Bald Eagles In Dutch Harbor, Alaska

    I spent the first three months of 2013 in Dutch Harbor, Alaska, working for Westward Seafoods. The bald eagles that hung around the compound where I lived were the one bit of wildlife solace that kept me from losing my mind while I was there. Those of you that travel through or live in the downtown area of any city have seen pigeons all over the fucking place, right? The bald eagles of Dutch Harbor fill that role. The fishing and crabbing industry has, in my opinion allowed these flight capable dinosaurs to flourish on an island in the Bering Sea.

A Bald Eagle Calls For Dinner

    In the photo above you can see just how close these bald eagles were to where I lived. For whatever reason, I decided to give up San Diego for Alaska. Honestly, it was because I had taken San Diego for granted. I didn’t know it at the time, but I did. San Diego has the best weather on Earth and that’s why I moved here from Denver back in 2006. I forgot that fact but was reminded about it while I was in Alaska.

Eagles Hanging Out In Dutch Harbor

    Anyway, I got to see more bald eagles in person on my doorstep than most people see in their entire lives. They were everywhere all the time so I took a lot of pictures. They were really close; close enough to make me think that if I tried to pet them they would rake their velociraptor talons across my face and eat my eyeballs for dinner.

Bald Eagle Shit

    shit like a dog or a cat or even other feathered friends. They shit like malicious teenagers that just had their internet privileges taken away. You can see in the photo above that they project their poop like Fox News projects their news.

Popeye, The Bald Eagle

    There was one eagle in particular that I was easily able to pick out from the crowd and that was one that everyone called, Popeye. There is something wrong with his right eye; it’s squinty. Normally, a bald eagle can stare at you with both eyes at the same time, with depth perception that I can only imagine puts ours to shame. The fellow in the photo above, with his defective eye was constantly swinging his head around to see what was going on.

Popeye IS A Dutch Harbor, Alaska Institution

    Despite his defective eye, Popeye the Bald Eagle is a very imposing figure. His talons and beak, especially at close range, look like they could cut through sheet metal. I walked by him hundreds of times while I was there and even fed him a few times.

Alfonso Venegas With A Bald Eagle

    The photo above is just an example of how close we were to these bald eagles. They really were all around the Westward Seafoods compound and were a part of our daily lives.

Westward Seafoods Processing Plant and A Bald Eagle

    By this time I’m sure you’ve noticed that all the photos in this post have the eagles perched in a very human world. That is on purpose because they are, after 3 months, the best photos of the birds I managed to get. I’d never been this close to bald eagles before so having them so close to where I lived was amazing for me. I did some hiking and took some wild shots of these birds but at the end of the day I had no zoomed in shots that could even compare to what I’ve presented here. Every shot in this post was made with an 8mm fisheye lens at a distance of three or so feet. Yeah, the lens my awesome parents gave to me a year and a half ago has become my permanent accessory. Cheers!

Carb Pots At Night In Dutch Harbor Alaska

    Crab is a big part of Westward Seafoods bottom line so crab pots take up a lot of real estate on their Dutch Harbor, Alaska compound. At this point, we all know that I did not have a good experience whilst working for Westward Seafoods and I recommend that you do not work for Westward Seafoods, but up to this point, I haven’t mentioned crabs or what it takes to get them to your plate.

Crab Pots

    The way the pots work is fairly simple and has to do with direction of travel, the same way some carnivorous plants trap insects. Basically, the door swings one way & not the other so after a crab shoves its way into a trap, it can’t shove its way back out.

Westward Seafoods Employee Meals At Their Earliest Stage

    I suspect that Westward Seafoods rents or stores, for a fee the crab pots that crabbers use to catch their prey. In all sincerity I actually think that Westward lets the crabbers use their pots for free in exchange for a guarantee that any crab caught will be sold to Westward Seafoods, no matter what the quality, size species. I was there and personally had to process crab after the season was over so I believe that Westward Seafoods buys crab bought from black market, pirate vessels and lures them into Dutch Harbor by letting them use their crab pots.

The Moon, A Bald Eagle and Crab Pots in Dutch Harbor

    The unfortunate thing is that photography is prohibited inside the building of the Westward Seafoods compound. There are no trade secrets or proprietary equipment that would be revealed but the working conditions of the seafood processors would be. To say the conditions are dangerous is a given be to but to say they actually break the law is something I’m saying, based on my three month stint working there. I got more sleep, more free time, more medical benefits and more pay whilst in the military in the mid 1990’s so that’s my basis for comparison.

Westward Seafoods Crab Pots in Dutch Harbor

    There are two sides to the Westward Seafoods plant. One side processes cod and crab and the other processes pollock into a product called surimi. Surimi is imitation crab meat. It is the hot dog of seafood and I had the displeasure of working on that side of the plant. Let me very be clear about what I say next: The sirimi at Westward Seafoods is poisonous because it is laden with mercury. Not the planet, the heavy metal that’s also known as quicksilver and used in thermometers and barometers. The final stage of surimi processing is to run the pollock meat through a metal detector. Any meat that trips the detector has a level of mercury in it that is illegal to be sold, so it is fed to employees of Westward Seafoods. You heard it here first people. The fish that gets fed to employees is so full of mercury that it cannot legally be sold in the United States of America. The pollock that Westward employees eat has more metal in it than a tooth filling and the baked rexsole, the other fish entree that is served was scooped up off the floor, nothing more than an unwanted byproduct of the processing and producing of surimi. Cheers!

    I was introduced to Daft Punk back in the late 1990s and have been a fan ever since. On May 21, 2013 they will release a new album titled, “Random Access Memories” that I was fortunate enough to be able to listen to, just now. Here is my track by track review of their new disc.

    1. “Give Life Back To Music” (Featuring Nile Rogers)

    This track starts out with a bang of an intro that hooked me in and continued to keep me hooked as the beat slowed down and then picked up again. This is a song about turning music on and giving yourself to the music. It’s a happy song that demonstrates how an evening is always made better with some music.

    2. “The Game Of Love”

    This is a sexy track that has undertones of 1970s porn music and light jazz. It is a song of lament with the singer going on about a person that has broken their heart and chose to walk away instead of stay.

    3. “Giorgio by Moroder” (featuring Giorgio Moroder)

    This track has everything to do with passion. Giorgio introduces the track by telling us how being a musician was what he always wanted to do and the sacrifices he made to pursue that dream. This is an instrumental track after the intro and it is chill most of the time but some areas of the song will make you want to stand up and boogey down.

    4. “Within” (featuring Chilly Gonzales)

    This track is a classical music masterpiece and is the most introspective Daft Punk song I have ever heard. A lone piano begins the journey into this song. Way back in the day, back in the 1980s when I first heard The Beatles and Janice Joplin singing about a love they couldn’t have or uncertainty in their lives it resonated with me because I was a teenager that thought if you were beautiful, rich or a celebrity that everything would fall into place. It was amazing to find out that isn’t true. This song reaffirms that.

    5. “Instant Crush” (featuring Julian Casablancas)

    The title of this track says it all. If we were to pretend for a moment that relationships have a beginning, middle and an end, this song is all about the beginning.

    6. “Lose Yourself to Dance” (featuring Pharrell Williams and Nile Rodgers)

    I like the concept and title of this song but I didn’t like the song itself. With a title like this, I felt like the song should have been more powerful and hard hitting. Listening to this song did not inspire or want me to lose myself to dance.

    7. “Touch” (featuring Paul Williams)

    This song has some great lyrics but for the second song in a row, I was left less than impressed. The rhythm and the music of this track is underwhelming for me and it seems to me that this song and the track that preceded it are one long intro to the eighth track on the album.

    8. “Get Lucky” (featuring Pharrell Williams and Nile Rodgers)

    This is the first single released in support of this album and it is a great, catchy tune with some great lyrics. It’s a song about what a man and a woman have planned with and for each other over the course of a night. They both want the same thing but it’s always uncertain and can be an evening filled with trepidation when getting lucky happens for the first time between two people.

    9. “Beyond”

    This is an instrumental track that leads us into the next; there is nothing special here.

    10. “Motherboard”

    Whilst listening to this track you really get the feeling that something special is about to happen, but it doesn’t. This is a chill track that ends with the naturist sounds of a babbling brook. Nuff said.

    11. “Fragments of Time” (featuring Todd Edwards)

    I could swear that in the beginning of this track I heard a riff from Silly Love Songs by Paul McCartney. I’m probably wrong but either way, the album picks up just a little bit during this song.

    12. “Doin’ It Right” (featuring Panda Bear)

    This is an odd song that has an immovable marching cadence from beginning to end. It does not add or take away any momentum from the album but it does allow the listener time to reflect on the album thus far. It has good lyrics and a slow beat.

    13. “Contact” (featuring DJ Falcon)

    The last song on this album immediately reminded me of “High Roller” by Crystal Method. It has a live band sound to it that launches and descends but never really explodes. It seems to me to be a post modern bit of Daft Punk music; weird for the sake of weird.

    So, in conclusion I would say the first half of the album is much better the last half. Get Lucky should have been the final track of what should have been a 45 minute album. I’m not disappointed but I was underwhelmed, especially as a mad fan of their Alive 2007 album which was a rough and tumble live journey of their best music. They did well by releasing Get Lucky as the teaser trailer for this album as the song did a great job of anchoring the center of the album. I would recommend their album, Discovery as an intro into what Daft Punk is all about. This one, Random Access Memories is a progression of their music and does not in my opinion represent them in and of themselves. This album is great but would have been better had it been half the length it was presented. Cheers!

Rob Hurlbut In The Grand Aleutian Hotel

    As a photographer, I like to stay behind the lens. Self portraits have never been my forte and having another person take my photo is something that just doesn’t happen very often. So, in order to not be selfish, to help this blog become more personal and reflect the real me this is a post that will feature self portraits of me, Rob Hurlbut. The photo above was taken a month ago on my last day in Dutch Harbor, Alaska.

Rob Hurlbut With A Bald Eagle

    I spent the first three months of 2013 in Dutch Harbor, Alaska, which is where all the photos in this post were taken. It was fun being in Alaska and it was fun to see bald eagles hanging around like pigeons at a bus stop. I’d never seen an eagle in person, let alone striking distance to my face before. They are very large birds and their talons are as big as my hands. They perched themselves on the railing of the bunkhouse I was living in so when I walked by them, they were less than three feet away and staring me right in the eye. From that distance, you can see the dinosaur lineage of bald eagles staring you right in the face.

Rob Hurlbut Inside A WWII Bunker

    On Dutch Harbor, there are several WWII observation bunkers. These are concrete structures and they are very claustrophobic. One can only imagine what it must have been like to be stationed in Alaska and standing watch, looking for Japanese planes or the Imperial Japanese Navy. As you can see in the photo above, they are not tall enough to stand up in, the floor in frozen tundra and for some reason I was wearing white socks with black shoes. I apologize for that.

Rob Hurlbut Out The Alaskan Tundra

    I did a lot of hiking whilst in Dutch Harbor. Hiking through snow is not the easiest thing in the world to do, nor is photographing snow. Personally, I hadn’t set foot in a snow drift for seven years, not since I left Denver for the sunny shores of San Diego back in 2006. In my glorified opinion the snow and cold suck, so my time in Alaska made me realize I had been taking the warm California sun for granted and that in all probability, Alaska would have been better appreciated by me had I visited in the summer.

Rob Hurlbut In Westward Seafoods Bunkhouse

    Any post I do that talks about Dutch Harbor or Alaska must include a stab at the company I was working for at the time, Westward Seafoods. It was a terrible experience that I have touched on in two previous posts. The first is titled, Do Not Wok For Westward Seafoods In Dutch Harbor, Alaska and the other is titled, Working For Westward Seafoods In Dutch Harbor, Alaska. They are worth reading and will very place some context around the photo above. 18 hour days, racism, mercury laden food and bedbugs were on my mind when I took the self portrait you see above. Read the posts and do not work for Westward Seafoods.

Rob Hurlbut Near The Bering Sea In Dutch Harbor, Alaska

    Dutch Harbor is in the background, water from the Bering Sea is right behind me and for the third time in one post, a beanie is on my head. It was really cold in Alaska so I didn’t cut my hair and I always wore some form of skull cap. Truth be told, I still haven’t cut my hair even after being back in San Diego for a couple weeks. I’m pushing 40 now so growing out my hair could be a combination of my last hurrah and a midlife crisis. Either way, the response from those that have seen me in person has been positive so I think I’ll just keep on growing it for now.

    So there you have it, an honest post from me with self portrait photos. I won’t lie, none of these photos were intended for public consumption but I really do want to open up and use this blog as a better window into who I am, what I do and where I’ve been. Cheers!

Bald Eagles At Westward Seafoods In Dutch Harbor Alaska

    Westward Seafoods in Dutch Harbor, Alaska is a throwback to a time when human rights, environmental awareness and racism were running rampant or had never been heard of before. It is a place that is horrible to work for and should be shut down. I worked for Westward Seafoods from January until April of 2013 and I am still piecing together the shattered remnants of my psyche and recovering from physical damage that has not been encountered by an employee in the United States of America since the late 1800’s. The culture of Westward Seafoods is comically racist and the isolated location of Dutch Harbor is used as leverage to instill fear in the employees. After bringing people to Dutch Harbor, Westward lies to employees by saying the only way to leave the island without paying for a $1000 plane ticket is by getting laid off after working the entire season. They say that if you get fired, you will be cast adrift in Dutch Harbor. That is a lie. Alaska State Troopers and the Unalaska police require the seafood companies to fly terminated employees off the island. Westward Seafoods uses the implication of homelessness on an island on the southern fringes of the Bering Sea to force the full cooperation of their employees. The photo above is of bald eagles hanging out on the railing of my bunkhouse, with the plant and harbor in the background. I’m just getting started, so let’s move on, shall we?

Tom Madsen Airport in Dutch Harbor, Unalaska, Alaska

    Employees of Westward Seafoods are brought to the island on a prop driven, puddle jumping plane. The shot above was taken as I left the island but the Saab plane was the same type that flew me into what was to be my prison for the next three months. Make no mistake; you are a prisoner on Dutch Harbor.

Cell Phone Towers In Unalaska

    The prison situation on Dutch Harbor starts with a lack of communication. There is cell service on the island but it’s not service that you can bring with you from the continental United States. Once there you will have to pay for a new phone and a new cell phone plan that is specific to the island. Other than that, you have to use payphones to communicate with the outside world. This leads me to my next point and that is communication within Westward Seafoods itself.

Westward Seafoods Bunkhouse In Dutch Harbor, Alaska

    While you are working for Westwards Seafoods, they put you up in a bunkhouse and give you three meals a day. Above is the bunkhouse I lived in. The bed in the foreground was mine. This was only one half of the room. The other half had two more beds and a bathroom. So yes, five people lived here. You will notice there are no chairs or tables and there is no refrigerator or microwave. You are not allowed to bring food back from the galley, so if you happen to take a $20 round trip taxi ride to the island’s only grocery store, you have to buy food that does not need to be refrigerated and that does not need to be cooked. Imagine that for a second. Pretend the place where you live does not have a refrigerator, microwave or stove. After that, imagine that bedbugs infested your building and the company doesn’t tell you about it. I’m not kidding; there was a bedbug infestation that took place in February of 2013 at the Westward Seafoods plant. There is simply no dissemination about information like this at the plant. Knowledge and information are power so Westward does everything they can to keep employees in the dark.

Westward Seafoods Dutch Harbor Processing Plant

    The photo above shows the extent of your world whilst working at Westward Seafoods. I was standing on the porch of my bunkhouse when I took the photo and in it you can see the two other bunkhouses in the foreground, the galley on the middle left and the buildings of the actual plant in the background. That’s it people.

Dutch Harbor & Westward Seafoods Processing Plant

    Above you can see the entire Westward Seafoods prison compound as it looked one morning in February 2013. In all honesty, this post has not even scratched the surface of the working conditions, the racism or the mercury laden food that must be dealt with as a condition of working there. If you try to contact them via their website, they only have links for recruitment or sales. That should tell you everything. If, for example you had evidence of them selling or serving mercury laden Pollock, purchasing opillio crab from pirates or a working environment that is outside of OSHA standards, there is no way to let the company know. As if they didn’t already know.

    Let me put it another way; company policy is not to administer first aid to an injury. If your finger gets loped of in one of their machines, you have to tell the lead of your section that your finger got loped off and only then can you seek medical attention. I’m not kidding. There is a first aid station that has no nurses or any doctors that require you to tell one specific person that you are injured BEFORE you can receive Boy Scout treatment for your injury. If you walk from your section to the first aid station with an amputated finger before you tell your lead, you will be refused medical aid. Anyway, Do not work for Westward Seafoods, I implore you. The basic math shows that, after taxes I brought home $5.20 per hour. No one has worked 12 to 18 hours a day for $5.20 an hour since the stone age. Need I say more? Yes, I should and will say more in my next post. My next post will talk specifically about the racist culture, lack of medical personnel, buying black market fish & crab and the mercury laden food that is fed to employees. In the meantime do some research and see that I’m not alone or making this up. Cheers!

Rob Hurlbut In Dutch Harbor, Alaska

    After spending three months in Dutch Harbor Alaska working for Westward Seafoods, I have a lot to say and I have many photos to show. Depending on what mood I’m in, what I have to say will either be about the terrible time I had working at Westward Seafoods or about the great time I had exploring Dutch Harbor. I’m in a great mood right now, so aside from saying that you should not work for Westward Seafoods at their racist, unsafe plant I’ll leave the issue for other posts. THIS post will be about the photographic opportunities that Dutch Harbor has to offer. The photo above is a 10 second exposure with me flashing a light on my face three times at three slightly different positions, that’s why you see my pretty face in the middle of Dutch Harbor.

Rob Hurlbut Uncropped In Dutch Harbor, Alaska

    Above is the uncropped version of the first photo in the post. Dutch Harbor has no trees so it looks like someone shaved off the portion of the Rocky Mountains that is above the tree line & dropped it in the Bering Sea. There is some wildlife on the island in the form of waterfowl, foxes and especially bald eagles. The rest of the wildlife wonders are found under the sea just as the fauna are found under the snow.

Unalaska at Night

    As evidenced by the constellations in the photo above, this is the north side of Dutch Harbor, Unalaska, Alaska. Even after spending three months there I still don’t know what or where Dutch Harbor is, relative to Unalaska. I think Unalaska is the name of the town, while Dutch Harbor is a geographic feature of the island on which the town is located but I really don’t know for sure. Anyway, from the Westward Seafoods plant where I was working, the area below is where people went when they “went into town.” This area has a library pool, recreation center and a very old Russian Orthodox church, visible in the lower center of the frame. To the south, on the other side of the mountain I was standing on when I took this photo is the airport, a grocery store, a bar and a liquor store. Guess which side of the island was more popular?

Russian Orthodox Church In Dutch Harbor, Alaska

    Above we see the Russian Orthodox Church that is visible in the previous photo as well as the mountain I was standing on for that particular night shot. The far right of the photo was my perch for the previous shot and the left of the photo, obviously out of frame is the harbor.

Rob Hurlbut Leaves Westward Seafoods Dutch Harbor, Alaska

    I’ve been doing a lot of thinking over the last 3 months. I’ll tell you right now that I didn’t want to think a lot but what I was doing and where I was didn’t leave me with much of anything else to do. I just got back from a three month stint working for Westward Seafoods Inc. in Dutch Harbor, Alaska. It was not a good experience and I am struggling with how I’m going to relate my experience with to the world. Of course I have photos but what I went through can’t be adequately shown or expressed with photography. I had mental and physical degradation happen in way that should be investigated as criminal wrongdoing because the methods, manners and culture of Westward Seafoods Inc. are immoral, rude and racist. For me, leaving Dutch Harbor and the employ of Westward Seafoods was not the end of a job; it was fleeing the scene of a crime. Westward uses their isolated location to scare and bully their employees. They use the high cost of airfare out of Dutch Harbor as leverage against employees so they will give their full cooperation to any task they are asked to do. Employees of Westward Seafoods do this as the company buys fish and crab that have been caught by pirates in a way that is not sustainable, legal or ethical. I have so many more things to say and so many more photos to show that I’m not quite sure where to begin or how to end. This post is my way of placing the world on notice, I suppose. The photo above was taken on a flight out of Alaska, heading to the lower 48. I was watching the sunrise as I pondered what to do next and what I wanted to say about my Alaska experience. So, be aware; more posts and photos are coming.

Hotel Del Coronado Christmas Fireworks

    Hotel Del Coronado is the best neighbor to have in all of San Diego. It is the hub, the center of the wheel around which everything else revolves. Most of the amazing things you’ve heard about San Diego are on Coronado. If you have just landed at San Diego International Airport the first thing you should do, regardless of where you are staying is cross the Coronado Bridge, walk through The Del and then walk along the beach. You won’t believe your eyes and your remaining four senses will struggle to force your brain to accept what is really happening; you are having the best time of your life and Coronado is the best place you have ever been.

    Last night, there was a full moon so Hotel Del Coronado threw a Christmas party that was free and open to the public. The party was all things Christmas and culminated with a fireworks show. Yes, The Del rang in Christmas under a full moon with fireworks on the beach.

Sandcastle On The Beach Of Coronado

    Merry Christmas is what I say during the Christmas season. What is written on the sand castle above is something I don’t say and will not write on my blog. I’m taking a stand on this one and drawing a line in the sand. Basically my take on the whole politically correct thing is this; if you are not a politician looking for votes but still try or want to be politically correct then you are fucking GAY! That being said I want all the people that are dreaming of a white Christmas to realize that you don’t have to include OR exclude others from your holiday. Freedom of speech doesn’t mean you get to say whatever you want; it means sometimes you have to hear things you don’t want to hear. In America you can wish a group of people a Merry Christmas, even if that group is in a synagogue, a mosque or surrounding a sandcastle on a beach in California. No one has a problem with saying Merry Christmas, but there are people that have a problem with hearing it. God bless the former and God damn the latter for attempting to water down the most sacred event in all of Christendom and America’s favorite season. Merry Christmas!

Fireworks On Coronado

    So far I’ve gushed about Coronado and bitched about political correctness so now I’d like to talk about photography and what I was actually doing during this awesome Christmas party. I was making friends with the fireworks crew!

    They let me photograph the fireworks from their command station so I was something like 30 yards from the show with a completely unobstructed view of the fireworks and Hotel Del Coronado. The reason being this close was a treat was because I was packing my 8 mm fish-eye lens. The photo above shows the crew on the right, The Del on the left, fireworks up top as well as a full moon and Mexico in the background; just a typical night from my neighbor, Hotel Del Coronado.

4 Seconds Of Coronado Fireworks

    Earlier this year there was a fireworks show that went completely haywire. I’m referring to The Bungle in the Bay that was our annual 4th of July celebration here in San Diego. I was embedded with that fireworks crew as well, but I didn’t get any photos of the event because all the pyrotechnics exploded at the same time. I know that sounds cool and people that were far enough away got some great video of the debacle but for me and the crew I was with it was a little different. We were running for our lives! Don’t get me wrong, it was very exciting but I have no photos from the night so it was ultimately very disappointing for me.

Mouseover For Fish-eye vs. Human-eye

    I’m going to wrap up this erratic and disorganized post with an image that takes advantage the IMG Mouseover plugin for WordPress. The photo above is a lens corrected version of the original photo. If you hover your mouse over the image above you will see the original, as it looked through my 8 mm fish-eye lens. There are good and bad things about both photos, but the bullet point I want you to notice is that I was really, REALLY fucking close to the fireworks yet I managed to have to entire explosion, plus The Del and the full moon in the frame. That is the joy of a wide angle lens at Christmas.

    Merry Christmas and a happy new year!

Ice Skating In Front Of Hotel Del Coronado

    Hotel Del Coronado is the place to be in San Diego during the Christmas season. I have many posts and photos of The Del that will help convince you if for some reason you are a doubting Thomas. For the better part of a decade The Del has upped the ante by installing an ice rink on their beach during the Christmas season for their annual Skating By The Sea event. You heard me; there is an ice rink on the beach in Coronado, during Christmas. How do you like them apples? Hopefully you like them sunny, warm and within throwing distance of the Pacific Ocean. I live in a place where I can swim in the ocean, walk up the beach, go ice skating and then have a drink as I watch the sunset.

    In the interest of full disclosure, the alcohol prices at The Del are very expensive so I would bring my own flask if I were you. No, you can’t take swigs from it whilst skating nor can you drink on the beach but you can take bathroom breaks. Welcome to California!

People Enjoy Skating By The Sea

    Skating by the Sea has become unbelievably popular; probably more anticipated than the Christmas decorations of The Del itself. Who would have ever thought that installing an ice rink on the beach would draw such a crowd? Not me, that’s for sure! There are two skate sessions everyday during the week and each session lasts three hours and costs $25. On holiday days and on the weekends there is an added matinee session that lasts two hours and will set you back $20. Those are the adult prices; skate rental is included in that price but children are not. A child, as far as Hotel Del Coronado is concerned is 10 years or younger and they are welcome to skate with the adults for either a regular session or the matinee for $20 and $15 respectively.

Children Are Welcome To Skate Too

    When you are walking or skating around Hotel Del Coronado, you really start to get a sense of just how great a place San Diego is. San Diego receives more visitors per year than the entire state of Hawaii. I’ve lived in both places and San Diego is better than Hawaii in every way except one; the ocean here is too cold! Yeah, even the surfers wear wetsuits out here so I would recommend activities that keep you near or on the water, not necessarily IN the water.

The Sun Sets On Coronado

    The skate sessions are well timed and basically give you the options of skating until the sun goes down or skating under the moonlight. What looks like a nuclear blast in the photo above is our nuclear powered sun as it prepares to dive into the Pacific. I’ve been skating in a lot of places but this rink is by far the most unique and has the best view. Thanks to The Del, you can go ice skating on a San Diego beach; how cool is that? It’s very, VERY cool and it makes for a wonderful experience that you won’t soon forget. Below is a video I produced at the ice rink last year. Cheers!

Hotel Del Coronado Lobby and Christmas Tree

    I live right down the street from Hotel Del Coronado. You have no idea how fortunate a person I am to be able to say that. Residents of Coronado know what I mean and visitors to San Diego have a slight idea what I mean, but no one else does. The Christmas season is a quintessential holiday; it involves all five senses. As a person from Denver, I want the rest of the Christmas celebrating world to know exactly what I mean.

    In Denver, during Christmas you can stand outside with your eyes closed, breathe in through your nose, out through your mouth and KNOW that you are in Denver during Christmas. After that breath, when you open your eyes you’ll see that what you felt on your skin was the sun, touching you before it touched anyone else. That is the joy of Denver, the Mile High city during the Christmas season.

Outside Hotel Del Coronado

    Coronado does suffer from Christmas envy, though no one on the island knows it. It’s not a problem, it just it was it is. Coronado is a quintessential San Diego beach community; all five senses are dominated by the ocean and fish tacos every day of the year. Again, this is not a bad thing but it is NOT a Christmas experience. Palm trees are not pine trees, white sand is not white snow and rolling bluffs are not the Rocky Mountains. When you dream about a white Christmas and roasting chestnuts on an open fire, you are dreaming about Colorado and my beloved mile high city of Denver.

Christmas 2012 in the Lobby of Hotel Del Coronado

    This brings me back around to Hotel Del Coronado during Christmas. The Del has been doing Christmas for 125 years and over 100 of those years have involved electricity and decorating trees with electric lights. Yeah, it is the resident expert in San Diego when it comes to lighting up a Christmas tree and launching off the Christmas season.

Vintage Santa Claus Inside Hotel Del Coronado

    It’s not just the lobby and roof of The Del that get decorated; every square inch of the place gets the treatment. The Victorian Era was a very beautiful if not cluttered time to make a statement and it was right in the middle of this era that The Del was built. The unsinkable Molly Brown was a Denver socialite that survived the sinking of the Titanic in 1912. Her house in Denver is a museum and my dad used to be a tour guide there. I bring this up because during a tour of the Molly Brown house, you will learn everything you ever wanted to know about the Victorian Era, including the fact that it was very stylish to pack every flat surface in the house with knick knacks. If the term “flaunt it if you got it” existed back then, this is how it was done.

Fish-Eye View Of Hotel Del Coronado – Christmas 2012

    Please allow me to talk about photography for a minute or two. I was packing an 8 mm fish-eye lens when I visited The Del on this particular day. I’ve had the thing for almost a year and it has become my permanent accessory. I find it very ironic that wide angle lenses like this are referred to as “fish-eye” because it is the best way to get a human-eye view from a photograph. Besides that, it forces the photographer to physically move closer to their subjects; this is abnormal because for 150 years photographers have been backing away from their subjects just to fit them all in the frame. You don’t have to do that with a fish-eye lens. For the photo above, I was standing right in front of a 25 foot tree yet it doesn’t even come close to filling the frame. I’m telling you now that a fish-eye lens allows you to photograph the world the way you see it rather than the way your camera or lens allows it.

The Incinerator Tower of The Del

    And so this concludes my third annual Christmas pilgrimage to Hotel Del Coronado. Shortly after the New Year my 7 year San Diego anniversary will be presenting itself. Don’t get me wrong, I have nothing bad to say about Denver, it’s people or the Broncos but, San Diego has the best weather in America. You all know that I’ve been around the world and back again so please believe me; San Diego is a great place to live and Coronado is the best part of San Diego. I like all four seasons, but I love living here because I get to skip the shitty ones. It rained a few times back in January and that was all the winter I had to endure; it’s been in the 70’s and mostly sunny ever since. Yes, this is the life I lead. You can have this life too if you just remember that you can lead a horse to water, but a pencil must be lead. Merry Christmas!