/// Wild Tracks - Landscape Photography by Eduardo Gallo

WILD TRACKS

Passion for Landscape Photography

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Denali National Park, AK, USA

August 2014

Denali National Park, AK, USA

Canon 5D MkII & EF 24-105mm f/4L IS USM, 1/125s f/8 ISO1600 @32mm

Google Earth for this photo
PAC-MAN

I will always remember the day in which I took the above picture as "Pac-Man" day, in honor of the immensely popular arcade game from the eighties, in which the player moves through a maze trying to eat all the pac-dots while continuously avoiding four enemies or ghosts (Blinky, Pinky, Inky, and Clyde) who roam the maze trying to capture poor Pac-Man. If the player succeeds in eating all the dots, he just moves on to the next maze, where the action starts again with faster and more intelligent ghosts.

In my case the maze was the tundra north of the Alaska Range, a cold windy place that looks easy to walk through from afar, but becomes a boggy marshy nightmare once you put your boots on the ground. My objective was not to cover all the dots in the map, just to move up valley and find a campsite with some sort of protection from the wind. And my enemies were not chasing me at all, but at one point further down the valley I was simultaneously keeping track of all four of them, while they went about their businesses easily moving three times faster than myself, just as in the video game. With the minor but important difference that in virtual life there were four and only four enemies, while in my case I could not be sure if I was missing an extra half ton grizzly bear or two. Instead of crossing the glacier fed creek once (at a point where it was much bigger than in the photo), I was forced to ford it five times to maintain an adequate distance with each of them. Glacier cold water plus glacier cold wind will do marvels for your mood, believe me.

On Pac-Man success gets you to live for another stage, in which the challenge is more complicated, while in my case avoiding the bears got me to continue my adventure, take photos as the one above, and three days later ascend the ice to reach Anderson Pass on the continental divide thirty miles east of Denali, "The High One", which at more than 20,000 feet is the highest mountain on the North American continent. This close it is easy to feel overwhelmed by its more than 18,000 feet from base to peak, which make it the biggest mountain on Earth situated entirely above sea level. And although I saw several more bears, they were kind enough to appear one by one, all of them keeping their distances.

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