Return to the Yellow Brick Road

Carstairs Trail in the Northumberland County Forest offers wheelchair friendly accessibility through a mature arboretum.

Cheers to You Dear Readers

Before I get started with this post, I want to thank everyone who has welcomed this newsletter into your lives in 2024. I am especially grateful for the many thoughtful and meaningful comments you have left. I never expected to have any sort of an audience here and your feedback has literally blown me away. I continue to write mostly for myself, but I am filled with gratitude for your presence. In a very tough year, this has meant the world to me. I wish to raise a glass to your health and wish you all the best of the season in the coming year.

Carstair’s Trail, Northumberland County Forest

Carstairs Trail is an amazing botanical garden. According to the park brochure, it was constructed to minimize obstacles for visitors with mobility issues, meeting or exceeding accessibility standards. It is the only park in the Northumberland County Forest that can be easily navigated in a wheelchair, at least for three seasons of the year. For people constrained by these and other mobility devices, this is huge. The park is a botanical gem, planted as an arboretum in 1948 and then re-planted with red and white pine, white spruce and european larch in 1950. Rare trees, native to Ontario were further planted in 2015 in honour of the Carstairs family.

I was alerted to the location by fellow photographer Norma Keith, who had posted images of her dog walks along the yellow trails of the park, brightly painted with fallen larch needles. The pictures reminded of the yellow brick road from the Wizard of Oz.

November 2023

Soon after seeing Norma’s photos, I arrived at the park. The trails appeared more orange than yellow, but in the warm morning sun, the illusion of the road to the Emerald City held true, at least in my mind. Nowhere in sight however were Dorothy and her red slippers or her three faithful companions. Still, there was something magical about the place.

The Yellow Brick Road

From the trailhead, I headed off to the right, down the larch loop and the yellow brick road. As you can see above, there was a bit of snow on the ground but harder to tell was the bitter cold, the camera being notoriously inadequate at relating temperature. The camera is full of blind spots including touch, taste, sound and smell.

Despite this inability to relate four of our five senses, a penetrating wind swept in from the north and the wind chill dipped dangerously below freezing, forcing me to keep my hood zipped tight and my mittens on while operating the camera’s controls.

My initial intention was to shoot colour, but I soon found myself switching to black and white for many of the images. I used one of Fuji’s built in black and white film simulations, Acros+red, to convert and darken the cloudless blue sky creating additional contrast between it and the treetops.

European Larch in Black & White

I was fascinated by the hard packed, winding trails that give such easy access to the deeply thicketed undergrowth. The trails are easy to walk and have a maximum grade of 6.7 degrees. Hills are practically non-existent and most of the forest paths average between 2 and 2 .5 degrees of rise and fall.

Interpretive signs are present throughout the arboretum, pointing out important attributes of specific trees, effectively turning the park a living textbook.

European Larch: larix decidua. Pinacae: Pine Family

November 2024

this year, I returned a few weeks ahead of the anniversary of my first visit to capture the larch needles at the peak of their colour against a bright blue sky. This time I stuck with colour for these overhead shots.

The tall straight larch stand like giants high above me and the surrounding the undergrowth, the last of their needles hanging on, but soon to fall. With warmer temperatures than my first visit, the spectacle was even more enjoyable the second time round.

European Larch

Larch Loop Trail

Even with morning sun it was impossible to represent the tails as a pure yellow. Perhaps the Wizard had grown tired of the illusion and opted for a simple warm glow. There were no bricks either. Just a meandering river of needles.

Larch Loop Trail

Larch and Maple

Only a few deciduous trees still held onto their autumn coats. The young maple in the photo above was one of the few understory trees still cloaked in yellow.

Eastern Hemlocks

Moving down the path into a hemlock grove, I once again found myself switching to black and white. Colour and black & white. Each has their merits. Both interesting in their own ways, and form is the crossover element between them.

Eastern Hemlock Sign

I love how the trails twist around through the park. There are few straight paths, except for the central cores which unite the four loop trails and provide convenient exit for anyone wanting a quick return to their cars.

Eastern Hemlock with shadows falling into mystery.

The forest is a photographer’s paradise, a textbook of shadows and light. I found myself drawn to experimentation, exposing for shadows and letting the highlights blow out and vice versa.

Human vision is not like a camera’s. We are much more discerning. We look into the highlights; we look into the shadows. Our ever active brains provide a dynamic amalgam of these extremes. As long as our eyes remain open, we continue this process reassessing the exposure of the scenes in front of us many times a second with our point of focus darting through the forest picking out details here and there, often following cues from the soundscape that surrounds us, alerting us to areas of interest and reflecting a wide gamut of emotions from pleasure to danger. Human vision is all about awareness. Over millennia, our survival has depended on it.

My brain could easily see into these highlights, but not my camera. As a photographer, I have to choose what I will reveal with the camera.

The camera has no such innate abilities, at least not without combining multiple exposures or playing tricks in post processing. Even then, the camera pales by comparison. I lean into the camera’s limitations to illustrate what our brains cannot.

As a photographer, I fix a moment in time using a single exposure unaided by the brain’s multi sensory interpretive powers. The limitations of photography are one of its greatest assets. Simple photographic vision provides a respite from information overload. A quiet scene for our eyes to rest upon and a place for our brains to relax. A convincing argument for the concept of less is more. Even complex scenes are rendered with simplicity by the camera’s mechanical gaze.

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Goodbye Yellow Brick Road

As I usually do, I’ll leave you with a tune. I thought of inserting Elton John’s classic rendering of Yellow Brick Road in this space. It was a landmark song in a landmark album from a landmark year at the end of high school.

But I thought it worthwhile to look around at some of the covers from recent years. I listened to a dozen or more before landing on this gem by Foxes and Fossils, a cover band collective of young female singers and old fart musicians. What a great version, with a beautiful emotional reading of Taupin’s lyrics by Chase Truran.

If you enjoy a good tune, and who doesn’t, consider visiting my other substack, John’s Jukebox, where I occasionally list some of my favourite tunes.