The old and the young

These old, bleached trees once held the dunes beneath their green branches. Since destroyed by fire, the sands are free to shift where the wind would take them, and the dunes now move about, changing from day to day.

The crossing

Winter clouds work their drama. County Kerry, Ireland.

By a thread

A rescuer moves across a horizontal high-line during a training exercise somewhere on Table Mountain.

The Mountain Club of SA (MCSA) search and rescue team is a highly motivated, highly trained group of climbers. They offer their services - time, energy and expertise - free of charge to the community, and are regularly called out, sometimes to risk their lives, day and night.

Sunrise in the canyon

This image really is best viewed large - just click on it.

Forest of change

This photograph was taken when work was begun on the new 2010 soccer stadium in Cape Town.

I wanted to show something of the frustration I felt at the whole thing, this ghastly abomination that would soon appear to blight yet further this city's skyline.

The final edited image makes me sad.

Night on the bay

Starlight mingles with the lights of Muizenberg to reflect off the unusually still waters of False Bay, one warm Autumn evening.

Brooding sky

Storm clouds gather over False Bay.

Spring 2007.

Desert water

The last rays of the setting sun lie like glistening silver on a dam in the Cederberg.

The Hex

Frozen in time, she stands; twisted sentinel. Arms outstretched in the act of casting her spell; weathered and gaunt, a lonely reminder of eons past: a time when the world was young.

Long ago, vast forests covered these mountain slopes. Now, amongst a handful of scattered living trees, gnarled and ancient, many of them hundreds of years old, stand skeletons. Decaying, a slow reminder of change and of life's brevity, life's fragility.

Cederberg. Winter 2007.

Waboom

The starkly silhouetted form of a Waboom tree.

Dark water

The peaceful murmuring of a mountain stream.

Laser-cleaved

A boulder the size of a small house sits, cleaved by the harsh elements high in the mountains, under the cold blue sky of an African winter.

Water is life

A splash of green denotes water in the barren aridity of the Karoo.

Autumn 2007.

Bleached bones

A great, lonely skeleton, white-bleached by the sun stands sentinel on the high rocky slopes of an exposed mountainside. Once, these slopes were covered with forests of Ceder trees. Climate change, indiscriminate logging and man-caused fire have rendered the population a tiny fraction of what it once was.
The landscape is strewn with these stark reminders of our own mortality, and our impact as humans even in this wild place.

Beauty there is in death even, and textured white timber reaches up to touch a vast, cold sky.

Liquid Reflections

Motes of liquid light
reflect the setting sun and
float your mind to wander with
a thousand journeys past and
a thousand still to come.