"Returning home is the most difficult part of long-distance hiking; You have grown outside the puzzle and your piece no longer fits." - Cindy Ross
About Me:
First a little bit about the name. Anastatica hierochuntica is the Latin name for what is commonly known as the Resurrection plant. The plant can survive for great periods of time without any nourishment and blooms back to life when watered. It seems a fitting metaphor for someone who merely survives in the Cotton World (a name long distance hikers have given THE non trail world) and comes alive when he's in the wild.
I'm an accidental photographer. Each time I've picked up a camera it's been
either because I had to or because I merely wanted to document something; it was always a means to an end. When I started taking photos in the mid 90's it was because I had to. I’d lost my job working on a loading dock and my girlfriend helped me con the hospital she was working at into hiring me as a photographer in their educational media department. I ended up spending a bunch of time in the operating room documenting surgical procedures* for publication and then volunteering my services to a trauma surgeon. I’m an adrenaline addict and I fed off of the balletic chaos of the trauma bay. I was fascinated by the human condition and the way life spilled, literally and figuratively, onto those floors. The sterile and highly controlled environment of the operating room was interesting to me, but the cyclonic nature of Emergency Medicine matched the cyclone inside my head. I eventually left that job, but not my love of trauma, and with it I left the camera behind. It would have been unimaginable to mid 20's me that one day I'd be on the opposite end of the camera in the trauma bay, but in my profession, I am.
(*if you want to feel pressure, try shooting surgical procedures and traumatic events on film and then Imagine having to tell SAID surgeons that you fucked up and there's nothing on said film. I don't miss that. Not. At. All.)
My first backpacking trip was in September of 2013. Having almost no hiking experience I decided it might be a good idea to spend 30 days hiking the 274 miles through Vermont from the Vermont/Massachusetts border to the Canadian border. I bought a point and shoot camera and, for reasons I’m not quite sure of, decided to purchase a waterproof Diving case for the camera. This would prove to be a wise decision because It rained for nearly 21 days. I was soaking wet for the majority of the trip and a good portion of my photos have a weird abstract effect due to the raindrops on the lens. They perfectly captured the experience but were little more than documentation of a trip.
My next adventure, in September of 2014, took me to the Sierra Nevada mountains in California. I’d seen Ansel Adams photos, spoken to people who had hiked the John Muir trail, and decided to give it a try. I took the same point and shoot camera and, in spite of the fact that it was only a serviceable point and shoot, came away with some stunning photos. Neither pictures nor the 26 letters of our alphabet will ever capture what I saw and felt on that trail and I've given up trying. I’ll at some point post some of the best images, but they fail spectacularly to capture the beauty of the Sierras, the beautiful people I traveled with, and the sense that for the first time in my life I was home.
Fast forward to August 2016 and I’m standing in a rock strewn field trying to set my tent up between puddles in, let’s call them, challenging Icelandic winds. The plan called for us to fly into Keflavik airport, drop off our non hiking gear at a hostel, hop on what I can only describe as a 1970’s bus equipped with some sort of 4 wheel drive capabilities, and drive said bus through rivers and over “roads” until we got to our first campsite in Landmannalaugur. The week prior I’d spent time watching YouTube videos trying to figure out how to use the Sony NEX 3N camera my brother loaned me for the trip (I still haven’t figured out how to use it). I shot as many photos as I could in between storms and came home with about 1700 images. The law of averages dictates that whether I knew what the fuck I was doing or not, I’d have to get at least a few good shots. I came back with more than a few. What made my keeper list even more miraculous is that I couldn’t see what I was shooting because either the rain or extremely bright sun made it impossible to see what was on the rear display. I was literally shooting blind. I started sharing my photos on Instagram and with friends and was encouraged to start selling prints. It seemed like more effort than it was worth. .
My most recent trip was this past August, 2017, I decided to try a solo trip through the San Juan Mountains in southern Colorado. The weather was gorgeous for the entire trip, save the afternoon rain/hail storms that came and went within an hour. I shot about 450 photos in 5 days and the results were pretty good. The lack of apocalyptic skies made for less dramatic photos, but the Cumulus clouds against bluebird skies created their own sense of drama. A sharper and wider lens improved the image quality enough that selling my photos seemed like a real possibility. It was an odd feeling to rely only on myself for every decision between Silverton and Durango. I woke up when I wanted to, hiked for as long as I wanted to, and crashed for the night when I wanted to. I had a friend who once told me that inside my head was the worst neighborhood on the planet and at the time, he was correct. It's an odd thing to spend every waking hour of the day in relative silence. There was no TV, none of the white noise of daily life, and non of the monitor alarms, call bells, and screaming patients that serve as a distraction to me. There were times when I was absolutely miserable, running out of water with the temperature in the 90's and 8 miles to my next water source or getting pounded with hail crossing an exposed ridge. there were also sublime mornings bathed in slanted yellow light crossing the Sliderock Talus Field and technicolor sunsets that looked, as the writer Roberto Bolano so beautifully wrote, "like a carnivorous flower". Though the surroundings were gorgeous, Colorado was as much about the internal as the external. I spent a considerable amount of time thinking about the work I do, about it's effects on me, and how the triumphs and heartbreaks of that job have forged a formidable family. I also spent a considerable amount of time thinking about how the job has finally started taking more than it gives and that my heart belongs in the mountains.
There are a ton of amazing photographers with expensive gear, incredible images, and fancy websites. I had to ask myself what I brought to this world that many of them didn’t and the only thing I could come up with is that I travel to places THE AVERAGE PERSON DOESN’T. I’m not saying I’m some crazy adventurer (I'd rather suffer an endless dentist's drill than try mountaineering), I just walk a little bit deeper into the wild. So that’s the long ass story. I’m sure the “About” section of a site is supposed to be concise but that’s something I’ve never been. I’ve also noticed that most photographers behave more professionally than I do and don’t prominently feature the word ‘fuck’ every 20 words. Oh well.
Todd 3/7/2018
“Out of suffering have emerged the strongest souls/
The most massive characters are seared with scars.”