Weekly Post: The Higher You Get, The Higher You Get by Robert Glenn Ketchum (#101-200)

Continued. . .

The Higher You Get, The Higher You Get

by Robert Glenn Ketchum

Growing up my parents had a home near Sun Valley, Idaho. It was there that I learned to ski. Over many years I befriended members of the Decker Flats Climbing and Frisbee Club, with whom I had both life, and art-forming outdoor experiences. I had my camera, and these are my adventures.  Enjoy!!  ~Robert Glenn Ketchum

Monday, March 2, 2020

The Higher You Get, The Higher You Get - Sun Valley and the DFC&FC, #200: DFCFC, #200: As edge my way along the lakeshore, Belle, my lab, keeps sticking her nose into the snow to investigate whatever she smells beneath it, and as a consequence, her snout is cutely decorated with powder. In fact, everything around me is decorated with powder, and as I draw closer to Schiestler Peak, there is much powder decoration to ponder. The light snowfall has etched the granite crags and terraces, making them more pronounced, and the blowing winds of the past night have knocked all the snow from the trees, so they stand in sharp contrast to the bedecked rocks. The weather is streaming through overhead, the clouds zooming across the skies, driven by high winds in the upper atmosphere. When breaks in the weather appear, pockets of sunlight flash blindingly across the landscape, which I work myself into a frenzy trying to capture on film, but it is COLD, I am still sleepy, and I have not yet hit my morning stride. The tripod legs are especially cold, even through my gloves, but hey! I’m havin’ some fun now. Actually, I am. It is a blustery, beautiful beginning of the day, but I am definitely going to want breakfast when I get back to camp, starting with something hot to drink.

photograph(s) © copyright, ROBERT GLENN KETCHUM, 2020, @RbtGlennKetchum @LittleBearProd #LittleBearProd

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HELP WANTED: Hypothetical Partner for the Pebble Mine by Joel Reynolds, NRDC

HELP WANTED: Hypothetical Partner for the Pebble Mine

April 22, 2019

Joel Reynolds, Natural Resources Defense Council

Canadian owner of widely condemned Bristol Bay mine desperately seeks new partner with a few billion to spare. Financial, social, and environmental indifference required. No need to apply if you’re fazed by economic infeasibility, relentless local opposition, pervasive risk, and potentially catastrophic social and environmental impacts.

It’s no secret that Northern Dynasty Minerals (aka the Pebble Partnership)—the sole remaining partner in the embattled Pebble Mine proposed for the headwaters of Alaska’s Bristol Bay—is in urgent need of a new financial partner. To be sure, after four of the world’s major mining companies (Mitsubishi Corporation, Anglo American, Rio Tinto, and First Quantum Minerals) have walked away from the project since 2011, it’s a tough sell.

At last year’s general meeting of shareholders, Northern Dynasty CEO Ron Thiessen expressed confidence they can make a deal. The only question, he told me, is “what deal”—that is, what terms will be required to entice a buy-out or at least a new major partner. With the company’s history of failed partnerships in mind, I began to speculate about what the profile of such a partner, if indeed there is one to be found, might look like.

Here, in no particular order, are some essential characteristics:

(1) Unconcerned by financial risk
Contrary to industry practice—and despite repeated requests—Pebble has refused to release an economic feasibility analysis for its latest mine plan, now under permit review by the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers. When asked by the Army Corps’ consultant AECOM to produce information on Pebble’s “cost/feasibility,” the company refused, citing a Canadian securities regulation whose purpose is to prevent securities fraud relating to mining properties. When pressed by the Bristol Bay Native Corporation (“BBNC”) last December, Pebble’s CEO Tom Collier, too, declined, explaining that such an analysis “remains on our to-do list.” Just this month, pressed by E&E News, he demurred once again because “an economic analysis is not a required piece of the permitting puzzle.”

Weekly Post, NO PEBBLE MINE: Pictures from Ground Zero (#301-350) by Robert Glenn Ketchum

NO PEBBLE MINE Pictures from Ground Zero

by Robert Glenn Ketchum

 

Since 1998, I have been working to protect the spectacular resources of southwest Alaska and the fishery of Bristol Bay. Two Aperture books, a national traveling exhibition, a massive coalition of concerned users, and a lot of personal lobbying, had it looking like we were almost there. Then Donald Trump took office claiming he would always put America, and American jobs first. SO WHY destroy a BILLION-dollar-a-year, RENEWABLE salmon fishery and over 100,000 jobs for a group of international mineral speculators that will leave us with a Superfund site to clean up, and NO fishery left edible? And yet, he did,..so please, keep saying NO TO THE PEBBLE MINE!

~Robert Glenn Ketchum

Tuesday, May 28, 2019 

NO PEBBLE MINE #350, Pictures from Ground Zero
NO PEBBLE MINE #350:  This ADF&G cabin on the Kanektok is NOT on an island in the river, but rather on a high bank of the river. That allows me a lot more room to walk around. On the evening of my arrival, I take advantage of this, find a few nice POV’s along the river, and experience another beautiful sunset, before dinner and sleep. After my stay with these rangers, I will go back to Quinhagak, where a plane will pick me up, and I will have a chance to overfly the entire river, to give me the broader view of what I will now experience at river-level. To best explain all of this, I am going to mix some of those overflight pictures in now. The buildings in the image above are one of the few fishing camps allowed on the river. More importantly, you can also see the scale of this waterway, and the myriad confusing meanders that spring from it, and feed back into it. To navigate the Kanektok without getting grounded or stranded, requires considerable experience, and I am thankful to have guides, one of whom is Native, and lives in the village.

photograph(s) © copyright, ROBERT GLENN KETCHUM, 2019, @RbtGlennKetchum @LittleBearProd @NRDC @OrvisFlyFishing #NoPebbleMine #LittleBearProd

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Weekly Post: Adventuring on the Yakutat Forelands - Bowing before St. Elias by Robert Glenn Ketchum

Adventuring on the Yakutat Forelands - Bowing before St. Elias

by Robert Glenn Ketchum

The Yakutat Forelands are where the Tongass rainforest and the Chugach forest to the north meet. It is also home to many large glaciers, a stunning coastline, the huge Alsek-Tatshenshini river, and Icy Bay, which sits at the foot of Mount St. Elias, the greatest vertical rise from sea level in the world. There is a lot of powerful energy out here.

Wednesday, October 24, 2018

Adventuring on the Yakutat Forelands - Bowing before St. Elias, #94:
The Yakutat Forelands, #94:  The spectacle of the exaggerated, and very visible, changes in the parts of Icy Bay we actually explored, is quite sobering to all of us. As the plane climbs and heads for the coast, we fall silent as each of us ponders the numerous times we have encountered life-threatening circumstances in just these past 10-days. This was NOT a casual Alaskan kayaking adventure. Our pilot suggests we have been in the middle “of an epic weather event,” and he acknowledges that he wondered what he would find in flying in to pick us up. He also notes that all flights in and out of Yakutat have been grounded for the better part of the last week, so he was not even sure if he would be allowed to come for us. As our flight path hits the coast, where we will turn south, the large river pouring out of the bay has flushed so much mud and silt into the Pacific, that it is actually changing the color of the ocean water for many square miles. Well, it IS Alaska! Go big, or go home. We have done one, and now we are going to do the other. I want to sleep on a mattress. We have all come to bow before St. Elias, and now suitably humbled, we retreat to play another day.

photograph(s) © copyright, Robert Glenn Ketchum, 2018, @RbtGlennKetchum, @LittleBearProd #LittleBearProd

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TERRA FIRMA Exhibit at the Manhattan Beach Art Center featuring Robert Glenn Ketchum

When at UCLA, Ketchum studied with two very non-traditional photography practitioners, Edmund Teske and Robert Heinecken. Ketchum was especially influenced by Heinecken's use of many different materials in presenting his photographic imagery, some of which involved cloth and fabric. Working with UCLA, in 1985, Ketchum became the first American artist to enter their China exchange program. This began a 30-year collaboration with a nationally prestigious Chinese embroidery guild, to translate his photographs of the natural world into embroideries and loom weavings, of which two of the most recent are displayed here. Graceful Branch Movement, 2010 One of the largest 2-sided embroidery panels ever created, featuring the untraditional use of two stitches that were never previously combined. The detailed leaves are done in the most laborious "Suzhou fine style," and all the other background work is done in the "random" stitch. There more than 40 dye colors used, and the work took several embroiderers 3-years.

Cont.: THE TONGASS: Stop the Cut, There are Salmon in the Trees (#1-99) by Robert Glenn Ketchum

Continued... Tongass #1-99

THE TONGASS:  Stop the Cut, There are Salmon in the Trees

by Robert Glenn Ketchum

In 1985, I began a 2-year commission to explore the Tongass rainforest, the largest forest in the United States Forest Service (USFS) system AND the largest temperate rainforest in the world. It was a unique, old-growth environment under siege from industrial logging. The resulting investigative book I published helped to pass the Tongass Timber Reform Bill, protect 1,000,000 acres of old-growth, and create 11 new wilderness areas. This is the story of how that was achieved.

Tuesday, July 17, 2018

THE TONGASS:  Stop the Cut, There are Salmon in the Trees, #99:
THE TONGASS, #99:  Although the day that Philip Slagter and I fly into Walker Lake and cabin, the weather is terrible, I want to give everyone a sense of HOW BIG the walls around us are, so I am inserting this image of our plane, which in this shot, is actually coming back to pick us up on a beautiful sunny day. That is a big floatplane that seats four people and a lot of gear. It is a small speck in the airspace of this fjord, and we can hear it long before we can actually see it. Even though the day of our arrival it is raining and cloudy, low elevation visibility is excellent, and we land on Walker Lake effortlessly. Our pilot taxis us across the lake to a firm tundra bank on the far shore, where we disembark with all our gear. With a quick swing-around for the plane, he then launches off, back down-valley, returning to Ketchikan. After the noise of his engines fades, all Philip and I can hear is the patter of rain, the echoes of falling water, and the high-pitched whine of millions of mosquitoes.

photograph(s) © copyright, ROBERT GLENN KETCHUM, 2018, @RbtGlennKetchum @LittleBearProd #LittleBearProd

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Weekly Post: Big Mountain and Glacier National Park - Expanding My Winter Consciousness

Big Mountain and Glacier National Park - 
Expanding My Winter Consciousness

by Robert Glenn Ketchum

In the early '70’s, I was doing a lot of winter adventuring with my friends in the Decker Flats Climbing and Frisbee Club, and a client invited me to take pictures at Big Mountain, a ski resort in Montana. Glacier National Park was not far away, so I thought that might be an interesting place to explore in the winter, as well. These two locations added important work to my exhibits and portfolios, and definitely expanded/sobered my winter consciousness.

Thursday, July 12, 2018

Big Mountain and Glacier National Park - Expanding My Winter Consciousness, #50:
Big Mountain, #50:  Bob Tchirkow and I finally arrive at Avalanche Lake which is frozen over, and we are certainly in a BASIN. Except for the direction from which we have come, the sheer walls rise straight up all around us, and disappear into the snowfall that is not only heavy, but the flakes have become gigantic as well. The open expanse of the lake runs right up to the walls, and there is no gorge now between us and an avalanche. Still boggled by the one we witnessed as we came in, neither he nor I want to get any nearer to the walls than where we already are. We choose a huge tree on our side that has a wind hollow beneath it, and we crawl in there, out of the weather, to drink, snack, and occasionally poke my camera out and take a shot. The above image, “Avalanche Lake Basin (Headwalls in a Blizzard)” becomes another from this trip to be included in my future portfolio, “Winters: 1970-1980,” and a larger print of this will also be included in “Silver See,” a portfolio, published by the Los Angeles Center for Photographic Studies. Once again, unfortunately, Bob and I misjudge the short winter day. Our journey back down the trail is more dangerous than we expect. Going downslope with so many trees is pretty ragged, there is a lot of falling,..and then it starts to get dark. When we fall in the heavy, wet snow, it clings, making our clothes wet as well,..and we are tiring. Then, rather abruptly in the growing darkness, the roar of the creek is close once again, and the bridge appears before us. We are back! Crossing the bridge to head for camp, we encounter a BIG, shaggy, snow-covered mountain goat, that just stands and stares at us, then disappears into the trees. I am sure we surprised him. Camp is a mess, as the heavy snow has squashed the tent and covered equipment. One of our two stoves will no longer light, and almost everything is wet. We survive the night, ski out in the early morning hours, and have a GREAT breakfast in a cafe. One feature story in POWDER magazine, and three new images for my portfolio are part of my expanding winter consciousness, and I hope you have enjoyed these “visits” to Montana that helped to shape my career.

photograph(s) © copyright, ROBERT GLENN KETCHUM, 2018, @RbtGlennKetchum @LittleBearProd #LittleBearProd

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Cont, NO PEBBLE MINE, 201-300: Pictures from Ground Zero by Robert Glenn Ketchum

Continued... No Pebble Mine #201-300

NO PEBBLE MINE Pictures from Ground Zero

by Robert Glenn Ketchum

Since 1998, I have been working to protect the spectacular resources of southwest Alaska and the fishery of Bristol Bay. Two Aperture books, a national traveling exhibition, a massive coalition of concerned users, and a lot of personal lobbying, had it looking like we were almost there. Then Donald Trump took office claiming he would always put America, and American jobs first. SO WHY destroy a BILLION-dollar-a-year, RENEWABLE salmon fishery and over 100,000 jobs for a group of international mineral speculators that will leave us with a Superfund site to clean up, and NO fishery left edible? And yet, he did,..so please, keep saying NO TO THE PEBBLE MINE!

~Robert Glenn Ketchum

Tuesday, June 12, 2018 

NO PEBBLE MINE #300, Pictures from Ground Zero
NO PEBBLE MINE #300:  I am writing a blog about NO PEBBLE MINE, but when I put up pictures like this of Wood-Tikchik State Park, I am trying to point out that this blog’s overall purpose is to “enlighten” those that may be unfamiliar with the ENTIRE area of Southwest, because everything out there is closely interconnected. I want readers to realize what a remarkable and INTACT habitat this is, like few other places on Earth. In this blog, I HAVE posted a picture of the ACTUAL mine site, #30, but that exact location has little to do with the overall impact of the Pebble project that will be more expansive. Returning to this image as an example, Tikchik is a good distance from the mine site, BUT major rivers flowing from Tikchik to the fishery of Bristol Bay, pass below other rivers draining from the proposed mine site. The Pebble Mine is not JUST a pit complex, either. The supportive road system would directly impact Lake Clark National Park, and Lake Iliamna - one of the largest freshwater lakes in the world. I also want readers to understand that other parts of these connected habitats might experience “collateral damage.” Bristol Bay, Katmai, Wood-Tikchik, and Togiak all SHARE pristine air quality, and the rivers they host are some of the most bio-diverse freshwaters in the U.S. To generate power for the Pebble mine, the mine will also dig and burn coal. Burning coal not only contaminates air quality, it puts mercury particles into it, which rain back down into the groundwater system, affecting ALL the lakes and rivers. If you want to argue about the “footprint” of the mine, you need to understand the ENTIRE footprint. You cannot be selective, or A LOT OF JOBS THAT ALREADY EXIST, WILL BE LOST because of the mine!

photograph(s) © copyright, ROBERT GLENN KETCHUM, 2018, @RbtGlennKetchum @LittleBearProd @NRDC @OrvisFlyFishing #NoPebbleMine #LittleBearProd

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Cont #1-100: The Daze of My Life: Robert Glenn Ketchum, An Autobiography

continued

The Daze of My Life:  Robert Glenn Ketchum, An Autobiography

Biographies are studies of someone's life based on cumulative research. Good ones may reveal something, but probably barely scratch the surface of what actually went on. The internet is allowing me to do something VERY different. 
~Robert Glenn Ketchum

Friday, June 1, 2018

The Daze of My Life:  Robert Glenn Ketchum, An Autobiography #100:

Daze, #100:  Back in LA, my proposed landscape exhibit now fully-funded thanks to an amazing “mini preview” staged in the foyer of the White House, I turn my attention to the other curatorial projects I have organized, while serving as Director of the Los Angeles Center for Photographic Studies. I still escape out-of-state for occasional shoots to further my personal work and the stories I am publishing in POWDER magazine, but I continue to visit Three Rivers, as well, taking advantage of the use of a client’s home, while exploring the area, particularly Sequoia National Park. After many visits, my friends I have learned some “secrets” about how to enjoy the park. Spring is an especially desirable time. It may snow daily in the big trees, which makes for great skiing, BUT the days are warming, and spring is coming to the Three Rivers valley floor, and the steep slopes of the Kaweah River as it flows through the park. The spring bloom brings forth wildflowers, and a profusion of blossoming trees and bushes that decorate the vertical hillsides of the Kaweah Gorge as it parallels the steeply ascending, switchback road into the Sequoia groves. One sunny afternoon, following a great morning of skiing up higher, friends and I stop at a pull-out on the road down, to have a view into the gorge. EVERYTHING is flowering, the sun is inviting, and my friends and I decide to take a hike,..over the side, and DOWN.

photograph(s) © copyright, ROBERT GLENN KETCHUM, 2018 

@RbtGlennKetchum @LittleBearProd #LittleBearProd

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2018 Venice Art Walk Featuring Robert Glenn Ketchum

For more than 20yrs. I have contributed to this event. It is VERY fun!. Because of some significant sales in the past few years, I have been allowed an “oversized” contribution this year, as the committee recognizes my images have amazing detail that is best viewed at a larger scale. “Rivers of Life” is stunning at 40” wide. Come to the Google offices - view all the work being exhibited and auctioned. Eat, drink, be merry, enjoy music, AND bid up my piece. Help support healthcare for all!

Remembering Barbara Bush

In 1987, Aperture published my book, 'The Tongass: Alaska’s Vanishing Rain Forest', which was intended to support the proposed Tongass Timber Reform Act. In the ensuing years, I spent much time in DC, exhibiting, lecturing, and lobbying on behalf of the bill’s passage. The most significant timber reform legislation in American history passed in 1990, and was signed into law by President George H.W. Bush. He then invited me to the White House in 1991 to acknowledge my contributions to the effort. For the photo-op, I was ushered into a room to find both he and Barbara awaiting me. We “socialized” while the pictures were being taken, and even in such a brief period, I was struck by Barbara’s presence. The president and I exchanged formalities, and he made sure I knew he had seen the book and knew my story, as I would have expected on this occasion. Barbara, however, was like speaking with my mother, in spite of the fact I am sporting a mohawk, a long ponytail, and a diamond-stud earring, and I am sure she was glad I was not her son. Nonetheless, she wanted to know if I was married, had kids, took them with me, were my adventures scary, did I enjoy sleeping in tents - you know, mom stuff - not a word about the politics of the situation. I have never had anyone make me feel some comfortable, in an otherwise “stiff” situation, so thank you Barbara Bush for meeting with me that day as well, and may you rest in peace.

To further this story a bit, I brought along my newest Aperture book, Overlooked In America: The Success and Failure of Federal Land Management which I gave to the President during the photo-op. Given the title of the book, and the nature of my politics, the President smiled broadly for a picture holding the book, and then put it aside. After speaking with me for awhile, Barbara turned and picked it up, opening it and leafing through the pages, complimenting my pictures and asking about their locations. She was a skillful weaving of necessary Washington formality, and honest, human interest.