A small Coyote crossed the road, Canadian Geese, Work from home / Work from the road. Van life travel, Dirtbag travel, Overland travel, Wilderness backpacking
Billy Newman Photo Podcast | 167 Coyote Sighting
If you’re looking to discuss photography assignment work, or a podcast interview, please drop me an email. Drop Billy Newman an email here.
If you want to book a wedding photography package, or a family portrait session, please visit GoldenHourWedding.com or you can email the Golden Hour Wedding booking manager here.
If you want to look at my photography, my current portfolio is here.
If you want to purchase stock images by Billy Newman, my current Stock photo library is here.
If you want to learn more about the work Billy is doing as an Oregon outdoor travel guide, you can find resources on GoldenHourExperience.com.
If you want to listen to the Archeoastronomy research podcast created by Billy Newman, you can listen to the Night Sky Podcast here.
If you want to read a free PDF eBook written by Billy Newman about film photography: you can download Working With Film here. Yours free.
Want to hear from me more often?Subscribe to the Billy Newman Photo Podcast on Apple Podcasts here.
If you get value out of the photography content I produce, consider making a sustaining value for value financial contribution, Visit the Support Page here.
You can find my latest photo books all on Amazon here.
167 Billy Newman Photo podcast mix down Coyote Sighting
Hello, and thank you very much for listening to this level of the Billy Newman photo podcast. I appreciate you guys checking this episode out. Out here at the wildlife refuge, I’m recording some stuff out here. I’ve been trying to do some 50 is a video and some photos stuff while I’m out here and what’s remarkable is the Canadian geese have started to make their migration down to the area. So this region that has wetlands over here, I guess why the land made it into a wildlife refuge, has elk in it like a herd of elk that come through and winter in this area. And then it also has like a ton of wetland out here where a bunch of geese and eat grits and different birds come through.
There’s like a bunch of hawks is out in this field. There’s are Eagles like bald eagles that come through and a pretty high number, I think a little later in the year or kind of like in like January, February, and March is when I see him out here like done in those fields. I think I’ve maybe talked about it last year when these this field you know you see like six or seven bald eagles floating out in the little trees out by the creekside.
Then they would come out flying around to be competitive with each other, making loops around each other to try and get a carry-in that don’t know been left out in the field somewhere. So it’s weird to see how these birds kind of act and how they operate and stuff, but that’s cool about coming down to this Wildlife Refuge areas. It’s not too far from the downtown area where I’m living in just a couple of minutes outside; you can hop over and check out some wildlife stuff. I haven’t seen any elk out yet today. I have recently, but I thought that I see you out here when I was driving around and have been able to spot any.
I bet it kind of other things if you’re out here for the entire day like either you know dawn till dusk you probably come across more than if you’re driving through in the afternoon. It’s cool. Yeah, there are many noisy birds out there, many noisy geese and stuff that I hear out on the wetland and stuff, but it was cool earlier I was driving, and I saw a coyote. It wasn’t a huge one. He was maybe 30 pounds or so, maybe 2030 pounds, but he seemed like a mean it was in there but still seemed like a pretty small critter. This guy is fun, though. Has winter coat perked up, and yeah was a coyote ran across the street kind of right out in front of me about 5060 feet or so. And then posted up about 15 feet off into the brush and the forest on the side and then pointed his ears up and then looked over at me; it was tried to scope you out.
So I threw a couple of coyote winnings, Adam trying to sound like a coyote Adam, and then he looked inquisitively at me like what is going on? I’m supposed to talk to this guy. And so then he started trotting off and then I who did add him again, and then he turned around looked at me, and then he was like I had enough of this guy, and then he started to take off but yeah, so Cody I hear hanging out is going about his coyote business this afternoon. But it’s cool getting to come out and check out the stuff of the wildlife refuge. So I don’t know, maybe you’ll see some other cool stuff out there.
But it’s cool coming out here to check out the Canadian geese and their migration down and see how the different birds and stuff come through and how they use this landscape throughout the other parts of the year. There are some hunting opportunities out here like I was reading a sign that said, like, there are a couple of elk tags available to manage this Wildlife Refuge area and its region. I think there’s like five or ten tags a year or something to hunters who want to hunt on this land. And then I think there’s like some other kind of discreet bird hunting opportunities that happen out here too, which is kind of interesting.
I just bought a recreation pass the other day. I don’t know if you guys know what that is like. Like a US Fish and Wildlife for US Forest Service recreation passes that I bought, I don’t know. I think it was 30 bucks. So it’s looking around. I go now. This is the one I needed to get. I’m not sure maybe I’ll focus on getting my fishing and hunting license next time. I think they’ll probably give me more opportunities, you know, but that’s what I was trying to kind of figure out what I was looking at, like what is this give me access to? I thought it would provide me with access to more of the like, and I don’t know that the Forest Service campground locations in Oregon and Washington try and make you pay someday use fee as a nominal three or $5 fee.
So I was trying to get the fee for the year to giving me coverage for it. At least to like a couple of these little fishing spots that I go to that have like a pull-out in the bank. I think they asked you to pay to park when you’re there, but I hope in that yellow the recreation pastor covers me for some of the same of the droppings that I was going to plan on doing in those locations. It’s cool though it lasts, I guess, the entire year. Does that make sense? Yeah, I think it would expire instead of my fishing license if I bought one today.
December 31. And then I’d have to get a new one on January 1, but with this one, yeah, but this recreation pass in December, I guess, because it’ll expire still on December 31, 2021. So at the end of next year, it’ll, it’ll wrap up, but I guess it’ll give me, you know, access to get on to a couple of the Forest Service properties that they do charge day-use fees. I think the state agencies manage a lot of the day-use costs that I do often run into. So I guess it’s like a state parks kind of thing, that I think you can also get, get a parking pass to forget a permit for some of those beach access spots along the coast, that they that I believe they are out there, but that I don’t think that this one covers any of that stuff.
So I don’t know, I might, I might have just given the Forest Service Department 30 bucks for just about no reason. So we’ll see if it ever comes into being anything cool for me; for the year that I was looking at this article, that kind of popped up, and it sort of had been relative to some stuff that I had done. So I was going to mention it. But it was talking about how everything now after the COVID-19 pandemic has thrown everything upside down; there’s a lot of work from home stuff. And then there’s also like a lot of displacement and things out of the cities and stuff.
So that I heard about, and so they have guessed I’ve done before, is, I think there’s a resurgence. And or at least there’s been an uptick, I think, you know, for the last 15 years of people trying to do Nomad work, or you know, trying to do work from home, but now it’s work from your car work from anywhere that you are stuff. And that’s what’s kind of cool about having internet, anywhere connection that you’d have with your cell phone, you know, with some of the data connectivity that you get to have now you get to be within 15, you know, 12 hours or I guess you could say 24 hours at any time of having a data connection where you can get internet access, or get a relationship out to other people and stuff if you need to for I guess work-related services, we’re just kind of the benefit there.
Suppose you’re not doing some manual labor, labor work that sort of like a service work like that we like doing something out in the woods, we can be outside and be away from stuff if you want to. So, in that case, I guess it is still kind of report back to the property, and it’s kind of nice that you have those options now to be anywhere you want to. So I guess some people are taking these work-from-home opportunities and then getting in their car, rig it up, and then taking off and kind of hide now in some of the more dispersed regions that we have right here. So I think there’s some of that stuff where you could still do well, there’s a lot of travels that you get to do right now outside what’s deemed essential even during like periods of lockdown, you can still do some interstates travel, and especially if you’re not going into other towns or a lot other like municipal services, or you’re not going into different stores and stuff when you get there using hotels, or I think like there’s like restrictions on certain types of tourism.
But there are not yet restrictions on certain types of outdoor recreation activities or outdoor management activities. Like I think if you’re doing hunting trips or stuff, it’s still the same but what I’ve been hearing is, Yeah, that now people are sort of free from some responsibilities of being tied down to an office job in an urban city center system, they’ve taken up making some van life trips, or some road trips or some work as a nomad trips, which I’ve always thought was kind of cool, that’s sort of what I was interested in the way back when I was trying to get set up to do some extended travel through 2011 and 2012. I’ve wanted to do some nice stuff, continuing from them. Since then, it’s only been like, and I don’t know, four or five-day trips or maybe a 10-day trip or something like that. I try and come back and then sort of reset and reset the gear and the equipment I have and then go back out again for some other stuff. Or go back to work or whatever it is, so that’s the way that’s what happened the last couple of years.
Still, it was fantastic, I guess, getting to do that during that period because I had a similar opportunity to keep my money going and submit my work for some time while I was out traveling around on the road. I had heard about this, I think, from someone that had selected to take only online classes. At the same time, I was back in college, someone it’s likely to take only online courses for a term. So then they guess I decided to live in their car and go rock climbing, you know, at a couple of different spots in Oregon and Arizona and New Mexico or something like that. So they just went out some rock climbing trip, and then they’d stop in at some little beach town Starbucks and drop off their term papers through the year.
I’m sure they didn’t do great in school. But it also seemed like an excellent opportunity. You know, if you wanted to do your spring term, take online classes live in your car, sleeping in your truck your car, and then submitting your online courses from your laptop or over your cell phone as you connect to the internet and then dip out and then go back to your dirtbag lifestyle, doing some rock climbing hiking stuff and some The public land National Forest Service stuff that we’ve got around. So it seemed kind of like a fantastic idea, and I’d heard about it, then that’s one of the things that got me interested in trying to set up my car, and you know, have like a little Camry at the time. So it was like rigged for any overland expeditions.
But I tried to kind of set it up as good as I could to be something that I live out it for a while, or do some extended travel with so that as the first year, we did, you know, I think like 5055 days or something out on the road. And then yeah, I was talking about work-life and working as a nomad traveling around and doing some stuff out of your vehicle; my battery just got wiped out. So then I reset that I’m still hanging out in the same spot recording this podcast, but I don’t know, I guess I’ve got a throne.
I was talking about earlier, the van life stuff and working as a nomad out was talking about being in college, taking online classes, and then going through and living out of your cars you’re doing like rock climbing stuff at different places across national parks on the West Coast seemed like kind of an interesting idea for something in college, that’s where I was trying to go through my Toyota Camry and try and sort of build it out of something where I could go on an extended road trip, and travel around to a lot of different places, like even with the two-wheel-drive sedan access, you have access to so many other natural areas out in the West,
it’s shocking, you know, all the other places you can get to I mean, certainly like almost every trailhead system, you can get to, you know, anything that doesn’t like a high clearance four by four style drive for road, I mean, you can take any car out there. And even as it is, I mean, even like the slightly better car you know, like all-wheel vehicle cars, like, like a Subaru Outback or something I’ve seen those go out over pretty wild and see what seemed like very rough roads,
I don’t know. I would probably try to avoid that kind of heavy roads and stuff if I were in, you know, such a small car like that even like Toyota four runner or something like just like a pretty street-ready four by four vehicle even though you know it’s a foreigner it’s set up for that like if it’s not really kind of specially equipped for that kind of travel some of these roads that have been an unseen way out of control for that. Still, the Camry did a great job of getting me through almost every place that I was in a lot of the time that man,
but I remember being frustrated. And I’m thrilled now to have the kind of high clearance that I have in the truck, and probably why I’d never go back is I remember being out in a place the sailing stones it’s out in Death Valley cool kind of area to get to go out to I’ve seen plenty of pictures of it, I was driving on my way out there in the Camry taking a time in the road got rough enough it just this type of grade where it was sloped and rounded off as it lifted, I don’t know maybe five or six feet, but the angle of lift that it was in the road was sharp enough that I couldn’t get the Camry over it without high centering the vehicle on that slope as it rounded off frustrated by how that worked.
If I just had a little more clearance, I could have hopped over that with no problem trucks and stuff. They move over that without ever even thinking about that as an issue. But I’m sure smaller sedans have kind of clipped their differentials and things on that kind of high center points a bunch of different times in the past, and so it was weird. But, yeah, I was there. I was looking at what I was as I was assessing it in the car. I was thinking, man, and there’s no way or angle, I can get this car kind of creep around the side of this, this piece here to get over it so that I can get to the other side, and we were so far out, you know, it just would have been terrible to puncture something or mess up on the car. So we didn’t get to go. It was terrible.
But as we were out there, we saw a family of like five quads that came through in a bit of a group. They just hopped over and zoomed right past us without every kind of thought of it as a problem. That would be sort of a trip, Ender if you’re going out there, so it was cool to use the camera to use kind of a smaller car like that. It’s also the same as people using a van or something like that. Vans aren’t like to set up to do four-wheel drive off-road kind of carry stuff. Still, they are great at getting you set up in a parking lot of a state service area that or, you know, a natural trailhead area that you can go out to, and you can have your gear pretty well securely set up inside you can sleep inside when you want to.
And for the people doing like the van life sort of dirtbag style stuff, I think dirtbag comes from a kind of colloquial term of the bag of chalk that rock climbers would carry if that sort of makes sense. I remember that as being one of the expressions of is someone that was rock climbing that would go to different sport climbing sites and set up the gear and the ropes and then do climbs that you know Smith rock or Yosemite or wherever other places and in California where that’s come into the swing. Still, it’s cool that that’s an avenue out there and stuff, but yeah, I’ve preferred the track and the canopy system and things for a while. I appreciate it and like the foreigner for a time, but I understand having the, I guess, a bit more full size. Have a track that’s still compact enough that you can kind of get over stuff and get in and out of tight spots pretty quickly. So it’s cool, and I don’t tow a lot of things or, or move a lot of other stuff around when I was doing some work before with a bunch of recreational vehicles; I remember part of the task was to do some photos and video projects with some motorhomes and like fifth wheels and trucks and trailers. And those are tricky because this started to find out like when they wanted to do, they tried to do some marketing stuff around that, and like a ski resort, so we had to go out and do some snow photos around the ski resort. ]
And I remember the drivers kind of look at me like you know, none of these vehicles are really designed to be off-road or not even off-road but just like out in any form of snow or slickness or slash at all like it’s set up to be a dry whether you’re driving the vehicle I want to attempt I don’t know what people in the Midwest or northeast would say about that they have RVs and physicals but also have to deal with sort of the inclement weather of winter, a lot of the time. So I wonder if the winterizing of that kind of thing is a little different.
And I figured, as I’ve always heard from people, you know, they drive their two-wheel-drive cars around and six inches of fresh snow all the time, or Pac snow or whatever it is, but they seem to still travel around through the winter, way more than I’d ever feel comfortable doing. But yeah, this driver that I was with, he was like I was maybe an inch or so the snow on a paved road, I was going out to a bit of turnaround spot on a forest road. And in the summer, it’d be nothing, you know, be kind of packed with people going swimming and stuff.
But in the winter, yeah, it was a snow-covered road. And that driver did not want to be on there with any trailer or truck or anything, you know, even with like a powerful truck, or whatever it is, it’s just kind of like a weird kind of tricky thing, it’s cumbersome stuff moving on the ice, it’s just never really as secure as good of ideas as what I’d want to try and commit to doing. So that’s kind of why like, I’m not that into trying to carry or trying to try to tow any big stuff. I think it’d be cool, though. I guess I got like a couple of my friends, and property and sort of when I was doing the raft guide stuff when I was doing the photography work for them a lot of their transport equipment were you know, vans with trailers that would carry their river equipment down to the river and back.
So I could probably understand doing something more like that if I was carrying a boat, there’s like a smoke craft boat that I want to take out to this lake nearby. And I think that’d be pretty cool. It’s pretty cool like, I think, three c, but it could probably fit five people in it. Sort of smoked crab fishing boat, though I take out to a lake around here sometimes. And do sufficient in that, you know, require like a trailer, and it would require tone it out there and stuff. And I guess that’s different, it’s still sort of, I think, more local travel, you know, you’re not trying to do like a van life road trip expedition that some people in these fifth wheels that are doing long term and I think a lot of the time, you know, fifth wheels, campers, and stuff, they’re doing it I guess it would be an RV park-style trip, which is the opposite of some of the stuff that I’ve been trying to do where I’m trying to stay more strictly in the BLM or National Forest Service land where you can camp for free, or you can camp in a more dispersed way.
And you can also kind of do some more of the wilderness experience stuff that I’m talking about and primarily more interested in. But there is a lot of road-accessible things, even the spot that I’m at right now. Um, you know, it’s I’m right on the road, I’m at my truck right now. And I’m looking out at a pond directly in front of me, that’s, that’s filled up with Canadian geese and goose and stuff. So it’s cool just to kind of hop over and gets access to this kind of stuff without having to travel too far from your car. But that’s still a far cry different from the wilderness experience you get from an RV park that’s more, and I don’t know, urbanized civilize something like that. It’s, it’s a pretty tight kind of compact area where you lined up in there. And if you have, if you have a good opportunity, or you know, good locations that you’re set up with the with a vehicle like a fifth wheel,
I think it’s kind of cool. But man, there’s just been so many times where I’ve been with people, even with pretty small like 19-foot trailers. You can’t get them backed up or turned around in the same kind of flexible way that you can, with a pickup truck or, or, you know, an all-terrain SUV or something like that, you can just kind of spin that thing around on a tighter Forest Service gravel road and then head back the other direction. But if you’re going up there with the truck and trailer, you have to have an entire turnaround system set up before you’re kind of confident of getting back in there. And then if you come up across, like a washout, or you know, some drainage problem in the road, or just a big ditch or bump or something like that, you got to worry about kind of several things that just sort of make, you know, make travel around with the trailer and that way a bit more tricky. But people have gotten used to it and have a lot of skill with it.
And I bet if you’re driving around a tractor-trailer and stuff, then you probably know what risks you’re you’re into or are not willing to take when you’re doing it that it’s kind of cool. Yeah, the van life stuff. I was thinking about the travels that I had done before. Some backpacking stuff They’ve added into that where it was a mix between backpacking wilderness travel that I would do every couple days but then also a lot of car camping travel, and then also a little of an edge of, of like going into an urban area and either get a hotel or sleeping in the car in the middle class, suburban neighborhood. That was a lot of it too. Yeah, Van life. It’s pretty fun. Yeah. So I prefer to stay out in the world wilderness area instead of roaming around in a sort of suburban neighborhood and try and sleep in the trunk of my car; it seems like kind of a weird life to do that sort of thing.
So I like heading out into Eastern Oregon and taken off and doing some wilderness Stuff and Being in the mountains and making a fire and all that stuff, trying to hide out and keep in the back of my car and then leave early in the morning before too many people notice that been there. So that was always kind of a stranger, a stranger part of the traveling camping wilderness experience when you’re just traveling around. You know, sleeping in your car and then heading off to the next place the next day or something you remember, kept pulling into some weird town outside of Yosemite after we’d been there.
And then just sleeping in my car down at the bottom of the hill from Yosemite, not in Fresno, thank god, and then hitting the highway, and that hadn’t happened. And then coming over toward Nevada, I think from there as well, we went, but I remember as a couple of those days, we strange we just in some little old gold miner town, setting up a sleeping bag in the back of your car to just kind of wink if you went over to a shopping Mart or some grocery store to pick up, whatever, put it in the Jetboil and eat it and stuff. So yeah, I mean, we’re times out there on the road.
But I want to get into that and do a breakdown of a couple of those chips and sort of some of the traveling stuff they did week to week over there. And then some of the photo stuff that I did along with is fun. But yeah, it’s pretty cool. Getting to talk about some of that getting to see that coyote was pretty cool. Get to talk about some Nomad how to live as nomad stuff is pretty cool. So I’ll probably get into that more to some books and the resources and stuff that I tried to get into on-site when I was trying to figure out the best options for me to get out and do some outdoor travel stuff. And it’s tough, you know, you want to be sort of you’re interested in like, oh, like camping or something or survival or photography, whatever it is, and then kind of like blending those to feel you know, like, okay, so when you in a rush to get out into the wilderness, or when you kind of like coming back to just doing like a lighter in town, kind of camp out things.
It’s kind of interesting like I traveled around like that as you go back and forth from needing a computer and power and an internet connection to also trying to get 15 miles deep into a wilderness area where you can set up a camera and do some wildlife photography, or some nature photography or some landscape photography. And then repeat that we come back to a car where you have more services and data connectivity, and then you need to travel a long way. And then also again, repeat the same process, and that Nomad style of you know, using the internet or getting your business done. And trying to be in contact with people to make some stuff happen is always kind of strange to do that, that number of different things and stuff.
But also that’s sort of what the skill is of going out and doing, you know, multiple days or multiple stretches of trips to do some photo stuff or send out to travel things or whatever it might be, but it was kind of cool. So if you want to, you can check out my website, Billy Newman photo comm; you can go to Billy Newman photo comm forward-slash support. To help out this podcast, it’s a value for value model were, where if you’re interested in what you’ve heard, or you think you’ve received some value out of listening to some ideas or topics that I talked about, feel free to help me out and send me some money or something equivalent to the value that you feel like you got out of the podcast itself.
You can check out PayPal links at Billy Newman photo comm forward-slash support. You can also use Patreon if you’re more interested in the format of that system. I know some people already have their Patreon systems, or you know Patreon payment system set up. So if you’re more comfortable with that patreon.com, forward slash Billy Newman photo. What else is going on? I think I got a couple of other things working out. I’m trying to get the night sky podcast set up with a bunch of information about some of the upcoming conjunction to Saturn and Jupiter. That’s going to be pretty cool on the 21st. So I’m trying to put out a podcast about that right away and then trying to get a bunch of podcasts up for the rest of the year. So that there’s some information about some changes going on, the sky also attempted to do a podcast about some music stuff.
I think that’d be kind of cool. Hey, the geese just took off. They just kind of life did a couple of 100 of them. See if they take off over me? Let’s say they turn in this way; I’m not sure if the mic will pick it up very well. But I tried to do a music podcast should be kind of cool working with Spotify Premium to put out a playlist of songs that they have in their catalog and then bolster that up against some sections of me talking and reviewing some information about that album but trying to go through some of my favorite albums over of time, you know, the music that’s available and stuff. So trying to go through many albums, give a couple of notes, and put that out as a show on Spotify.
Now that you can do that sort of stuff, cool. So you can check out the music listening sessions with Billy Newman on Spotify, but I think that should be everything. If you want to see more stuff, go to Billy Newman’s photo calm, and I think that should be a wrap until next week’s podcast. Appreciate guys tuning in. Thanks