A near tragedy for my camera! I woke up at 3:30am one morning, and hiked up 1200 feet in the dark to the summit of aptly-named Knife Point, a 13,265-foot spire with a killer view into the heart of the Needle Mountains. Once the dawn light started illuminating the surrounding peaks, I started to take some photos. At one point, I decided to switch spots, and grabbing my tripod I started bounding up some rocks to get to the other side of the summit. I heard an odd jiggling sound coming from my tripod, and turned to look just in time to see my camera falling off the tripod, crashing and bouncing off boulders. Oh crap. In a state of shock and denial, I jumped down to the camera, noticing shattered glass and dismembered plastic. OH CRAP!

With only minutes before an epic sunrise, and with a 2-3 day hike to leave the wilderness, I was appalled that my camera was ruined. Luck #1: I had a clear UV filter on the lens at the time, and that took the brunt of the destruction – the lens itself was slightly bent, but the glass was unharmed. Luck #2: Even though the viewfinder was broken out of the camera, the camera could still take photos! Plus, this Olympus camera has “live view” where you can frame the shot using the LCD screen instead of the viewfinder. Ok so maybe not all was lost. I couldn’t unscrew the broken filter since the threads were all bent, so I pulled out an alan wrench from my camera bag and used it to bust out all the broken shards of glass. With the lens clear and the live view switched on, I was back in action! The photo above was taken within minutes of this near-disaster. I was later able to use a knife to wedge the viewfinder back into camera, and it snapped back into place and seems to be working fine. I am so happy that the camera still worked after this awful crash, because most of the best photos from this trip came after this.

Here’s the second stroke of twisted luck. The morning after the camera crash, I again woke up pre-dawn, packed up my camp, and headed up above treeline, with the intention of taking sunrise photos at a high lake then crossing over a 13,600-foot pass to get to Chicago Basin, the final valley of the trip. As I hiked in the dark, I noticed that it was pretty cloudy. Darn, I thought, too cloudy perhaps for a good sunrise shot. Well in the darkness what I could not see was how thick the clouds really were. I soon found out when I heard the dreadful KABOOM of lightning across the basin. Oh crap. Having already hiked well above treeline in a broad tundra basin, there was nothing I could do but to run for a shallow depression where there were at least some taller knolls around me. I crouched on my Thermarest as the lightning crashed and boomed around in the basin. Terrifying. After about an hour and a half, the storm let up a bit and I scouted around, finding a deep valley with 200′ cliffs. I could camp down there and be theoretically fairly safe from the lightning, with the high cliffs to protect me. I set up my tent, and all day long wave after wave of hail, lightning, and thunder passed over. I had no chance of crossing the high pass and was thus stuck in the basin all day. I was bored, anxious, and constantly fearful of the ever-present lightning.

But, luck came again, and in the evening the clouds broke just enough to present the most glorious sunset I’ve witnessed all summer. I gleefully snapped away with my camera, and when the sunset faded away I was so stoked I let out a big hoot for all the mountain goats within 10 miles to hear. Not only that, but the next morning was another glorious spectacle, with amazing sunrise light, shining through the clouds. If it weren’t for the storms that trapped and delayed my trip for a day, I would have missed all of these sweet shots.