Pinnacles

Greetings from the newest national park, Pinnacles! Early this year Pinnacles was upgraded from national monument to national park status, so I thought I'd finally go check it out. Besides being an excellent example of California's more western mountains, it's also home to a California condor recovery program and a series of caves. Not too shabby! I must admit I was pretty excited to see the condors. They aren't the prettiest birds, but they're massively magnificent and fantastic flyers. I did get to see some from afar, but without a telephoto lens there was no way to capture them.

Instead, I've been trying to focus on the little things more lately, turning my camera away from sweeping vistas to focus on nature's tiniest details. There must be thousands of varieties of lichens in the world, and I want to know more about all of them. For serious.