http://photography.nationalgeographic.com/photography/photo-of-the-day/grand-canyon-dawn-light/

Light danced on the side of the canyon. Ilasos stood at the edge of the massive ravine and watched. No shadows moved across the firelight projected onto the striated rock. He heard nothing from the protected shelter below, though he wondered if he was too far away for that to mean anything. By all accounts, it was a natural fire started by a lightning strike from last night’s storm. Except it was lit in a huge nook of a large canyon where, Ilasos presumed, no dead foliage sat around waiting to catch a spark.

It was a campfire. Someone had lit it.

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http://photography.nationalgeographic.com/photography/photo-of-the-day/polar-bear-prey-kaktovik/

Cold wind buffeted the seabird’s wings as it moved ever northward. A few hours ago, it had left the last remnant of solid ground. Far below, drifts of ice bobbed in the dark blue chop. Occasionally, a small piece of white was framed by a large, amorphous shadow just below the surface. The icebergs were intriguing, but they were the domain of other Antarctic agents. His mission lay on the ice floes, just visible on the north horizon.

As he drew close to the nearest piece of wide, flat ice, he began his reconnaissance. He flew long arcs about three miles out, eyes cast down, looking for moving subsurface shadows or the telltale blowhole bursts of waterborne patrols. For half an hour, he circled, high as he dared go, but there was no sign of orcas. With the water deemed safe, he began his descent.

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http://photography.nationalgeographic.com/photography/photo-of-the-day/mangrove-roots-reserve-ecuador/

Clouds rolled across the massive swamp in the night. Dawn came with weak, grey light that did little enough to illuminate the mangrove trunks. Below their spindly roots, interwoven with complexity unseen anywhere else in the world, light could not reach the ground. And in the tangled mess, a shadow moved through the darkness, slow and plodding, slithering between gaps in the wooden prison.

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http://photography.nationalgeographic.com/photography/photo-of-the-day/unterthiner-chamois-gran-paradiso/

The goat had not moved for hours. He stood right at the edge of the rocky outcrop halfway up the mountain. Wind buffeted him in venturing gusts, but his stocky build hardly wavered under the assault. So near the edge and certain doom, he showed no fear. How he’d managed to hold a frown the entire time was well beyond Cary’s reckoning.

She had spent the morning climbing the mountain. Before that, she’d spent two days getting from the nearest airport to this peak in the middle of nowhere. The year before that she’d been consumed in grueling research, following hikers’ half-formed memories, vague hints from drunk shepherds and poorly translated clues from local folklore. In a few minutes, it will have all proven worth it.

If she could just get past this damn goat.

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http://photography.nationalgeographic.com/photography/photo-of-the-day/greenland-ice-phenomena-fredericks/

Journal Entry for March 2^nd
On the Halo

It’s still up there. And we still don’t know what it is, or where it came from, or what it means. It hasn’t grown, which I guess is good, but there’s no sign that it will go away either.

The theories people are putting out on the news are getting more ridiculous by the day. Most of it is still grounded in rudimentary, if scientifically dubious, astronomy and meteorology. No one has crossed the threshold into aliens yet, but I’m sure it’s only a matter of time.

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http://photography.nationalgeographic.com/photography/photo-of-the-day/plitvice-lakes-autumn-croatia/

Six weeks. Four limited-AI drones, five camp sites, and two close calls with local megafauna. The bear-like thing with the projectile claws had been easy enough to dispatch. The giant worm had not been, and they’d lost a drone and almost a hundred pounds of food in their escape. That aside, the reviews were coming in and they were glowing.

The beauty of a garden planet where it was always autumn was as breathtaking as they’d anticipated. Polychromatic trees filled every inch of landscape. The whole world bloomed in rich earth tones – browns and tans swirled with orange and yellow and a dozen shades of red. Rivers meandered through forests that the most idealistic, fantastical landscape artists on Earth wouldn’t dream of painting.

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http://photography.nationalgeographic.com/photography/photo-of-the-day/pronking-springbok-karoo-africa/

The springbok herd had vacated the plateau shortly after dawn. A ripple of concern had coursed through them, something intangible that each felt but hardly understood. So they had abandoned the tall grass of the height for the tall grass of valley below. It was from this vantage that they watched one of their number fly.

From the edge of the herd, a young male lifted into the air while casually grazing. Confused, he leaned his neck as low as it would go, took a bite at the grass and missed.

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http://photography.nationalgeographic.com/photography/photo-of-the-day/macaskill-mountain-biking-scotland/

He stood on the peak and felt the rising sun warm his left cheek. Stretched out over the surface of the world, from horizon to horizon, a glorious sunrise bathed the waking mountains. The pre-dawn ascent had been exhilarating and difficult. Yet it was only a minor preamble to the purpose of the trip. Angled down before him was the task that called to him.

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http://photography.nationalgeographic.com/photography/photo-of-the-day/beaver-winter-frozen-montana/

The river was a slushy mess for ten minutes before he came across the beaver. Water trickled in some parts, stood frozen stiff in others. It had been three hours since he’d seen or heard another living creature. In the forest in the middle of the winter, it wasn’t unusual to go alone for some time. Three hours was longer than he’d expected, and under other circumstances he may not have felt so ill at ease. Alas, these were not other circumstances.

Carefully, the tracker made his way to the water’s edge. He gave the living statue a quick once-over, and nothing seemed untoward. Outside of the poor guy’s frozen state.

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http://photography.nationalgeographic.com/photography/photo-of-the-day/berlin-architecture-reichstag-ludwig/

Two orange cones dropped onto the street. With one last cough, the engine cut out, and the van fell quiet at the curb. Two workers, civil servants in yellow overalls, swung open the back doors of the maintenance van. One grabbed a digital clipboard from a slot on the van wall. The other began to strap on a clunky power wash backpack.

“It’s not too big, I hope?”

“It is not.” The clipboard loaded a fresh checklist, and the man ran his eyes over it despite already knowing just what they would need.

“Because last time it was half a church,” the guy putting on the backpack said. “Getting the juice everywhere took absolutely forever.”

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