"Eclipsme" wrote in message
. ..

On a sad note, after being intrigued by this post, I searched for the book
to buy (found it used on Amazon), but found that the author and her
husband,
who was a serious nature photographer mentioned in the same breath as
Ansel
Adams, both died in a small plane crash near their home in Bishop, CA,
just
before this book came out. Neither was flying the plane at the time.

Galen Rowell was not a pilot, so he was not flying the plane. However he
pressured and bullied a pilot to fly them back to Bishop from San Francisco.
The pilot, although a commercial pilot, did not at first want to do the
charter flight because neither he nor the plane nor his operation were
certified for charter flights. The pilot finally agreed to do it in exchange
for some of Galen's pictures. There is some evidence that the pilot had
flown other informal "charter flights" for compensation.

This was a night flight to a mountainous area. The plane was an Aero
Commander and the pilot had slightly over 50 hours in type, but was not
night current. In fact, he had only 1.6 night hours in the plane. Turning
base to final the airplane suddenly banked very steeply and crashed. Given
the Rowells' personalities and their relationship with the pilot, it would
not surprise me terribly if it had actually been Barbara at the controls.
NTSB report he

http://www.ntsb.gov/ntsb/brief.asp?e...19X01425&key=1

The Rowells were truly great photographers. But they were risk addicts who
already had been nearly killed many times. These sort of people are like
bright meteors who streak across the sky of our lives, and then are gone. I
think that the short duration of their lives is not so much sad, as it is
simply the way they chose to live.