Randy Olson, Melissa Farlow Photography

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  • A Ladin farmer drives a horse-drawn sled on steep hills with small patches of melting snow outside the Dolomites. The community of LaVal remains isolated by geography and the people retained their own ethnic language although they also speak German and Italian.
    RANDY OLSON_MM7139_1024128.TIF
  • A man fixes mining equipment in a muddy pit in a search for gold in Borneo. Such operations leave a devastated landscape and miners test high for mercury earning about $5US a day.
    Gold_20060421_01818.tif
  • A man fixes mining equipment in a muddy pit in a search for gold in Borneo. Such operations leave a devastated landscape and miners test high for mercury earning about $5US a day.
    Gold_20060421_01781.tif
  • Men work on mining equipment in a muddy pit while searching for gold in Borneo. Such operations leave a devastated landscape and miners test high for mercury earning about $5US a day.
    Gold_20060421_01868.tif
  • A high wing float plane soars over the water at Batu Hijau gold mine's dedicated port facilities at Benete Bay.
    RANDY OLSON_MM7339_1222953.JPG
  • Russian Geological Society expedition member Anatoly Kayukov has constructed a makeshift bridge using a dead tree over the roaring Yagtali River of Siberia's Putorana Plateau, and slowly creeps his way to the other side. Kayukov was part of the Russian Geological Society's expedition that returned to study the remote Russi an region 200 miles north of the Arctic Circle called Putorana Plateau--a  magn ificent, uninhabited tableland the size of Nevada, cut by canyons, rivers, wate rfalls and endless flat-topped mountains receding to the Arctic horizon.
    RANDY OLSON_06396_673218-1.jpg
  • A nude man in a lake tosses a fresh-killed duck ashore.
    RANDY OLSON_06396_673219-6.jpg
  • A nude man in a lake tosses a fresh-killed duck ashore.
    RANDY OLSON_06396_673219-2.jpg
  • Landscape of the Putorana Plateau.
    RANDY OLSON_06396_673188-31.jpg
  • Men work on mining equipment in a muddy pit in a search for gold in Borneo. Such operations leave a devastated landscape and miners test high for mercury earning about $5US a day.
    Gold_20060421_01790.tif
  • Three volcanoes, quiet now, formed Easter Island half a million years ago. Rano Raraku has a lagoon-filled crater seen in an aerial photo of the island.
    RANDY OLSON_MM8059_1477354.JPG
  • A braided river ecosystem for salmon spawning. At the top of this photograph is the Sea of Okhotsk, and below it the Oblukovina River. They flow past wetlands created by heavy rain on the west side of Kamchatka. <br />
<br />
Wetlands are the primary sign of a healthy salmon ecosystem and clouds of mosquitoes form where insects are a main food source. Salmon create a mass migration engine that brings marine-derived nutrients into river ecosystems, and the carcasses fertilize the entire Pacific Rim.<br />
<br />
Salmon bring marine-derived nutrients from the Kamchatka shelf in the Sea of Okhotsk into the eight major river systems that run off the middle range of mountains that divide Kamchatka in half.
    RANDY OLSON_MM7593_1260979.TIF
  • The volcanic landscape of Kamchatka with snowy peaks above the clouds in an aerial photograph.
    RANDY OLSON_MM7593_1260935.JPG
  • Three volcanoes, quiet now, formed Easter Island half a million years ago.<br />
An aerial view of the island shows red scoria stone used for headpieces found on some of the moai came from solidified froth of volcano lava.
    RANDY OLSON_MM8059_1493975.JPG
  • Three volcanoes, now dormant, formed Easter Island half a million years ago.  Rano Kau is the largest crater on the island with an aerial view from the mirador on the headlands. Inside is a lagoon of fresh water filling the crater that is almost a mile wide and 1,000 feet high above the Pacific Ocean in Rapa Nui National Park.
    RANDY OLSON_MM8059_1477354-2.JPG
  • Aerial photo showing the braided river ecosystem for salmon spawning.<br />
<br />
When salmon die they fertilize the entire Pacific Rim. Warm waters from volcanic systems within with the coldest sea in the Pacific Rim create an ideal, nutrient-rich environment. And the river systems—some of the last braided streams on Earth that have not yet been constrained by agriculture—are vital habitat for salmon.
    RANDY OLSON_MM7593_1260978.JPG
  • A river ecosystem for salmon spawning is braided and full of nutrients as it meanders through the tundra.
    RANDY OLSON_MM7593_1260948.JPG
  • A braided river ecosystem snakes through the tundra and is used by salmon spawning.<br />
<br />
Salmon bring marine-derived nutrients from the Kamchatka shelf in the Sea of Okhotsk into the eight major river systems that run off the middle range of mountains that divide Kamchatka in half.
    RANDY OLSON_MM7593_1260934.JPG
  • Aerial photo showing a wate- filled cone of one of the three volcanoes, quiet now, but once formed Easter Island half a million years ago.
    RANDY OLSON_MM8059_1493976.JPG
  • Aerial  photo shows tire tracks in the tundra are left by poachers. <br />
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 The Kamchatka Shelf in Russia is mostly inaccessible.  Flying in and out by MI-8 helicopter is expensive but the fear is that the roads being constructed  for oil and gas pipelines will open these remote areas to more poaching.
    RANDY OLSON_MM7593_1260980.JPG
  • A nude man in a lake tosses a fresh-killed duck ashore.
    RANDY OLSON_06396_663866.jpg
  • Tributary of the Unuk River in the Tongass National Forest.
    MELISSA FARLOW_RF4115_1114669.jpg
  • Friends on the beach at Bill Baggs Cape Florida State Park.
    MELISSA FARLOW_MT5959_1376340.jpg
  • A boat motors past Stiltsville: abandoned homes on stilts.
    MELISSA FARLOW_MT5959_1376333.jpg
  • Walking in Lummus Park along Ocean Drive in South Beach.
    MELISSA FARLOW_MT5959_1376315.jpg
  • A father and son skip rocks along Lake Michigan south of the Loop.
    MELISSA FARLOW_MT5887_1345830.jpg
  • Two gray stallions put their heads together to smell a territorial marking. Although it may look friendly, the mustangs are exhibiting behavior typical in a wild horse herd when studs are vying for dominance. At this point, they may fight or walk away to battle another time.
    MELISSA FARLOW_MM7517_1222872.TIF
  • Rays of sunlight pierce the clouds hanging over Sitka Sound and Baranof Island. Southeast Alaska receives about 200 inches of rain a year creating its moody ambiance.
    MELISSA FARLOW_MM7258_1073532.TIF
  • Morning fog rises from craggy mountain peaks in the Alps surrounding the Matterhorn. The Alps range formed when two tectonic plates of Africa dn Eurasia slowly collided millions of years ago creating some of highest peaks in Europe.<br />
Rugged Zinalrothorn and Weisshorn in the background.
    MELISSA FARLOW_MM7139_1024111.TIF
  • Water rushing over a small fall on the Sol Duc River.
    MELISSA FARLOW_MM7061_759460.jpg
  • Hobet 21 mountain top removal coal mine grows larger and approaches a family home. Mines run 24 hours a day, seven days a week creating coal dust impossible to keep out of houses.
    MELISSA FARLOW_MM6773_1023747.jpg
  • Late day sun lights a meadow in Yosemite National Park. Glaciers carved the Sierra Nevada mountains and creating walls that frame a flat valley floor.  Trees and grasses provide a scenic setting in late fall before the first snows.
    MELISSA FARLOW_MM6560_968593.jpg
  • Young boy gallops at full speed riding bare back on a horse leaving clouds of dust in the barren, high-mountain Peruvian desert near Chauchilla.
    MELISSA FARLOW_04526_1187591.jpg
  • A worker catches salmon at a fish camp.
    RANDY OLSON_MM7593_1260947.JPG
  • A fishing brigade on the Bolshaya River south of the town of Oktyabrski where men make a fish camp out of a beached, ocean-going vessel.  They are not fishing on this day because it allows time for the fish to spawn, and indigenous communities up river in Kamchatka can fish in the area along the Bolshaya River. <br />
<br />
Fishing brigades use tractors to tow one end of a net and then bring it around full circle in the river to capture the fish. A net is  dumped into small boats that have small nets laid in them. A crane picks up the small nets and dumps them into trucks that take the fish to the processing plants in Ust Bolsheretsk. If fishing was allowed every day in the mouths of these rivers just off the Kamchatka shelf, no salmon would get up river to spawn. There are two “passing days” each week when fishing is banned, so these fishermen hang out in their camp and do their laundry. Some fishermen come from as far as Ulan-Ude, which is on the border with Siberia. One of the fishermen in this photo is from PK, two are from Urilutsk, Siberia, and two are from Oktybrski.
    RANDY OLSON_MM7593_1248226.TIF
  • The Vyvenka River loops through a floodplain in an oxbow curve in Kamchatka, a peninsula in far east Russia that is the size of California but only 130 kilometers of roads.  All roads are clustered around the capital, Petropavlovsk.  All other travel is by plane, MI-8 helicopter or something they call an ATV but we refer to them as a tank. Flying over the big empty landscape, the view is wetlands, tundra, braided streams, and meandering unconstrained rivers. Free of roads and dams, it is the perfect environment for salmon swimming upstream to spawn.
    RANDY OLSON_MM7593_1248217.TIF
  • Aerial view of some of the 16,000 participants in the Ski Marathon as Nordic skiers trek across frozen upper Engadine valley. The winter event has been hosted since 1969 drawing athletes and tourists to mountain communities around Saint Moritz in the Alps.
    RANDY OLSON_MM7139_1024133.TIF
  • A wooden pathway leads to an almost ghostly line of fog above a lake.
    RANDY OLSON_06396_673186.JPG
  • Aerial of Grand Prismatic Spring.
    RANDY OLSON_06103_495549.JPG
  • The Allegheny ant Monongahela Rivers converge at the Golden Triangle.
    RANDY OLSON_05837_470265.JPG
  • A nude man in a lake tosses a fresh-killed duck ashore.
    RANDY OLSON_06396_663866-1.jpg
  • Photographer Randy Olson lets out a sigh of exasperation during banya (bathing) day.  Olson was assigned to photograph the remote, uninhabited region of Siber ia called Putorana Plateau with the guide of members of the Russian Geological Society for National Geographic Magazine.  Here, at Lake Duluk, the last of three sites whe re they camped in Putorana, Olson has just finished steaming himself in a sweat box, and proceeds to cool down and bathe in the lake.
    RANDY OLSON_06396_673219.jpg
  • A nude man in a lake tosses a fresh-killed duck ashore.
    RANDY OLSON_06396_673219-5.jpg
  • Russian Geological Society expedition member Anatoly Kayukov has constructed a makeshift bridge using a dead tree over the roaring Yagtali River of Siberia's Putorana Plateau, and slowly creeps his way to the other side. Kayukov was part of the Russian Geological Society's expedition that returned to study the remote Russi an region 200 miles north of the Arctic Circle called Putorana Plateau--a  magn ificent, uninhabited tableland the size of Nevada, cut by canyons, rivers, wate rfalls and endless flat-topped mountains receding to the Arctic horizon.
    RANDY OLSON_06396_673218.jpg
  • Landscape of the Putorana Plateau.
    RANDY OLSON_06396_673188.jpg
  • Landscape of the Putorana Plateau.
    RANDY OLSON_06396_673188-20.jpg
  • Landscape of the Putorana Plateau.
    RANDY OLSON_06396_673188-26.jpg
  • Landscape of the Putorana Plateau.
    RANDY OLSON_06396_673188-15.jpg
  • Landscape of the Putorana Plateau.
    RANDY OLSON_06396_673188-7.jpg
  • Landscape of the Putorana Plateau.
    RANDY OLSON_06396_673188-1.jpg
  • A man embraces an arctic bath on  Siberia's Putorana Plateau.
    RANDY OLSON_06396_663875.jpg
  • Two Sudanese children, an adult and a donkey in a desolate landscape.
    RANDY OLSON_MM6998_718258.jpg
  • Shifting sands of the desert covers much of northern Sudan.
    RANDY OLSON_MM6998_714573.jpg
  • Islam and Arab culture came to Sudan through trading centers like the ruined Red Sea and ancient port of Suakin. Sudan has long been ruled by a small circle of wealthy northerners, who, because of their Muslim faith and Arabized culture, consider themselves Arab instead of African. Islam and Arab culture came to Sudan through trading centers like the port of Suakin. Suakin was ottoman built but was possibly chipped into this perfectly round circle by the Romans.  Suakin was the main port from the 14th century until World War I and has never been excavated.
    RANDY OLSON_MM6998_714566.jpg
  • A view from half underwater and half above of a Rapa Nui man fishing for rudderfish in high waves on Easter Island's south coast.
    RANDY OLSON_MM8059_1493941-1.JPG
  • A Rapa Nui man fishes for rudderfish in high surf on Easter Island's south coast. Powerful waves blast the rocky, volcanic barrier to the island.
    RANDY OLSON_MM8059_1477016.JPG
  • A couple strolls beneath power lines framing moai statues at Ahu Tahai. Over 100,000 tourists visit Easter Island annually.
    RANDY OLSON_MM8059_1493938.JPG
  • Restored moai stand watch at Ahu Tongariki. RANDY OLSON Photographer photographs the mysterious statues for a National Geographic assignment on Easter Island.
    RANDY OLSON_MM8059_1493967-2.JPG
  • Glowing under night skies, restored moai statues stand watch at Ahu Tongariki. The largest ahu on Easter Island, the moai were toppled during island civil wars and later swept inland by a tsunami in the 1960s.
    RANDY OLSON_MM8059_1493967-1.JPG
  • An ancient Moai statue and wild horses on Rano Raraku crater. Moai toppled along the road were left as rubble.Their eyes are not completed until they standing upright.<br />
A small herd of wild horses, introduced from Tahiti by Catholic missionaries in the 19th-century, trek across Easter Island.
    RANDY OLSON_MM8059_1493936.JPG
  • Ancient Moai statues dot a hillside on Rano Raraku crater on Easter Island. Between the 12th and 15th centuries, Rano Raraku was the main quarry for the massive monolithic sculptures created by the Rapa Nui.<br />
Statues lie in various states of production--some half carved, others broken or abandoned. Maoi stand half buried in the slope from years of erosion.
    RANDY OLSON_MM8059_1493935.JPG
  • A beach and artisanal fishing community in Saint Louis, Sengegal.<br />
<br />
A young woman stands by some of the brightly painted, traditional fishing boats called pirogues.
    RANDY OLSON_MM7393_1057914.JPG
  • A fisherman's catch lies on a boat in the sun on a Kayar beach in Senegal.
    RANDY OLSON_MM7393_1057899.JPG
  • Goats stand on the roof in a beach settlement of the fishing village of Saint Louis, Senegal.
    RANDY OLSON_MM7393_1057924.JPG
  • A woman prepared food surrounded by colorful cloth in the beach settlement Saint Louis, Senegal.<br />
The town was once an important economic center during French West Africa, however, it still has important industries, including tourism, a commercial center, a center of sugar production, and fishing.
    RANDY OLSON_MM7393_1057922.JPG
  • A ray fish ashore in a beach settlement in Saint Louis, Senegal.<br />
<br />
Stingrays are considered a type of fish that is related to sharks. They are found in the warm and temperate waters all over the world. Stingrays have a flat, gray to the darkish brown body and a long tail with a poisonous stinger on their end. Stingray is a popular seafood dish in many parts of the world.
    RANDY OLSON_MM7393_1057925.JPG
  • Artisanal fishermen coming and going at the port of Kayar.
    RANDY OLSON_MM7393_1058066.JPG
  • Pelicans reach for fish in a bucket on a beach where artisanal fishermen work and live in Senegal.
    RANDY OLSON_MM7393_1057940.JPG
  • Shrimp fishermen lay their nets in the waters off of Senegal. Women process fish on the shore at Karountine, northwest of Ziguinchor.  A growing number of Africans live on the coast because the ocean is one of the last sources for protein available. <br />
<br />
Authorities have attempted to get rid of this village, but since fishing is the most important aspect of St. Louis, the community has fought off the government to stay here.
    RANDY OLSON_MM7393_1057917.JPG
  • Women process fish on shore at Karountine, northwest of Ziguinchor. <br />
<br />
People in the beach community in Saint Louis, Senegal refused to leave although they are pressured to move by authorities.
    RANDY OLSON_MM7393_1057913.JPG
  • Arranged stacks of Atlantic bumpers dry on racks. The fish are a crucial food source in Africa.
    RANDY OLSON_MM7393_1055378-4.JPG
  • Atlantic bumpers are a crucial food source in Senegal and elsewhere in Africa, where 200 million people depend largely on seafood for their animal protein. Worldwide, fish sustain one billion people, many of them poor. As pressure on stocks increases, the challenge for developing countries—whose share of fish production is projected to increase to 81 percent by 2015—is to balance the need for revenue with the need for food.
    RANDY OLSON_MM7393_1055378-1.JPG
  • Atlantic bumpers are a crucial food source in Africa. Worldwide, fish sustain one billion people. Fish drying on racks appear to swim across the sand in Senegal.
    RANDY OLSON_MM7393_1055378.JPG
  • Floating islands of bouyant peat carry grasses, sedges, and bald cypress trees in the Okefenokee National Wildlife Refuge in southern Georgia.<br />
A mysterious aura surrounds the Okefenokee, wilderness of a boggy, unstable land commonly known as “Land of the Trembling Earth.” More accurately translated, “Okefenokee” means “waters shaking” in Hitchiti, an extinct dialect in the Muskogean language family spoken in the Southeast by indigenous people related to Creeks and Seminoles.<br />
<br />
The name refers to the gas that forms as submerged vegetation decomposes and bubbles up from the bottom of the swamp. Plants begin growing and clump together to form spongy little islands.
    MELISSA FARLOW_05842_470843.JPG
  • A boat cuts through reflections of clouds in the placid waters of the St. Mary’s River in Southern Georgia. The St. Mary’s forms a division between Florida and Georgia as it flows east to the Atlantic Ocean out of the Okefenokee Swamp.
    MELISSA FARLOW_05842_110252.JPG
  • Tourists are drawn to El Tatio, a geothermal field with geysers north of San Pedro at 4300 meters above sea level located in the Andes Mountains in the Atacama Desert.  More than 70 geysers and fumaroles spew hot water and steam as the sun rises in Chile near the Bolivian border.
    MELISSA FARLOW_04526_1187554-1.JPG
  • Steens Loop Road passes through winter sun that warms grasses on the high desert in Oregon's Steens Mountain.
    MELISSA FARLOW_MM6659_705729-60.JPG
  • A rancher on horseback accompanied by his dog drives a herd a sheep through the open range and grasses of the high desert in Oregon's Steens Mountain.
    MELISSA FARLOW_MM6659_705729-59.JPG
  • Land yachts race the wind and each other across the Alvord Desert playa’s flat, dusty terrain. Fans of the sport flock to the ancient lake bed in search of speeds beyond most posted interstate highway limits. The world record stands above 116 mph. Sports enthusiasts race in high temperatures when the playa is dry enough to drive on.<br />
The desert lies to the east of Oregon's Steens Mountain, and Steen's Mountain Wilderness which is “the largest fault-block mountain in the northern Great Basin.”  It abruptly falls to the dry Alvord Desert 6,000 feet below.
    MELISSA FARLOW_MM6659_705729-58.JPG
  • A  cinder cone in Diamond Craters, a monogenetic volcanic field southeast of Burns, Oregon. Basaltic lava flows were formed in the past 25,000 years and resemble a flat rocky area with small hills. The craters and vents, cinder cones and spatter cones, lava tubes are near Steen's Mountain Wilderness in the northern Great Basin.”
    MELISSA FARLOW_MM6659_705729-57.JPG
  • Blazing sunset leaves in shadow the famous gap in Kiger Gorge, atop Oregon's Steens Mountain. Steen's Mountain Wilderness is “the largest fault-block mountain in the northern Great Basin.”  The aerial view shows a forty mile long escarpment in southeastern Oregon has a notch cut out of the top and drops abruptly to the dry Alvord Desert, 5,500 feet below.<br />
Bulldozing down to basalt, Ice Age glaciers carved our huge gorges out of the Great Basin's largest fault block mountain. Beyond, Steens's east face plummets a vertical mile.
    MELISSA FARLOW_MM6659_705729-56.JPG
  • Morning fog rises from the Upper Missouri River Breaks in Montana.
    MELISSA FARLOW_MM6659_705729-55.JPG
  • Clouds fill depressions through the mountainous area of Northern California after a passing storm.
    MELISSA FARLOW_MM6659_705729-54.JPG
  • A lone cyclist crosses the maritime chaparral of Fort Ord National Monument, once a bustling Army post on central California's Monterey Peninsula and now a Bureau of Land Management-run reserve for recreation and scarce native habitats. The coastal gem has 86 miles of trails to ride a bike or horse or hike through diverse habitats.
    MELISSA FARLOW_MM6659_705729-51.JPG
  • Rock climbers practice technical moves on boulders in Crackhouse cave Castle Valley near Moab, Utah. Climbing ranks high with the non-mechanized crowd where strength and balance are measured athletic abilities. Climbers tape their wrists and use rub chalk on their fingers to grasp the slick surface.
    MELISSA FARLOW_MM6659_705729-39.JPG
  • Rock climbers practice technical moves on boulders in Crackhouse cave Castle Valley near Moab, Utah. Climbing ranks high with the non-mechanized crowd where strength and balance are measured athletic abilities. Climbers tape their wrists and use rub chalk on their fingers to grasp the slick surface.
    MELISSA FARLOW_MM6659_705729-38.JPG
  • Mountain bikers’ Main Street is the Slickrock Trail that undulates for 13 miles over Navaho sandstone outside of Moab, Utah. Silhouetted on a ridge, clouds put the red rock into deep shadow making the ride more challenging.
    MELISSA FARLOW_MM6659_705729-37.JPG
  • Castleton Rock is a 400-foot Wingate Sandstone tower standing on a 1,000 foot Moenkopi-Chinle cone above the northeastern border of Castle Valley, Utah. It is a world-renown desert rock formation that has numerous climbing routes and is located outside of Moab.
    MELISSA FARLOW_MM6659_705729-34.JPG
  • Sunset and shadows fall across a building in Lowry Pueblo, an archeological site located in Canyon of the Ancients National Monument. A treasure of Ansazi Indian ruins in Colorado, the pueblo was constructed around 1060 AD atop abandoned pit houses from an earlier period of occupation. A total of 40 rooms and 8 kivas at its peak in the early 11th century, it was home to approximately 100 people. The 176,000 acre monument of federal land administered by the Bureau of Land Management includes 20,000 archeological sites.
    MELISSA FARLOW_MM6659_705729-33.JPG
  • A worker enters the front door of the Umiat Hilton, in the unincorporated community in the North Slope of Alaska that is located on the Colville River. Oil fields near Prudhoe Bay were opened and the Navy built Umiat in 1944. The small lodge located near an airstrip is reputedly the coldest place in Alaska.
    MELISSA FARLOW_MM6659_705729-32.JPG
  • Human skull and other bones surfaced from under melting tundra from abandoned sunken houses and boats in what is believed to be a failed sailing expedition. The story goes that ship wrecked explorers built shelters to survive and were poisoned by their lead food containers before they could be rescued. The site is near Barrow but closer to Lonely, Alaska near the DEW line or Distant Early Warning radar station in the far northern Arctic.
    MELISSA FARLOW_MM6659_705729-31.JPG
  • Three vehicles traverse rolling hills across the green tundra in summer months as the "haul road" runs 414 miles north to the oil fields of Prudhoe Bay. The Dalton highway was built during construction of the trans-Alaska oil pipeline in the 1970s, mostly gravel highway with a few paved sections. It follows nearby the pipeline through rolling, forested hills, across the Yukon River and Arctic Circle, through the rugged Brooks Range, and over the North Slope to the Arctic Ocean.
    MELISSA FARLOW_MM6659_705729-29.JPG
  • Morning fog fills the valley between snowy, white peaks of the stark and rugged San Juan Mountains. Shafts of silver, not sunlight, lured miners into Colorado's wilderness where now rugged trails form the Alpine Loop, a Bureau of Land Management back country byway with more than a glimmer of mountain splendor.
    MELISSA FARLOW_MM6659_705729-25.JPG
  • Fog fills the valley surrounding snowy, white peaks of the stark and rugged San Juan Mountains. Shafts of silver, not sunlight, lured miners into Colorado's wilderness where now rugged trails form the Alpine Loop, a Bureau of Land Management back country byway with more than a glimmer of mountain splendor.
    MELISSA FARLOW_MM6659_705729-24.JPG
  • Fog and low-lying clouds fill the valleys surrounding the   snowy peaks of the stark and rugged San Juan Mountains. Shafts of silver, not sunlight, lured miners into Colorado's wilderness where now rugged trails form the Alpine Loop, a Bureau of Land Management back country byway with more than a glimmer of mountain splendor.
    MELISSA FARLOW_MM6659_705729-18.JPG
  • Sunlight parts the clouds and illuminates a stand of quaking aspen trees or Populus tremuloides in the stark and rugged San Juan Mountains. Shafts of silver, not sunlight, lured miners into Colorado's wilderness where now rugged trails form the Alpine Loop, a Bureau of Land Management back country byway with more than a glimmer of mountain splendor. Rich greens turn vibrant colors of gold as autumn comes to the region near Ouray.
    MELISSA FARLOW_MM6659_705729-16.JPG
  • Meandering from the San Juan Mountains to southwestern Colorado’s sandstone canyons, the fragile wildlife-rich San Miguel River corridor has special protective designations from the Bureau of Land Management. Afternoon sunlight illuminates a stand of aspen trees, Populus tremuloides, that turned golden as autumn comes to the region near Montrose.
    MELISSA FARLOW_MM6659_705729-14.JPG
  • A bride  smooths our her long, white dress after a four-wheel drive wild ride over boulders and slick rock to reach a spot for the wedding near Moab, Utah. The Bureau of Land Managements designates specific trails for off-road vehicle riders in the wilderness during the annual Easter Weekend Jeep Safari.
    MELISSA FARLOW_MM6659_705729-9.JPG
  • A bride hangs on for a four-wheel drive wild ride over boulders and rough slick rock trails near Moab, Utah. The Bureau of Land Managements designates specific trails for off-road vehicle riders like this who although dressed in traditional white, wants to be married in an untraditional way in the wilderness during a Jeep Safari.<br />
Most riders stick to BLM's loosely enforced straight-and-narrow rules are plentiful, but thousands more disregard the rules, answering the call of their combustion engines to chart new paths through roadless areas which had great ecological consequences.
    MELISSA FARLOW_MM6659_705729-8.JPG
  • Researchers track a mother sage-grouse, Centrocercus urophasianus, to study her chick’s behavior. Sage-grouses are found only in sagebrush country in the west nesting on the ground and eating sagebrush leaves which are a staple of the grouse’s winter diet. The sage-grouse faces extinction as populations plunged by 80 percent according to Audubon.<br />
As oil and gas fields multiply and climate change intensifies, grassland habitats disappear and birds like the Lesser Prairie-Chicken pay the price. Hens lay an average of 6-9 eggs in a ground nest hidden under sagebrush. Numbers are declining, largely due to habitat loss from fire, invasive plants and
    MELISSA FARLOW_MM6659_705729-6.JPG
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