Posted on
August 29, 2025
in
Photos
Erik Gauger has been maintaining his travel photography blog, Notes from the Road, since 1999. He is a self-employed father based in the Pacific Northwest. Gauger pursues Notes from the Road as a hobby, and has used his blog to try to push the meaning of the travel blogging medium, by incorporating sketches, hand-painted maps, unique prose and challenging subjects such as The Palos Verdes Peninsula (right), a surprising marine sanctuary amidst the vast concrete jungle of Los Angeles. His goal is to engage readers about the big, philosophical ideas of travel, and often argues that travel writing, and travel blogging, is a medium meant for funny, personal, invocative and compelling writing, rather than travel industry fluff. He argues that travel bloggers should do more to write about the real conflicts and drama of the places they visit. “Nobody reads the fluff,” he says, “travel readers are smart. They want you to invoke all the senses, and make them think.”
Here are 10 photos from Erik's travels that emphasize not only the beauty of the places he has visited, but also his photographic style.
The weird reflected light of Lower Antelope Canyon, near Page, Arizona.
Grasses and marshy plants display bright colors in late summer in Nome, Alaska.
The entrance to St. Herman’s Cave in Belize.
A dead Joshua Tree in Joshua Tree National Park.
A glass frog calls out at night near El Valle de Anton in Panama.
Eroded badlands in Anza-Borrego State Park, California.
Red mangrove saplings in the Abaco Islands, where Erik argues for more protection of natural resources against unrestrained development in the Guana Cay blog .
Eerie late evening light over the environmentally damaged Salton Sea in Southern California.
Low tide on sand flats in the Abacos, Bahamas.
Tufa formations at Mono Lake, California.
Posted by jhartmann13 (JJ Hartmann)