Whiting Ranch Wilderness 23

Posted on May 24, 2004 in Photos

Whiting is to me what Point Lobos is to the photographers around Carmel. The land invites me to explore and review what I have seen many times over. Just the other day, I spotted a cliff face where a particular species of succulent grew. I plan to approach it by means of a dry creek and photograph the fat little cabbages soon.

These pictures were taken along Vulture View. I was enraptured by the scenery on this, the first visit to this northernmost of Whiting trails, when I felt a clap on my head and shoulders. I looked up and saw this turkey vulture only twenty or thirty feet over my head. He circled over the scarps and undulations for several minutes, sweeping low to check a change in an open patch, finding the updraft again, flying high to pan the entire countryside, rising and soaring high enough to take him over canyon and knoll in his quest for dead.

I could not see this ragged seeker after the dead as evil, but as an angel of sanitation, picking up from the landscape what had dropped in a last exertion so that the world did not become a field of corpses.

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