Beautiful Sonoran Desert
Organ Pipe Cactus National Monument on the US/Mexican border, a place of amazing desert plants, quiet solitude, beautiful sunshine and occasional, dramatic rain, but also where reminders of political tensions are never too far away. A strange and beguiling place that I like very much
Mesquite Sand Dunes, Death Valley National Park
On a recent road trip throughout the Sonoran Desert of Arizona and Southern California we paused in this stunning place to wait for sunset
A Trip to Grassholm
Great short film
Grassholm is a small rocky outcrop, 13km off the coast of the Marloes peninsular. In the summer it is home to nearly 80,000 gannets. Dale sailing regularly do trips out to the island and during the trip you’re likely to see porpoise, dolphins, shearwaters, razorbills and puffins depending on the time of year. It is a fantastic sea safari and this summer I made a film of my most recent visit.
A Trip to Grassholm Island, Pembrokeshire, narrated from the book “Waterfalls of Stars” by Rosanne Alexander. This is a sequence taken from my most recent film on Skomer Island, Cynefin.
Hills and habitats
Beacons
Ominous cloudscapes, mountain roads, music to rip your heart out.
Snow flurries warp past the windshield, motion-blur, a starfield simulation.
I’m triangulating off gross landscape features, echo-locating.
Assigning local meaning, at this manifestation of scale.
And you might make a thing holy. Index everything to a single colour frame –
To that obscurest of sorrows, the moment of tangency:
It’s seconds, minutes, decades away.
I didn’t blink, and I missed it anyway.
If a tree falls in the forest, it’s an arbitrary event.
Life’s hard-forks are just waypoints, too.
Successive phases of madness. It’s a single story.
No what-ifs, no parallels. And for a season, for no reason – a universe occurs.
Grains of its self-awareness circle the local star.
Eleven hundred miles a minute, artefacts everywhere, and I’m still hoping for an everything’s gonna be fine attack.
If it helps, this was never about you.
If it helps, consider the user…
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Always nice to rummage in a mountain farm blanket bog with the magnificent Tryfan in view
Alps and glaciers, Chamonix/Mont Blanc
East Meets West
The Siberian airmass arrived on the very Western edge of Wales this week, bringing with it snows, ice, and thousands upon thousands of birds we rarely see in such numbers. Redwing, lapwing, fieldfare and golden plover driven to the edge of the country in search of food and shelter from the storm.
So for the first time in years not only were there thousands of unusual birds on the beach, there was snow too!
This is the same beach (Marloes Sands, photo Mike Alexander) in summer…….
Thoughts, deeds, music
Up here, on the roof of Snowdonia, we have restored the blanket bog and protected the largest and deepest area of peat in Wales. Not only is this good for increasingly rare birds such as curlew and hen harrier, but it locks up more carbon than all of the woodlands in Wales combined, and stops it from being released into the atmosphere.
This is also the place where I first thought of this tune, which bizzarely went on to be nominated at the Hollywood Music in Media Awards, two very different worlds. But that’s the power of music I guess……
