller and flatter.

Since variable length lenses of good build quality are rather heavy, I went with a 35mm fixed focal length (nothing like harking back to the 80s), and it had a nice composition and feel to the final product. Images were balanced and had a decent perspective, except I came to realize that I was flying way too close to mountains to try to frame the image. With no ability to change focal length, the airplane had to try to kiss the mountain to get the image right. That would likely result in a fiery death, so I finally settled on a 28-60mm variable that works rather well.

In any case, I used some flights over France, in the dead of winter, to a) try to freeze myself to death repeatedly and b) sort out the saga of working out my new equipment. Some images of these overpriced and dubiously justified escapades are below. Final images are now 42.4MP, instead of 24.2MP, are of incredible quality, and are virtually never out of focus. That reality means that I had to defecate $305 on another 10TB drive (I have over 60TB now), so as to do financial justice to the overwrought camera purchase, which was meant to “balance” the lack of sense spending too much on airplanes.

The 24mm full frame lens (too wide)….

Champéry, Switzerland & Dents du Midi, from the French border.

Avioraz, France on the middle left.

How am I supposed to know where this is? Its all clouds. Geneva is somewhere to the right of the sun.

Western terminus of the French Chablais Alps. Lake Geneva is to the right, under the clouds.

Now to the 35mm lens…

Avioraz again.

Les Hautes Fortes, with Mt Blanc on the horizon.

Dents d’Oddaz

Sixt-Fer-à-Cheval, France. Well, its under the clouds. Thumbs up for great emergency landing options!

Chamonix around the bend to the left, under the clouds. Mt Blanc dead ahead. This is me thumbing my nose at the site of my Canon’s “original sin.”

More of the same. “See one, see them all.”

Looking somewhat toward the sun (southwest).

Col de la Forclaz. It seems lewd.

Western edge of French Chablais Alps, with Lake Geneva hiding below the clouds. I can declare the camera a success!

Yes, it is getting old. I promise no more in 2020.

I didn’t think I’d go for #8. I had previously sorted, retouched, exported, labeled, and organized all of the photographs for this book (not mention getting my sorry ass into the airplane and actually taking the photos) almost a year ago. The thing is, it is hard to do a book about the villages in which Catalan and French people live, publish it in English, and expect anything to happen. Upon further research, translation is not cheap. For that matter, I’d really need it in Catalan, Spanish, and French, and, while I am at it, I would be writing the text in English, so might as well throw that in too. Then I got the brilliant idea: why not go light on the text and just be done with it? But how do I find three translators? Will they get it done in time for this fanciful little goal of mine to get it on Amazon before December 31, 2020?

Happily, the translators were available and delivered quickly, something unusual when someone is located anywhere near the Mediterranean Sea…

The story behind the book is somewhat interesting. As is readily evident, I generally like to keep people out of my images. While many do not like that, I point to Ansel Adams, who did the same, and he is considered one of the American forefathers of photography. So, phooey…people are not needed. Anyway, after so much time in the air above La Cerdanya, I couldn’t help but be drawn to the artistic arrangement of the villages below, many of which looked drastically different one from another, though each equally as interesting.

Eventually, I got the idea to do a book on the subject, but it was only after having completed the flights in Cerdanya. What I mean is that I was not actively taking village photographs intended for a book; I decided after having a massive pile of images collected that I wanted to do a village book. That meant sorting through well over 100,000 images. I am pleased that I may have only missed a small handful of villages, or if one wants to debate the point, none at all.

While it may seem a tad uncouth to be blogging so soon after the last post, the fact is that I am in the middle of a craze to get the announcements out for my 2020 books (before 12/31, for self-imposed reasons). Number 7 for the year has been squeezed through the birth canal. It is a monument to the illustrious rocky features of northern Catalunya that graced the pages of this blog for an extended period of time.

Standing proudly over the Alt Berguedà and La Cerdanya, Serra del Cadí, Serra del Moixeró, and Pedraforca are massive rock features, unusually gnarly and vertiginous, and they captivated my attention for quite a while. With the Mediterranean roughly 60 miles to the east, deserts to the southwest, and pure Pyrenean alpine climate to the north, there was always something going on in this collision of weather zones. It was a baptism in a new method of flying, to revisit the same place in different conditions, many of those marginal or what would previously be considered dangerous.

If there is one lesson that I learned from this production, it is not to make a favorite subject wait. The result is that much has to be discarded for favor of the constraints of attention spans and the publishing process, which means that, if I could do it over again, I would have come out with something a few years ago and found a way to keep the conversation going.

As lockdown in early 2020 got started, I set my mind to doing something I usually do not: submitting to an art prize. Normally I avoid these kinds of things, as the chances of getting selected are extremely small, and the workload is disproportionately high, which means it is basically for suckers, except for the one person that wins. For some reason that I do not understand now, I actually thought I had a reasonable chance, which caused me to set aside the calloused views that have developed over the years dealing with the art and publishing world. Suffice it to say that merit is a very small part of why things get published or selected and much of it has to do with hard to quantify things such as how cranky the person is making the decision at the time. While I can lose count of the quantity of people that feel that my stuff belongs in the prestigious art museums of the world, it doesn’t do anything to get it there, unless the mysterious powers that be permit it and, so far, they have not been in the mood to explain the mysteries of their moods.

Knowing those realities as a backdrop, I still had hope. Then I got carried away, and I had to ask myself how I’d react if I did not win. Then my enterprising brilliance entered into play, and I decided that I would just make the submission a book. That way, I couldn’t lose. Well, lose I did – not a winner, not a finalist, “but we encourage you to submit again next year.” Any feedback as to why that is the case? No. 33,000 words and 100 image submissions later….nothing, well, except for the prospect of a book.

I then wrote an honest yet cynical introduction, packaged the whole thing up, and then realized, disappointment aside, that I have put together a) the third most text heavy work to date and b) the most varied and comprehensive representation of my work yet in existence. Every other book has been focused on something much more narrow, whereas this one is complete open season on what I thought was best across the board.

Prior to this whole art prize nonsense, I had someone review my work and note that my books “do not explain what the images are.” I pointed out that they are labeled, with precision, as to the subject and location, and he said, “But it still doesn’t tell me anything about it. You’re telling me all this background about the image as I review it. It should be in the book.” With “My Struggle,” I put it in the book. After failing to be selected as a finalist, I exchanged a conversation with an art professional, in particular the person that recommended submitting to the prize, and she said, “Perhaps next time you shouldn’t say so much.”

For whatever it is worth, this is book #6 for 2020, so I have broken my record, which turned out to be quite a struggle.