Wayback
We were hiking a trail in the Lamar Valley in north-west Yellowstone National Park: it’s a wide alluvial valley with lots of grassland, which was giving me serious hay fever. Lamar Valley is also habitat for a number of Yellowstone’s biggest animals, which is why we hiked there.
We were following two hikers, Terry spotted a bear ahead, we froze to see what would happen as the bear had already spotted us. I suppose it knew the route hikers would usually follow. The hikers up ahead carried on, I’m not sure they had yet spotted the bear. The hump on its shoulders characterised it as an adult grizzly, so maximum caution. Of course we didn’t have the binoculars with us as we were hiking light, but I did have my telephoto lens which I swapped on to the camera as quickly as I could.
More photos: Grizzly bear encounter - Yellowstone National Park - June 2000
Pavement coffee at Fulham Broadway. Bit of a reminder of my stay in nearby Farm Lane care home following a collision in the North Pennines, that’s now ten years ago. No wheelchair and sling for me today. Rehab rides out in the wheelchair with friends were a big treat that hot summer as I was relearning how to walk. It took surgery to get my upper arm back in one piece then gym to get my strength back. My faithful CBR600FW never came back; those tasty white Dainese leathers saved me but were trashed on their first ride.
A happy holiday to Provence with Paul W on his GSR750ES, new that year. I was riding my XJ900, which had been to the Nürburgring and crossed the watershed to the Danube the previous summer, 1984.
We stayed our first night in a one-star hotel in Chartres. Next night and a massive 900 km later, we pitched my tent under the cork trees in a camping à la ferme in Grimaud for our first week in the South. Our days out included Port Grimaud and of course Saint Tropez and the beaches.
More photos: St. Tropez and the Grand Canyon of the Verdon - Sep 1985
Enjoying Glastonbury 2022 from the comfort of a home cinema reminded me of the years we enjoyed Reading Rocks. These few photos and fuzzy memories are all that remain. It looks far smaller in scale and so much more relaxed than the big festivals we see on the TV these days. The music reached everywhere on the site but on the stage was “over there”, some way away from our spot on the grass field. Although there was an Eidophor, the big television screen which showed close-ups of the musicians in black and white, but the picture was dim and hardly worth it, even after dark. I recall we laid back and enjoyed the sunset and the moon amongst the smells of cooking on camping stoves and the burger bars at the edge of the field.
Read more: Reading Rocks ’79 - Little John’s Farm, Reading - August 1979
New scans from my negatives of our hike around the Cornwall Coast Path from St. Ives to Penzance over the August Bank Holiday in 1995.
