Tag Archives: National Park

California’s Eastern Sierra region is a remote and vast wilderness, lightly populated and replete with extensive rugged and magnificent terrain. Sitting in the rain shadow of the Sierra Nevada, the mountains here rise steeply from the prairies and deserts to the east. The largest industry in the Eastern Sierra is tourism: based in tiny localities and […]

View full post »

California’s Eastern Sierras are a jaw-droppingly beautiful outdoor playground. How lucky was I to have a photography-friend with not one, but two bases in this rugged and gorgeous area! Like me, she is a fan of mountain walks and flowers, and we had timed my trip to line up with the best of the mountain […]

View full post »

It’s an incredible landscape. Red, flat, and empty as far as the eye can see, except for two remarkable – and remarkably different – ancient rock formations: Uluru, the 348 m (1,142 ft) high sandstone monolith, and Kata Tjuta, the 36 domes of conglomerated sand, pebbles, and cobbles. This is a living, culturally-rich topography, home […]

View full post »

“Send us more camels!” Last year when I was in Jordan, that was the exhortation of every second person I met, once they heard I was from Australia (see: Desert Rains and the Seven Pillars). Who knew we actually sell camels to the Middle East? I knew there were feral camels – at least 300,000 […]

View full post »

Fraser Island is a unique and wonderful place; it is a poem in sand, punctuated by the occasional sculptured rock. I’m not much of a geology student, but the landscape of Fraser Island is a living, pulsing thing that transcends time. As written in the UNESCO-World Heritage listing, the “immense sand dunes are part of […]

View full post »