Alaska

Here's a photo of a near-vertical rock face near Valdez. Take a look at the photo and imagine you're a hiker trying to get past the clip-art rock climber. Which route would you choose to get from the bottom to the top if you wanted to avoid technical climbing and just scramble up the boulders to the top?

Here's the photo a bit larger, showing more detail but without the routes shown. Try to trace your path:

I'd probably try the middle route. At least that's what I pictured when I first looked at the photo. But then a few years after I took the picture, I looked a little closer at it, and realized that all along, I had been looking at it the wrong way. If you look closely at the trees in the photo above, they're all growing sideways to the left. So the photo should actually be rotated 90 degrees clockwise. Here's the rotated photo with the correct orientation. I don't know why, but it still looks sideways to me.

So anyway, I thought it made for a bit of an optical illusion. What do you think?

All photos © Krey Price unless otherwise noted.

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