AMAZON

When I went to the Amazon in mid-November I expected – and found -- a landscape thick with life. It was life run riot: tangles of vines enveloping trees festooned with bromeliads, 4-foot tall wasp nests suspended from their branches, birds of every color calling, and always the ants.

But the people living along the rivers of this most biologically rich place on the planet became one of the most interesting surprises of my travels. Known as Riverenos, they are of mixed blood, but mostly indigenous people, living in very simple thatch-roofed stilt houses in small villages along the rivers. They fish and hunt and grow a few crops, consult shamans for cures and blessings, play soccer in the evenings under ominous thunderheads. And in places like the nearly one million acre Tamshiyacu-Tahuayo Community Reserve in northern Peru, they have embarked on a voluntary conservation project that promises to protect the wildlife while enhancing their livelihoods.

A gallery of images from the Amazon is now posted on my website portfolio.

8 Parts Mayberry, 2 Parts Twin Peaks

Boise's north end is the kind of charming, homey, front-porch-with-cat, quirky neighborhood that developers are constantly trying to recreate --minus the quirkiness.

And Toto too?

Red Couch Guitar Series

I decided to photograph my favorite instruments, with the only rule being they had to be photographed on the red couch in the music room. This gave continuity to the images, referenced both Picasso and the other famous Red Couch Series, and meant that I didn't have to move my favorite possessions very far. They are, top to bottom, a Martin D-35 guitar, Weber Beartooth mandolin, Paul Reed Smith Custom 22 electric guitar, and a Beard Roadaphonic resonator guitar.

The Amazing Traveling Colorado Tourism Photo Shoot Road Show, Part 4-- Revenge of the Rain Clouds: All's Well That Ends Well

bottom photos by Aaron Beck

Highlights:

1. Working with a great crew: Jen Farquharson, our talented and lovely art director; Tommy Martinez, account executive and comic impersonator; Liz Long, the hardest working woman in production; Jere Long, location scout and fixer extraordinaire; Nathan Berry, production assistant and source of all useless factoids; Aaron Beck, my energetic and quick assistant. And a cast of two dozen-plus.

2. At Cliff Palace, Mesa Verde’s most spectacular cliff dwelling, the storm clouds and rain finally breaking at the very last possible moment to illuminate the sandstone arch and make the Anasazi architecture glow.

3. Faking out Liz by convincing her that we weren’t sure we got the above shot and would have to stay another night at Farview Lodge sans phone service, internet and t.v. The horror, the horror.

4. Shooting backstage during Vieux Farka Toure’s performance at the Telluride Blues & Brews Festival.

5. Riding the highlift 30 feet above the crowds at Telluride as the day-long rainstorm cleared.

6. A crazy-busy, complicated, beautiful shoot at Denver’s Rioja restaurant and then enjoying an exquisite late dinner on their patio after the wrap.

The Girls

Every day is Christmas when you have chickens. You open the little door to the nesting boxes, peek inside, and Voila! a clutch of mocha, cream and chocolate-speckled eggs.  Just don't say the words "fried" and "chicken" when they are within hearing range. They're smarter than they look.

Summer in the city

Dawg Music

David Grisman is one of my musical heroes -- a player rooted in traditional music who has  created his own genre, which has been described as incorporating strains of  Django/Stefan Grappelli style jazz and Grateful Dead folk-rock with traditional bluegrass.   Grisman just played  the Egyptian Theatre, which was one of many  Egyptian-themed movie theaters built across the country in the 1920s in the wake of the King Tut tomb discovery and a general Egyptian mania. So here's an audience of Westerners listening to a bluegrass/jazz/rock mandolin player from Hackensack, New Jersey by way of California under a panel of scarab beetles and Pharos. We finished the concert and had dinner at Bar Gernika, the Basque bar down the street.

Fingerlings

The lake at 9,700-feet in elevation was filled with very hungry Brook trout -- too many for the amount of food available. So we did them a favor and reduced the population by five. My friend Lee used his fingers as a stringer to carry our catch up to camp. A few hours later they were browning in olive oil with slivers of sweet onion.

From the ashes

Two years after the Castle Rock Fire raged around Sun Valley an explosion of wildflowers has risen from the still very black ashes. On this ridge north of Sun Valley, over an acre of hollyhocks (yep, they grow wild) stands four feet tall beneath the charred remains of the forest.

Alaska Terminal Polar Bear

I had finished a two-week raft trip down the Tatshenshini and Alsek Rivers  and was in the Juneau airport awaiting my flight home when I encountered the polar bear under glass. This had been my second Tatshenshini trip, and in just the 8 years since my first, the glacial retreat along the river was noticeable. Further north where the polar bears roamed, the ice was also thinning and shrinking, leaving the bears no where to go -- except perhaps to live under Plexiglas. The whole peculiar diorama of  this once-living bear now stuffed and framed by a trash can, courtesy phone, restrooms and a photo mural of its melting habitat seemed to say a lot about our  inadvertent  attitude toward nature.