Photography – Michael Rappa

Glacier National Park, 2019: Going to the Sun Road

September 2, 2023September 2, 2023 Michael Rappa

These photos are from various stops during my drive along Going to the Sun Road in Glacier National Park. Famously depicted in the opening sequence of Kubrick’s The Shining, it is one of the most scenic national park roads I have been on. I was able to drive the entire length in both directions on separate days, which is highly recommended if you have the time.

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Going to the Sun Road

Going to the Sun Road: St. Mary Lake

Going to the Sun Road: St. Mary Lake, featuring Wild Goose Island

Going to the Sun Road

Going to the Sun Road: St. Mary Lake

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A Machu Picchu Milestone

August 29, 2022 Michael RappaLeave a comment

It’s my ten year anniversary of reaching Machu Picchu after an arduous four-day hike of the Inca Trail through rain, sleet, and altitude sickness. Despite my tribulations, the journey and the destination were more than worth it. It’s an experience I will never forget.

My traveling has been on hold since the pandemic—I hope to get back to it again someday soon. In the meantime, here are my journals from the entire Peru trip, culminating in my arrival at Machu Picchu.

The Peru Journals:

Canada Trip, 2016: Prince Edward Island

March 10, 2022 Michael RappaLeave a comment

I’m finally getting around to sharing travel photos again after a long layoff—(the instagram fiasco soured me on photo sharing for a while and in the interim I switched my attention to writing prose again)—but I’m back.

First up: Prince Edward Island. We only allotted two days to spend here but it ended up being one of our favorite legs of the trip. We stayed on the less-touristy northeast side of the island at a charming place on a cliff overlooking the sea called the Johnson Shore Inn. The view from our room was spectacular. The entire visit was relaxing and serene, and during our walks it felt like we had the entire island to ourselves. I only wish we could have spent more time here.

This collection includes shots from the inn and our hikes along the shore and the cliffs, as well as a couple of shots from our visit to the Souris Historic Lighthouse.

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Night sky viewed from our inn on Prince Edward Island, Canada.

Prince Edward Island, Canada: looking toward our inn.

Prince Edward Island, Canada: looking up toward our inn.

Long Exposure - Prince Edward Island, Canada

Prince Edward Island, Canada: looking back toward our inn.

Prince Edward Island, Canada: nice little secluded beach that yo

The inn where we stayed - Prince Edward Island, Canada

View from our room - Prince Edward Island, Canada

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California Trip, 2014: San Francisco at Night

October 24, 2021 Michael Rappa

This collection compiles the photos I shot while walking around San Francisco at night. Fishermans Wharf and Pier 39 feature prominently, along with some photos of various buildings.

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San Francisco, California: Bread animals.

San Francisco, California: Sea Lions and gulls on the docks.

San Francisco, California: Alcatraz looking creepy shrouded in f

San Francisco, California: Lombard Street looking west.

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Glacier National Park, 2019: Wildlife

October 3, 2021 Michael Rappa

Here are some animals I encountered during my hikes in Glacier National Park. I was particularly thrilled that I was able to see a bighorn sheep in the wild on my way back down from Grinnell Glacier.

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Ram on the Grinell Glacier Trail

Moose walking away from lake, viewed from high up on the Grinell Glacier Trail.

Chipmunk at St. Mary Falls

Mountain goat high up on a mountain at Two Medicine.

Mountain goat high up on a cliff at Two Medicine.

Glacier National Park, Montana - September, 2019

Marmot on the Highline Trail

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Canada Trip, 2016: The Ovens and Lunenberg

August 22, 2021 Michael RappaLeave a comment

In the middle of our long drive from Halifax to Yarmouth, Nova Scotia, we stopped at The Ovens, a beautiful coastal national park featuring a hiking trail along a series of sea caves. We then had a nice early dinner at a little German restaurant on the side of the road before heading into the cute seaside town of Lunenburg for a walk. Lunenburg is another of those towns that made me fall in love with the Canadian Maritimes and fantasize about moving there.

Fans of Locke and Key may recognize both The Ovens and Lunenberg as filming locations for the series, though our visit was long before the show aired. I seem to have a habit of visiting places before a TV show begins filming there–years ago I visited both Split and Dubrovnik in Croatia before Game of Thrones had begun filming in those cities.

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The Ovens National Park, Nova Scotia, Canada

Lunenburg from a distance. Nova Scotia, Canada

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California Trip, 2014: Redwoods in Yosemite

August 9, 2021 Michael Rappa

On my way out of Yosemite National Park I stopped for a hike through the Mariposa grove of giant sequoias (aka redwoods). They don’t grow as tall as the coastal redwoods, but they grow wider–some are so massive that their branches actually look like trees themselves. It’s impossible for any photo to do these behemoths justice, but the people in some of the shots below, and the fact that many of the large surrounding trees look like sticks next to the redwoods, help to provide a sense of scale.

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Yosemite National Park – October, 2014

I thought this was a redwood pine cone because of how enormous it is, but redwoods apparently have small cones, so I’m not sure what type of tree this belongs to.

Yosemite National Park – October, 2014

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Glacier National Park, 2019: Panoramas

August 1, 2021 Michael Rappa

This is a collection of panoramas from my visit to Glacier National Park. For the most part I didn’t take any deliberate panorama shots on this trip–these were all stitched together from separate photos that I later realized would make good panoramas. The exceptions are the two night shots, which were sort of deliberate in that I aimed the camera in the dark at different angles for long exposures and hoped for the best (the Lake McDonald one, in particular, turned out pretty well).

The first four photos below feature views from the hotels where I stayed in Apgar Village and Many Glacier; the next three were taken during my hikes of the Highline and Grinnell Glacier trails, and the final photo is a view that should be familiar to fans of The Shining or Big Sky.

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Lake McDonald

Many Glacier: Swiftcurrent Lake

Highline Trail

Red pool near Grinnell Glacier.

Grinnell Glacier Trail

St. Mary Lake: Wild Goose Island

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Canada Trip, 2016: Hopewell Rocks

July 18, 2021 Michael RappaLeave a comment

These photos are from my visits to the Hopewell Rocks at both low and high tides. Walking among the rocks at low tide, you can tell by the shapes of the rocks how much the water rises at high tide. When I visited the next day at high tide, there were people kayaking around the same rocks that I had walked underneath on the previous day.

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California Trip, 2014: Lombard Street in San Francisco

July 12, 2021 Michael Rappa

A few photos taken along San Francisco’s famous Lombard Street (the “crookedest street in the world”) during my visit in October 2014, including one heavily cropped photo of the twisty section from further up the road (if I had realized what I was looking at I could have zoomed in for a much better shot), and one night pic snapped while standing on the twisty section and looking out toward the bay.

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