August 22: Lots of wonderful and sometimes strange places to visit in Minnesota. This is Jim’s Apple Farm in Jordan, also the largest candy store in the state. We stopped yesterday on the way home from a wedding in Mankato, Minn. No credit cards allowed — cash only. It’s difficult to summarize what you can buy here besides apples and candy, meats, pickled “things,” small brand sodas, fruit preserves, jams and jellies, odd-ball souvenirs, etc. You name it, Jim’s probably got it.
August 18: A change in the weather, photographed through the windshield in central Minnesota the other day.
August 17: Minnesota’s state bird, the loon, photographed yesterday from the deck of the Chester Charles II on Lake Itasca. Highly recommend this cruise — great narration about the passing scene and sights like this you seldom see closeup from the shore.
August 15: Lake Itasca morning.
August 14: Whoa! First impression of Lake Itasca State Park today: major storm damage from earlier this summer. This is an iPhone shot from near Douglas Lodge. The huge ancient fallen tree may predate the birth of my father in 1911.
August 6: Great time last night with Dorette Kerian and her granddaughter, Avery, watching the Saint Paul Saints lose to the Fargo Red Hawks at CHS Field. Old-fashioned minor league professional baseball on steroids. Even a post-game fireworks display. Snapshot taken with a Canon SX710 pocket camera.
August 4: View of Idaho’s Sawtooth Mountain Range northwest of Ketchum, photographed July 31 with a Canon Mark III DSLR and a 24-105mm lens. Smoke from forest fires was often visible but less noticeable by using a circular polarizer filter.
August 3: Photographed with my iPhone, a Hemingway display in Ketchum Idaho’s visitor center.
July 31: The view today near the top of the main mountain at Sun Valley Ski Resort in Ketchum, Idaho. I had thought about retiring from the sport, but this gives me pause.
July 30: Ernest Hemingway’s grave in Ketchum, Idaho, photographed with my iPhone near sundown today. Visitors still leave flowers and mementos (including on this day pebbles, coins, a shot glass and champagne cork). Also buried here are Hemingway’s wife, Mary, and son, Jack. The cemetery was still outside town in 1961. Today, there are more trees than in photos taken at the time of the burial, and the area has become surrounded by commercial development. But aficionados like me still sense Hemingway’s spirit here, just as we do in his books.
Photographer Dave Vorland shares these images taken this past month from near his home in Bloomington, Minn., to Itasca State Park to Ketchum, Idaho, where author Ernest Hemingway is buried.
