Greg Gerhart Uses Photography to Cope with Wife Denise's Death

Greg Gerhart snapped his backpack straps at Glendalough State Park outside Battle Lake and headed into the trees. Inside that pack: up to four or five cameras. He has made that walk nearly every day, all winter, since losing his wife Denise to cancer.

"She was kind, compassionate, had patience. She gave it to me. I was never that patient, she gave me that gift," Gerhart said of Denise.

The park was a place Denise loved. After she died, Gerhart returned to it with a camera, turning the trails she once walked beside him into a daily practice of grief and recovery. On March 23, Glendalough finally sounded and looked like spring, and Gerhart was there to witness it, as he has been through every frozen week before it.

"I didn't want to sit on the couch at home and sit in a depression and a rut, and there were days I made myself come out here and I was glad I did," he said.

Photography did more than give Gerhart somewhere to be. The daily hikes and the discipline of the camera also kept him on his path of sobriety, grounding a routine around something that demanded his full attention and drew him outside regardless of the season.

What he found through the lens has been remarkable by any measure. Trumpeter swans, eagles, sunsets, and otters have all become subjects along the Glendalough trails. The otters, in particular, have held his attention. "I have seen them pull up mud puppies, northerns, frogs and bullheads," Gerhart said of what he has watched unfold on the water.

The patience required to photograph wildlife at that level, to wait for an otter to surface with a bullhead or hold still while a trumpeter swan crosses the frame, is the same patience Gerhart credits Denise with giving him.

His story has drawn attention from local outlets including the Detroit Lakes Tribune, the Echo Press, and the Perham Focus. The work Gerhart has produced at Glendalough this winter represents something that began in loss and has grown, one hike at a time, into a reason to keep showing up.