Sometime in 2026, the hundreds of thousands of people who bought the Sierra Club’s popular wall calendar will turn over to a new month and see a sumptuous picture taken by avid Henderson photographer Chuck Summers.
It’s an explosion of green: a grove of moss-covered vine maple trees above a shimmering body of water in the Hoh Rain Forest, an incomparably lush portion of Olympic National Park west of Seattle. Summers recently learned that his photo will appear in the 2026 calendar.
It’s hardly the first of his photos to be published; his pictures have appeared in magazines, books and about a dozen Sierra Club yearly engagement books.
But to have taken one of just 13 photos selected for the 2026 Sierra Club wall calendar—one each month plus a cover photo—is a milestone for Summers, who travels extensively shooting wildlife and landscape photos. The big calendar has been produced for more than 30 years, with more than 10 million sold.
It’s also some compensation from the misfortune of that trip to Olympic in May 2023, when Summers took a hard fall and badly injured his right shoulder, which has undergone three surgeries and hurts to this day.
The 68-year-old Paducah native first acquired a film camera while in high school, “but I didn’t know how to use it, what any of the dials were for.”
He went to seminary and entered the ministry, serving in several churches across Kentucky and Tennessee over the years.
“In 1993, when I was in Jellico, Tennessee, I was dealing with burnout with ministry,” Summers said. “I wanted to do something creative. I considered pottery, but thought it would be too expensive.”
Instead, he turned to photography, “not realizing I would spend far more on photography gear,” including the Nikon digital cameras he now uses.
“I knew I loved nature and thought (photography) would be a good connection,” Summers said.
He could hardly have imagined where it would lead. Within just a few years, he would publish his first book of photos, “A Year in the Big South Fork National River and Recreation Area,” which was copyrighted in 1999 and featured an introduction by former U.S. Sen. Howard Baker of Tennessee, who was instrumental in establishment of the 125,000-acre federal reserve.
That would be followed by “A Year in the Cumberland Gap National Historical Park” (2002) and “Kentucky Unbridled Spirit and Beauty,” a coffee-table style book published in 2007 and featuring a preface by former Gov. Martha Layne Collins.
By 2013, Summers and his wife, Bonita, moved to Henderson, where he pastored at First Christian Church until he retired in 2020. Here he found new friends with similar passion for nature photography, particularly Ron Moore, with whom he often travels and shoots pictures. Summers posts photos regularly on Facebook, often with passages of Scripture.
“I’m very much the tree-hugger,” Summers said. “As Christians, we are called to tend the garden and care for the Earth” — and, in his case, take pictures.
