Discovery Channel: Photo Journeys: Lucian Perkins

Elephant Seals

The Northern elephant seal, Mirounga angustirostris, is an extraordinary marine mammal. It spends eight to 10 months a year in the open ocean, diving 1,000 to 5,000 feet deep for periods of 15 minutes to two hours, and migrating thousands of miles, twice a year, to its land-based rookery for birthing, breeding, molting and rest. The Piedras Blancas rookery on Highway 1 is seven miles north of San Simeon on the California central coast.

The elephant seal colony at Piedras Blancas has grown phenomenally. From the first seals, which graced the beach with their presence on a late November morning in 1990, the colony has grown to around 16,000 with about 3,800 pups born in 2006.

Friends of the Elephant Seal is a non-profit organization dedicated to educating people about elephant seals and other marine life and to teaching stewardship for the ocean off the central coast of California. Since 1997, Friends of the Elephant Seal volunteer docents have staffed the vista point overlooking the colony.

Machu Picchu

It’s a sleepy sunrise as the train to Machu Picchu leaves the ancient city of Cuzco nestled in a valley 11,000 feet up in the Andes. Though its destination is only some 50 miles away, it takes almost four hours to snake through the snow-capped mountains and forests, past fields, rivers and the occasional village. Along the way, hikers from everywhere are making what surely must be one of the most amazing treks of their lives on the Inca trail.

Once you reach the town of Aguas Calientes, you have a choice of taking a 20-minute bus ride up a winding, precarious road or hiking an hour and a half to Machu Picchu, which sits at nearly 8,000 feet above sea level. This year it was voted one of the  new seven wonders of the world in a poll taken by more than 100 million participants over a period of seven years, and tourism has soared. But you can still take comfort in finding isolation in this vast complex by hiking the remote trails in the surrounding mountains, or by relaxing on one of the many terraced pastures in the company of grazing llamas.

“The Lost City” is thought to have been built around 1450, during the height of the short-lived Inca Empire, which lasted only a hundred years. Encompassing temples, sanctuaries, terraced fields and homes, the former winter retreat of the Inca ruler Pachacuti Yupanqui was interconnected by a system of alleys, side streets and over 100 staircases carved into the rock. The Spanish conquerors never found the city, which was only discovered in 1911 when Yale professor Hiram Bingham was led there by locals.

Standing on one of its peaks, it’s easy to grasp why this city stayed hidden for so long. As you look down a vertical drop of 2,000 feet to the valley and the Urubamba River, you  gaze at the massive mountains and dense rain forests that cloak it. Still today, full knowledge of its function remains incomplete as does its mortar-less granite masonry. Though only fragments of the buildings survive, the wondrous, geometric patterns fit together so tightly that supposedly even a needle can’t pass in between. According to a native guide, these shapes often mimic surrounding mountains and honor the deities whom many believe inhabit them.

One can only imagine what Machu Picchu looked like at the height of its glory. Anthropologist Johan Reinhard believes the site functioned as a ceremonial center whose location comprised a unique convergence of geographical and astronomical features. As you wander through the ruins and peer out the windows of the existing structures, it’s easy to feel the presence of the high priests and the "Virgins of the Sun.” And then, as you survey the magnificent vistas around you with the clouds hanging in the distance below, you can easily picture being on top of the Earth and living amongst the gods themselves.

 

Arches National Park

The road into Arches National Park takes you to a plateau featuring what must be nature’s most wondrous sculpture garden, spreading out over 199 square miles and visible in part from an 18-mile scenic drive.

Beautiful topography with names such as Park Avenue, Dark Angel, Fiery Furnace and Delicate Arch are on view in every direction.  They reference arches, windows, balanced rocks and formations so diverse that you easily imagine being on an alien landscape; seeing a New York City-style skyline of stone; overlooking a fiery landscape of frozen molten rock; or standing next to massive, gravity-defying rock sculpture that defies an explanation of its creation.

Hidden beneath the park is an underground salt bed deposited around 300 million years ago when a sea covered the region and eventually evaporated. The shifting bed, which is thousands of feet deep in some places, along with millions of years of layers, weather and wind, is the main cause of the esoteric formations made to the more recent top layer of the reddish-colored Entrada Sandstone.

A highlight is Delicate Arch. Tucked away in the park, it is one of the more than 2,000 sandstone arches that together represent the largest concentration in the world, and is accessible by a moderately strenuous hike of a mile and a half. The trail begins near the well-preserved Wolfe log cabin, built by early settlers in the late 1800s. It proceeds along brush and dried-out streambeds, and opens out to a vast sloping slab of sandstone where you can at times observe hikers of all ages -- from children to the elderly, huffing and puffing as they slowly make their way to the top. Most visitors will stop along the trail and gaze at the spectacular scenery around them.

From the top of the slope one circles round other beautiful rock formations, continuing on a winding trail carved by the wind. Turning the corner, you are rewarded with a spectacular view of Delicate Arch precariously perched on top of a small canyon. In the background is the often snow-covered La Sal Mountains. Awe-struck hikers sit or wander around the arch. Many linger until sunset or moonrise.

Naturalist Edward Abbey, whom many admire in this part of the world as a writer and who was a park ranger at Arches, writes of Delicate Arch:

  “There are several ways of looking at Delicate Arch. Depending on
your preconceptions you may see the eroded remnant of a sandstone fin, a
giant engagement ring cemented in rock, a bow-legged pair of petrified
cowboy chaps, a triumphal arch for a procession of angels, an illogical
geologic freak, a happening — a something that happened and will never
happen quite that way again, a frame more significant than its picture, a
simple monolith eaten away by weather and time and soon to disintegrate
into a chaos of falling rock.” ...

He further writes of Arches National Park:

       “There are enough cathedrals and temples and altars here for a Hindu
pantheon of divinities. Each time I look up one of the secretive little side
canyons I half expect to see not only the cottonwood tree rising over its tiny
spring — the leafy god, the desert’s liquid eye — but also a rainbow-colored
corona of blazing light, pure spirit, pure being, pure disembodied.”

Abbey may have come closest to describing this land of colossal artworks, but nothing quite captures the experience of being there -- standing among them in the silence of the desert and watching the sun slowly set them a glow with only the wind to keep you company.

Fearless Planet: Grand Canyon

Lucian went behind the scenes on the Grand Canyon shoot, interviewing geologists and snapping stunning photos.

Lucian Perkins won two Pulitzer Prizes, The World Press Photo of  The Year in addition to many other awards during his 27 years as a staff photographer at The Washington Post. Now working as an independent photographer and videographer, he concentrates on multimedia projects and documentaries while still pursuing his love for the still image. He lives in Washington, D.C.