Isn't that the truth Ray. They also serve great lunches with choices on their many breads. We always stock up with their breads and pastries to take home, that is if we are heading that way. Actually we do, even if we aren't... :)
I mentioned your Rowell gallery pictures to my wife and she mentioned they had been recently killed in an accident. Sure enough, a few years ago. I googled them and came up with this National Geographic article..
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news.nationalgeographic.com
Front Page > History & Culture
A Photographer Remembers Galen and Barbara Rowell
Gordon Wiltsie
for National Geographic News
August 14, 2002
I probably wouldn't be a freelance photographer for National Geographic magazine if it weren't for the master of adventure imagery, Galen Rowell. Without his inspiration, chances are that I would never have traveled the world, climbed distant mountains or explored vast wilderness tracts in the Himalaya, the Arctic, and Antarctica.
As a consequence, it came as a thunderous blow when I learned this Sunday that he and his wife Barbara were killed in a tragic small plane crash just shy of an airstrip near my birthplace of Bishop, California. After surviving countless mountain epics and exploits—all of which he immortalized on film—my mentor, and a hero to legions of people who loved his photography, was suddenly gone.
I first met Galen in 1969 when I was still a senior in high school, just learning to rock climb. A friend, a mountaineer who knew Galen, had taken me out to a small crag just next to U.S. Highway 395, north of Bishop.
I was pretty scared, not just of the climb, but also of the landowner, a former assistant scoutmaster of mine who had developed a reputation as a gun-toting maniac when it came to chasing climbers off his land. But instead of the landowner, some other crazy guy showed up, squealing to a stop in his venerable white Chevy station wagon.
I didn't know it at the time, but the driver—Galen, a hot-rodding car mechanic—was already famous for scaring his passengers half to death by whizzing 80 miles per hour down country roads with one eye on the pavement (hopefully!) and the other constantly roving for wildlife, magical light, or anything else photogenic.
Whenever he saw something interesting, he'd slam to a panicked, pre-seat-belt-era stop. This time he leaped out waving a Nikon and, before I knew it, I had a new friend.
I'd already read about Galen's famous climbs and seen dozens of pictures he had taken for the most popular mountaineering journals. I couldn't believe that someone of his fame and wizened old age (he was 29) would even stoop to talk to a kid as lowly as me—a mere high school yearbook shutterbug.
I was even more astonished in later years as he invited me to climb with him, taught me photography tricks, hired me to change his film, and helped me to get my work published. But that was just who Galen was.
Even as his fame grew over the next three decades, he never tired of sharing his knowledge and electrifying people with the wonders not just of photography, but more importantly the magnificent landscapes and cultures he captured on celluloid.
Career at National Geographic
I heard that Galen shot his first pictures with a Kodak "Instamatic." What made his work unique was the he was also one of the best rock climbers and mountaineers in North America. He pointed, clicked, and came back with images that were so stunning that in 1972, National Geographic's legendary Director of Photography, Robert Gilka, hired him to photograph a groundbreaking ascent up the huge, dead-vertical north face of Yosemite's famous Half Dome monolith.
Galen returned with pictures that were so astonishing that the editors put one on the magazine's cover. Later, he photographed nine other features for the magazine—ranging from the Sierra Nevadas to Alaska to the wildest corners of China. His career wielding a torque wrench was finished.
Over the ensuing decades, Galen went on to publish numerous books, many of which will long be regarded as the standard-bearers of their genre: Throne Room of the Mountain Gods, a revealing, soul-searching account of an unsuccessful American expedition to K2; Mountain Light, a bible of his photographic vision; My Tibet, a magnificent portrait of this vanishing culture, co-written with the Dalai Lama, Poles Apart, about the lonely polar regions; and many others.
Galen was a popular lecturer and every year counseled hundreds of budding photographers in personalized photography seminars, including one in Alaska he had just completed with fellow National Geographic photographer Frans Lanting when he and Barbara were killed in the plane crash.
My biggest memory of Galen was his personal power. It exuded from everything he did, wrote, or spoke—every image he photographed.
I guess it started with just being darned tough. He always leaped out of his sleeping bag before the morning star had risen and could lope up a 20,000-foot mountain like the stairs to his den.
For years he lived on top of the Berkeley Hills in California, and many days would run from bottom to top. My own fuel-efficient automobile could barely make it without stalling.
Barbara Was Vital to Galen's Success
Nevertheless, Galen did have a mischievous and humble streak and might have stumbled in the race towards success in a very competitive world if he had not teamed up with Barbara Cushman more than 20 years ago.
Barbara had worked as marketing director for The North Face, one of the world's leading outdoor equipment and clothing manufacturers. After she married Galen, she devoted her tireless energy to building a business they would call Mountain Light. In her own way, she was Galen's equal and she was vital in his later successes in publishing, lecturing, exhibits, and other endeavors that helped to establish him as arguably the most famous outdoor photographer since Ansel Adams.
Barbara had a mind of her own. On one assignment, the editors at National Geographic said that they liked some of her pictures of Islamic women better than the ones Galen had taken!
Barbara was also flamboyant. At various times she drove a pink Porsche, rode well-bred horses, and became a master pilot, flying a small plane from California to the tip of South America—a journey about which she had written a book due to be published next fall. She was not, however, at the controls of the chartered plane that inexplicably crashed so short of the runway in the place that Galen, Barbara, and I all loved so much.
I can only imagine the thoughts and joy that Galen and Barbara were feeling as they descended back into the Owens Valley, headed for their favorite home. What a tragedy that they will reach it only in spirit.
After a career of superlatives, Galen's last big assignment was for National Geographic magazine, documenting a grueling overland journey through western Tibet in search of the calving grounds for the rare chiru antelope.
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I especially like this quote. I only wish I could be remembered as such in my own way..:)
""My biggest memory of Galen was his personal power. It exuded from everything he did, wrote, or spoke—every image he photographed.""
What a life..
HERE'S TO THE ROWELLS
c
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