Mid-January. Nearly dark. Already 20 below zero. He is alone in the heart of Yellowstone National Park. All he has for shelter is a small blue tarp. The snow is four feet deep. The nearest human is a dozen miles away, which might as well be in Pakistan. The twilight air is still and clear. By morning temperatures will drop another fifteen degrees. ..... ...
Articles
Breaking the Crust
I find the pull of open spaces strong enough to lead me away from warmth. In the fall of 1985, about six months after I had skied across Yellowstone Park alone for the first time, a woman called me from Los Angeles. Someone had told her about my 14-day trip and she said she was interested in doing a Hollywood film about it. She had a lot of questions. I told her some of the stories: wading the Snake River half naked at 5 degrees, sleeping in snowbanks under a thin tarp at 35 below zero, ...
Backcountry Mystic
The images float before the viewer’s eyes, strange and otherworldly — like photos of the Crab Nebula from Hubble, or mixings from a hippie light show. They might be satellite shots of the Mojave, cell-section studies from an electron microscope, or hallucinatory paintings from a would be Jackson Pollock. In fact, they are nature photographs made by Tom Murphy, taken largely in Yellowstone National Park and often of objects measuring no more than 10 inches square. He calls them abstracts. “In a ...
“Never Ruin a Bear’s Nap.” An Interview with Wildlife Photographer Tom Murphy
Check out the Earthjustice interview here. ...
Dunanda Falls
Dunanda Falls is on Boundary Creek in the SW corner of Yellowstone Park. It is 150 feet high with several hot springs just below it. The falls faces due south, and because of the mostly clear vertical drop, it creates a lot of mist and spray when the water hits the rocks at the base. During a full moon on a clear night, the moon will create a lunar rainbow in the mist or a moonbow. While I was standing watching the moonbow, it looked like a shimmery silvery blue arch. The digital chip saw the ...