Wanderings of the old sloat

Winter's Surf

2012-01-08T11:56:00.000-08:00

I think winter is a far nicer and more interesting time of year in the Monterey area than summer. Summer brings gray skies, throngs of tourons, brown grass, and small, unobtrusive waves. All of these things are minimized during winter, and not infrequently you get a day like this one, January 6...with bright skies, mild air, uncrowded beaches, and thundering, majestic surf.

These pix were taken at Carmel River State Beach, where the waves are usually larger and more powerful than elsewhere in the area. There's a steep dropoff a few yards from shore which allows the waves to barrel in at full strength, then abruptly crash on the sand with massive power. There was a high surf advisory in effect when these pix were taken. This breaker is probably about 12-14 feet high; the crashing water can bounce twice as high into the air after the wave finishes breaking.

The low winter sun, of course, provides nice light. It's not a black sand beach; just looks that way with the underexposure.

Seagulls hangin' by the Carmel River lagoon, separated from the surf by a sand berm. Pelicans also like to kick back here in between feeding forays.

At low tide, fine patterns are created on the beach by water percolating from the lagoon through the sand to the ocean. The lagoon is about fifty yards to the left of the picture, the ocean about ten yards to the right. If you were up in a satellite you would see patterns of erosion very similar to these, extending dozens of miles across desert regions. But here on the beach, the area encompassed by this pic is perhaps eight feet by ten.

The winter surf has exposed these rocks at the shore. When the river breaks through the berm and flows into the sea, it often runs right through these stones. During the summer, gentle surf covers the rocks with sand. I've always liked this beach...every time I come here, it looks different. And you see various critters...gulls, pelicans, otters, seals, cavorting all over the place. It's a very interesting spot.

Winter Surf!

2012-01-06T19:32:00.000-08:00

Big waves crashin' at Carmel River beach today...Weather Bureau's high surf advisory lookin' good! Haven't had much big surf this winter...it's always fun to go to this beach and watch.

Bisbee Vibes

2011-12-18T19:08:00.000-08:00

I visited Bisbee for a couple days last week. It's a historic town that was a copper mining center for the better part of a century. With the price of copper too low to economically mine it, Bisbee has turned into a tourism and art center. I stayed at the Copper Queen Hotel, built in 1902 by the Phelps Dodge Corporation, which was one of the main players in the mining business. It's a classic hostelry that has the only elevator in Bisbee, along with a swimming pool, restaurant, saloon, and a nice balcony (visible on the 3rd floor) that is a good spot to set a while and watch the town go by. Copper mining has not formally ended here...if the price goes up enough, mining will resume.

The Central School also dates from around the turn of the 20th century. Originally an elementary school, it now houses art offices.

The alternative culture is strong in Bisbee, resulting in some...interesting structures.

Central Bisbee is a mix of Victorian and Edwardian architecture. After several fires in the late 19th century, the town was built in stone.

In my continuing search for sidewalk contractor signs, I found this one in Bisbee.

The Lavender Pit mine lies just southeast of central Bisbee. It was excavated from around 1951 to 1975. After Bisbee's heyday in the early 20th century, the price of copper dropped and simultaneously, the high grade ore was exhausted. But in the mid 20th century, new techniques made it economical to mine again and this pit was dug.

This is the Warren ballpark, which has been used most of the time since it was built in 1908. Currently high school and little league teams play here, as well as the semipro Bisbee Copper Kings. It's one of the oldest ballparks in the US. In 1917 it was used to detain striking miners, who were rounded up by Phelps Dodge and sent here. The miners who agreed to go back to work were released; those who didn't were herded onto trains and deported to New Mexico with orders not to return.

Last Tuesday, heading out of Bisbee, I enjoyed sunny weather through Tombstone, but then approached a wall of rain near Benson.

The storm clouds begin to swallow the landscape north of Tombstone. By the time I reached Tucson it was pouring, with fresh snow cloaking the Catalina Mountains north of the city.

Rambling in the Southwest

2011-12-14T10:40:00.000-08:00

I'm on the road, currently in Arizona. I always try to leave...and return to...Monterey on Highway 1, going down the Big Sur coast. Last week I had a fine, top down day for the trip.

Cruising through the Cuyama Valley the next day, I was impressed by the stark beauty of the landscape.

Here I'm hiking in Saguaro National Park West. Blow up the pic and you can see petroglyphs on the rocks. Archaeologists aren't sure whether the pictures have some religious or symbolic value, or whether the Hohokams were just doin' a bit of tagging.

As one might expect from the name, Saguaro West has many fine saguaros. The one in the back of this pic has an especially complex array of arms.

Classic Arizona...a stately saguaro rises into a crystalline sky dappled with high clouds.

This saguaro serves as a bird condo. Blow the pic up for a better view of all the holes in the cactus.

A chain fruit cholla backlit by the sun appears almost impressionistic in its variety of lighting and shade.

The Lizards, of course, love the desert. Here they're hangin' on a barrel cactus.

The woody skeleton of a cholla has an elegant design.

A closeup of a saguaro. The cacti in the park are nice and plump...when they're filled with moisture the arms fatten and expand like a bellows. There's been decent rain around Tucson in the latter part of this year, and a few days after this pic was taken the area was soaked with another inch of moisture. A good wildflower season lies ahead!

Street Hiking in The City

2011-10-21T20:51:00.000-07:00

Earlier this week I was in San Francisco for an Opeth concert...great! The next day I had the opportunity to do some street hiking in The City. In the early 1990s, when I lived in the Bay Area, I hiked the hills often, but since moving to Monterey, I haven't done it nearly as frequently. It's always a treat...though hard on the Achilles tendons. I need to come up here more. This pic was taken from one of my favorite spots, Ina Coolbrith Park on Russian Hill. I've been coming up here for forty years. It's one of many little oases of calm in the midst of urbanity. Folks come here to sightsee, do Tai Chi, or just relax with the morning paper.

Russian Hill is precipitous. Here's a typical sidewalk, stepped to ease the strain on the ol' Achilles and to improve traction on rainy days.

Some of the streets on Russian Hill are simply pedestrian walkways and staircases, but with official street addresses. This is an example. There are pretty gardens in these forested nooks, along with resident cats and even parrots, though I didn't see any on this trip. In some places there are old mid 19th century houses that survived the 1906 fire, which spared some areas on Russian Hill.

This pic was taken on Montgomery Street near Union, on Telegraph Hill. There are a couple of pre-1906 houses in the foreground.

Near the site of the previous pic is this fabulous 1939 Art Deco apartment building. the exterior design on this side of the structure depicts the Bay Bridge, brand new at the time, along with the latest airplanes and ocean liners.

On the other side of the building, the past is depicted...a conquistador, sailing ship, and birds instead of airplanes.

From the summit of Telegraph Hill, Sts Peter and Paul cathedral in North Beach lies in a pocket of sunshine, with the highrises of shady Russian Hill in the background.

A good workout is to climb up and down Telegraph Hill on foot! These are the Greenwich steps...there are about 400 of them between Coit Tower and Sansome Street near the bayfront.

You can also take the Filbert Steps, a block to the north. There are fine old bungalows on the steps, a century and a half old, that escaped the 1906 earthquake and fire.

The quake...and mainly the fire...wiped out most of San Francisco from downtown north, and west to Van Ness Avenue. However, west of Van Ness many 19th century Victorian homes survived. More escaped the fire in the Mission district to the south. Most of the Victorians still in existence have been finely restored, and are worth over a million dollars. Pacific Heights has many fine old homes. This is a stick style residence, popular in the 1880s.

While the Stick homes have squared bay windows, Italianate houses have angled windows. This beauty is also in Pacific Heights. I love the fancy trim on the perimeters of these homes.

Queen Anne homes commonly feature round towers and fancy shakes on the exterior. Many of these houses were built in the 1890s. This one is on Gough Street across from Lafayette Square. The windows in the towers are curved...I can only imagine how much the glass costs.

Stick, Italianate, Queen Anne, Art Deco...San Francisco has a myriad of architectural styles. For me, this is one of the fascinating elements of The City. And, in keeping with the climate, there is a lot of Mediterranean architecture, such as this home in Pacific Heights.

Southwestern Spirit

2011-10-11T21:00:00.000-07:00

Rambling around the southwest, I saw a couple historic sites where Native Americans lived in the past. This is Spruce Tree House at Mesa Verde, in SW Colorado between Durango and Cortez. The ancestors of todays pueblo Indians occupied this spot in the 14th century. They left not too long after building these structures, probably because of a prolonged drought at the end of that century.

Spruce Tree House, like many other dwellings of the period, was set under a rock overhang, which gave some protection from rain and snow. The residents built fires out in fromt of the complex, which is evident from the soot marks on the rock above. In places the homes go at least a hundred feet into the alcove. The irregularly shaped holes on the second floor are actually doorways...originally these houses had balconies on the upper floors.

This is Square Tower House at Mesa Verde. The Anasazi...now known more widely as Ancient Pueblo Peoples...were building high rises of a sort...this one is four stories high...at a time when Europeans were constructing their big cathedrals. Advanced architecture was in vogue in both hemispheres.

Here's the Four Corners Monument, where Utah, Colorado, Arizona, and New Mexico meet. This plaque is fairly small...you can literally put one foot in all four states with no problem.

Canyon de Chelly, in NE Arizona, has been settled by Native Americans for many centuries. Navajo still live on the canyon floor and farm the bottomlands.

White House, in Canyon de Chelly, is one of the better preserved ruins dating from the 14th century. Cool rock alcove too!

The Lizards enjoyed hangin' at Canyon de Chelly. It's an interesting place for geology, scenery, history, and culture.

The Painted Desert near Winslow.

Jackson Browne, with his guitar, standin' on the corner in Winslow Arizona. He wrote "Take it Easy" with these lyrics, and the Eagles had a monster hit with the song. Still one of the best road songs ever. Only trouble was, when I was taking pictures, no girls in flatbed Fords slowed down to take a look at me.

The rambling reptiles are displaying their mountaineering skills here, climbing a barrel cactus in White Tank Mountain Park near Phoenix. This is their favorite area...the Sonoran desert is their natural habitat! We're going home tomorrow but I promised my saurian friends I'd bring them back to the desert next spring.

Cincy Critters

2011-10-02T17:27:00.000-07:00

A few weeks ago I was in Cincinnati, and as I often do when I have some time to kill in a city, I went to the zoo. It's always interesting to check out the critters, and each zoo seems to have a different specialty. In Cincinnati they have a lot of rare species, and a lot of animals from Madagascar in particular. This is an old lion that used to work with Sigfried and Roy in Las Vegas. He's now retired, taking his leisure in a spacious compound, fed daily by zoo staff, as was being done here.

A Mexican coastal rattlesnake, looking ready for action.

Lemurs from Madagascar, especially well groomed and carrying on with a certain aplomb!

The polar bear was dealing with fairly warm, humid weather, thus he was staying close to the water.

A rainbow lorikeet from Australia, In the mountains and forests on the east coast of Oz, these guys are common. You get a blaze of brilliant color when a group of them takes wing.

A Sumatran rhino. There are only a few hundred of these critters left. The Cincy zoo successfully bred a female...probably this rhino here...and she had a calf a few years ago.

This is a memorial to Martha, the last passenger pigeon in existence, who lived out her days at the zoo here, dying in 1914. The remarkable thing is that in the mid 1800s, there were literally billions of these birds in the eastern and midwestern US. They flew in flocks that darkened the skies. Then, in the last half of the 19th century, they were killed en masse, with nets and guns, as food for slaves (before 1865) and the poor. Between 1870 and 1890 their numbers crashed, and finally Martha was the only one left.

More Great Autumn shots in Colorado

2011-09-27T21:17:00.000-07:00

The last two days in the Colorado Rockies have been more of the same...fabulous!! The area around Monarch Pass is especially flamboyant...as this shot shows.

The Lizards visited yet another major American river...the Arkansas. Colorado is an unusual state where rivers are concerned. There are no large, navigable rivers in the state, but there are several famous streams...the catch is that they all begin in Colorado and are thus small here, while becoming larger downstream. The Colorado, Arkansas, Rio Grande, and Platte all start here and attain more major status downstream.

The mountainsides near Monarch are downright luminous!

Here's the sign at Monarch Pass...higher than the summit of Mount Hood, Oregon's tallest peak.

Our saurian vagabonds have now landed at the Black Canyon of the Gunnison. This gorge is not nearly as deep as the Grand Canyon...about 2000 feet on average...but it is more precipitous. In places it's barely a quarter mile wide. The dark rock adds to a sense of foreboding.

The fissured rock at the Black Canyon has been penetrated by flows of other material, creating these seams.

Lightning caused fires have ravaged the P-J landscape at Black Canyon. The gnarly dead trees add to the surreal vibe here. The first time I visited was in the 1980s. I camped on the north rim of the canyon, under a full moon. An owl serenaded me all night long. It was cool and more than a little mystical.

Monday night I stayed in Ouray. Though I lived in the Denver area for 12 years, I only visited here once, then only briefly. Hard to think of a town anywhere in a better setting. I'll have to come back for several days. For that matter, it's not all that far from Monterey either.

I had never been over the famed highway between Ouray and Silverton...till today. The terrain in Southwestern Colorado just seems to be more dramatic than in the rest of the state, and that's saying something! The mountains here are steeper, the valleys deeper. And the fall colors are astounding! I was one of the few casual photographers here...most of the folks had big SLRs and tripods.

This could be an impressionist painting.

The Glory of Autumn in the Colorado Rockies!

2011-09-25T19:00:00.000-07:00

I have been privileged to spend the last three days in the Colorado Rockies under absolutely perfect conditions! Crystalline air; warm, intense sun; cool, refreshing breezes; and aspen near the peak of fall color. It has been absolutely glorious. I did make a bit of an error here, though; I was at Hidden Valley in Rocky Mountain National Park, and walked out of a corridor between buildings. I didn't look to my right immediately, but when I did, here was this big ol' bull elk! Several minutes earlier, he had been feeding in a ravine 20-30 yards away. Fortunately, he was mellow...used to the tourons, I reckon. You really should not get this close to a bull elk (this is not a zoom shot!) and I would not have if I had known he was in this spot. But bruddah Elk was cool about the whole thing.

The aspen will probably be at their peak around September 27-30, but on the 23rd there was plenty of blazing color.

Most aspen leaves turn yellow in fall, but some go red...they are prized. Here's a macro shot of some red aspen. I love how the red coloring reveals the intricate veins in the leaves.

Here the Lizards continue their tour of America's great rivers. Our saurian travelers have already visited the Columbia, Mississippi, Ohio, and Missouri on this trip. Now they're hangin' at the Colorado, near its headwaters at Grand Lake in the Rockies.

Mount Sherman, framed by aspens. About a week earlier, the first snow of the season fell; on the north facing slopes, it hasn't melted, and probably won't before winter sets in for good.

The deep blue skies at two miles above sea level, combined with the blazing golden aspen, always make a stunning color contrast.

I have endless possibilities for color, shading, and light when the aspen are turning. For a photographer it's like being a kid in a candy store! You could take thousands of excellent pics in a few days here. Really, it's breathtaking.

Yesterday my friend Cindy and I did a loop trip from Breckenridge, over Boreas Pass, and back over Guanella Pass. Exactly 100 miles. Cindy enjoys the stunning contrast between the dark green hues of the evergreens (mostly englemann spruce and alpine fir) and the brilliant golds of the aspen. This shot, near Guanella Pass, is a fine example.

Here's another one. The brilliant colors and the sublime scenery rendered the Venerable Pinniped euphoric! A guy we talked to here felt the same way. Such a day makes it wonderful to be alive! Being Saturday, it was fairly crowded, and no wonder, with this scenery. But everyone was in a good mood...we shared our enjoyment with each other.

It's good not to overlook the forest floor. This is a typical scene, worthy of a still life composition by a Dutch Master. Weathered wood, waving grass, shrubs in fall color, subtle differences in lighting. By the way, have you guessed that my favorite painters are the French Impressionists?

High Plains Drifting

2011-09-20T17:58:00.000-07:00

Yesterday, I drove across the High Plains from Goodland, KS to Denver. Though I'd passed through Goodland several times, I''d never really had a look around, so this time I did. Goodland does have a skyline; here it is.

There's even a NWS forecast office in Goodland. It's in an uncongested area.

Downtown Goodland turns out to be rather cool. The streets are paved with red brick, adding a retro vibe to the scene.

And talk about retro chic! The telephone building, constructed in 1931, is an Art Deco classic. Who knew??

This is one of the few remnants of virgin shortgrass prairie in Colorado, in Bonny Lake State Park.

The roads of the high plains stretch to the horizon. I loved the sense of openness and vastness I felt when driving across the prairies.

This observation tower in Genoa, Colorado has been around since 1926. It's kind of a rundown, touron schlock place. It is claimed you can see six states from the top. I don't know about that, but you do get your first good look at Pikes Peak from here. After driving westward for a week, that scene was significant.

Midwest Backroads

2011-09-18T19:03:00.000-07:00

I've been heading west the past few days, through several midwestern states from Indiana to Kansas. Though I've taken I-70 part of the way, I also like to get off the freeway and take the backroads. It's slower, but I have the time; it's more relaxing...few trucks or tailgaters; and you see more. This is the longest covered bridge in the United States, near Medora in south central Indiana. It's 438 feet long and has three interior spans.

The bridge is equally attractive from inside. The structure dates from 1875. The beautiful roof timbers are mostly new, but the thick pieces of wood that make up the spans and other interior supports are mainly original.

Brown County State Park is an oasis of lush forest in the middle of Indiana. In October, it's one of the nation's best spots for fall color. I was several weeks early for the show, but the forest floor still presents a fine mosaic of color and form.

This covered bridge near Greenup, Illinois is new! It was built in 2000. There was a CB on this site in the mid 1800s but it was torn down and replaced by a steel truss structure before 1900. That in turn was pulled down long ago, and the locals decided to resurrect the original structure...with modern engineering.

Bolstered by a couple chilly nights, the first isolated signs of color are popping up in Illinois.

The Gasconade county courthouse in Hermann MO was built around 1900.

Hermann has many fine Victorian structures. The town was settled by German immigrants in 1836, and retains a strong Teutonic influence. It appears that the main activities are eating delicious food...emphasizing bratwurst; drinking good locally grown wine; and having festivals with oompah bands, singing, dancing, eating, and drinking. Sounds like a good lifestyle to me!

The Lizards are now hangin' at the Missouri River...at Portland, Missouri, no less! They've had a fine tour of the great rivers of the US on this trip.

Vegetation on the banks of the Missouri...in Missouri...is lush, to say the least.

I did three strolls on the Katy Trail. The Katy runs for 238 miles through Missouri along an old railbed that was abandoned in 1986. By 1990 the first sections of the trail were completed. It's still expanding and will soon reach all the way to the Mississippi. This stretch of trail, between limestone bluffs on the right and the Missouri River to the left, is in the central part of the state near the town of Portland, between Jefferson City and Hermann. You can bike, run, or hike the trail...and some of the western part is open to horseback riding. At times in the winter the trail offers cross country skiing.

Now I'm on the Konza Prairie in Kansas, near Manhattan. This is original tallgrass prairie, mostly never plowed, that is a Nature Conservancy preserve. Buffalo have been returned to this, their natural habitat, and scientists come from all over the world to study the prairie ecosystem. While not as spectacular as towering mountains or dramatic coastline, the prairie is equally diverse, biologically speaking.

A typical Kansas rural skyline.

Edmond, Kansas; a typical hamlet, moribund but mellow. Probably too mellow for most of us if we lived here full time. 4 PM Sunday afternoon and no sign of life.

Beautiful Southern Ohio

2011-09-14T17:16:00.000-07:00

A couple days ago I drove across southern Ohio...for the first time. It was rolling country, with forests and meadows, towns and farms. The overall impression I had was of beauty, tranquility, and a peaceful way of life, slow paced. Cincinnati of course is busier, but still not all that hectic. This is old country by American standards; many cities and towns have been settled for over two hundred years. Even the vestiges of the bygone industrial era have symmetry and grace.

Here, the Lizards are at the Ohio River. This is the third of American's major rivers they've seen on this trip...the Columbia, Mississippi, and Ohio. Indeed, one could argue that those are THE three main rivers of the US, as far as transportation and commerce are concerned.

I was kickin' at a pleasant rest area on the river, when a sternwheeler and an old tug passed each other. I was transported back about a century in time.

Ohio has its share of covered bridges. A few miles inland from the big river, the Rinard Bridge spans a small stream. This bridge was destroyed during floods about a decade ago, since rebuilt.

The Hune Bridge spans the Little Muskingum, running fitfully in mid September. Overall it's been a wet year in these parts, but the last few weeks have been fairly dry. The bridge dates to 1879.

Cedar Falls, in Hocking Hills State Park.

The Lizards are connecting with their spiritual ancestors, as portrayed in the Serpent Mound. This Indian memorial was constructed about 900 years ago.

I eventually arrived in Cincinnati. It's a pleasant city with a fine skyline. Good zoo too...I'll make a critter post later.

This is the John Roebling Bridge, spanning the Ohio between Cincinnati and Covington, Kentucky. The remarkable thing about this bridge is its age...it was finished in 1866! And it's still heavily used, by pedestrian and vehicle traffic. I walked across it. I just finished a fine book by David McCullough, The Great Bridge, on the construction of the Brooklyn Bridge. It was designed by the same man who designed and built this one, John Roebling, and the bridges in Cincinnati and Brooklyn are very similar in their construction...the one in Cincy was the longest suspension bridge in the world when it was constructed...the Brooklyn Bridge surpassed it 17 years later. Roebling died shortly after construction began on the Brooklyn Bridge in 1869, and his son, Washington, built that span.

The new home of the Reds, Great American Ballpark, is adjacent to the insurance company of the same name, which is housed in the most distinctive skyscraper in the Queen City's skyline.

Night action at the ballpark. Reds have the bases loaded here. However, Jay Bruce hit into a double play, killing the rally. The Reds won anyway, 2-1.

Pittsburgh

2011-09-12T18:29:00.000-07:00

While most of these pictures were taken in Pittsburgh, I also visited the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame in Cleveland enroute. This pic was taken in a park near the Hall; I liked the juxtaposition of the guitar and the rubber stamp.

You could only take pictures in a small part of the museum, but Slash's guitar was in that area!

Here's Janis Joplin's car.

Now shifting to Pittsburgh, Nancy and I visited the Carnegie museum. For one $15 admission you can see both the art and natural history museums...great value! This skeleton has been in the museum's collection for over a century, since the bones were collected in Colorado and Utah in the 1890s on an expedition sponsored by the Carnegie. For many years this critter was called Brontosaurus, but it turns out that that was a mistake; it's actually an Apatosaurus...the name Brontosaurus was erroneously applied to a skeleton that was thought to represent a different species but really didn't.

Here's Allosaurus, the alpha predator of the Jurassic period!

While Allosaurus and then T-Rex were the head honchos on land, this bloke, Tylosaurus, ruled the seas. He grew up to 40 feet long, had sharp teeth, and an attitude to match. Great whites would have lost that matchup!

The Carnegie has a really neat exhibit showing five stages in the development of the horse. Eohippus, the smallest, was about the size of a dog and had five toes on each foot...no hooves. He lived in the Eocene, 50 million years ago. By the Miocene period, 10-20 million years ago, Meryhippus, the horse on the far right, had developed hooves but still had two vestigial toes on each foot. The largest horse, Equus, lived during the Ice Age and was essentially identical to the modern horse.

The art museum at Carnegie is also world class. Here's a statue of Ganesh, the Indian elephant god.

The museum has a nice collection of impressionists, my fave. This is one of Monet's water lilies pictures.

Loved this modern painting of a boy...great colors!

Saturday night it was on to PNC park, the Pirates' fine new ballpark on the banks of the Allegheny River. In front of the park is this statue of Honus Wagner, owner of eight NL batting titles and one of the greatest players of all time. This statue was originally at Forbes Field, the old home of the Pirates, but it has been moved twice since it was dedicated in 1955; first to Three Rivers Stadium, then to PNC.

Like AT&T park in San Francisco, Pittsburgh's ballpark is right on the water. Unlike AT&T, the downtown skyline is close at hand! Here's the view from the upper deck. The Allegheny is between the park and the skyline.

Milwaukee has sausage races. In Pittsburgh, they race pierogis! I had my first pierogis on Sunday while watching football with Nancy and Dave...delicious!

The Pirates put on a fireworks show after the game. It was absolutely the best I have ever seen! A spectacular barrage! And the little round light near the center of the picture is the full moon.

The skyline glitters on the Allegheny below the full moon. Just a few hundred yards to the right, the Allegheny merges with the Monongahela to form the Ohio River.

An Architectural Mecca

2011-09-08T17:40:00.000-07:00

Chicago is really a great city for architecture. There are countless styles of design here, and often the most innovative, cutting edge architecture has been implemented here. It's been that way since the late 1800s. Here a couple of modern highrises on the Magnificent Mile frame the Water Tower, constructed in 1869 and the most important building to survive the great fire of 1871.

Here's Big John...the John Hancock building, about 40 years old and still a fine landmark.

This skyscraper captivates me. It changes looks with the weather, looking mystical in cloudy conditions, majestic when the sun comes out.

And the Lizards made the trip...they're representin' in Chitown!

Look at the variety in this shot. The dominant building is the Willis (nee Sears) tower, Chicago's tallest. Fronting the other modern buildings of varying design is the city's older skyline on Michigan Avenue, which dates from before World War II.

A mundane shot here for native Chicagoans, but somewhat legendary for a first time visitor...The El. The trains clatter above the downtown streets as others rumble through the subways below.

I went up to the top of the Sears Tower...or almost to the top. This is a view of Chicago from 103 stories up, looking southeast. If you blow the pic up you can see all the way around the southern shore of Lake Michigan.

Looking northeast from the Sears Tower with the John Hancock building prominent.

More Museum Highlights

2011-09-07T18:42:00.000-07:00

Continuing at the Art Institute, here's a painting by one of my favorites, Goya. Goya is noted for painting gaunt figures...kind of the opposite of Reubens.

My favorite Dutch painter is Jan Steen. He frequently painted people partying down severely, usually with tongue in cheek. This painting is titled "Family Concert". And a merry scene it is...blow up the pic for better detail. But, things are a little disheveled. In the lower left are a couple of dead wine bottles, one toppled over. And it looks like the cat is scarfing the dog's food, and the dog is none too happy about it. And the kid playing the cello? Instead of a cello bow, he's using a pipe! Delightfully disorderly!

The institute had Edward Hoppers classic, Nighthawks. Tension? Loneliness? Alienation? Mystery? You decide.

This is a local painting, "Nightlife" by Archibald Motley. He was trained right here at the Art Institute in the 1910s, and executed this painting in the early 1940s depicting the goings on in a club on Chicago's South Side. I love the colors and the people...the painting pulses with energy.

And here's American Gothic! I misread this painting...thought it was of a farmer and his wife. But, it's really a farmer and his daughter. But not really...The artist, Grant Wood, used his sister and his dentist as the models.

The Institute has a fascinating exhibition of Soviet WWII propaganda posters. This is a famous one that I saw in a Time-Life book long ago. Issued just days after the German invasion on June 22, 1941, it intimates that Hitler will meet the same disastrous fate as Napoleon, 129 years earlier. Of course, this happened, but at the time the outcome was not certain at all.

Stalinist propaganda was, of course, often untruthful. But the Nazis gave the Russian spinmeisters plenty of genuine material to work with. This poster mocks the supposed German "Aryan ideals" by showing that the Nazi leaders didn't measure up. 100 percent true!

This poster...not quite so accurate. It's celebrating the "liberation" of the Baltic states from the Nazis in 1944. Of course, four years earlier the Russians had marched into Latvia, Lithuania, and Estonia and destroyed those countries' independence. The poor Balts were tossed around between the Russians and the Nazis for five years...hundreds of thousands of them perished in the crossfire.

Chicago Museums

2011-09-07T18:06:00.000-07:00

I've been ODing on the world class museums in Chicago, which is truly a world class city! I was reflecting on the fact that Chicago and Hawaii are about the same distance from the west coast, and I've been to Hawaii 25-30 times and this was my first visit to Chicago! What was I thinking? Yeah, the beaches are better in Hawaii...though Chitown does have beaches on Lake Michigan...but the urban amenities in Chicago are awesome! I should have been here at least four or five times before now. But, better late than never. I visited the Museum of Science and Industry, and found a genuine Spitfire! This airplane essentially won the Battle of Britain in 1940, and may well have saved the UK from being overrun by Nazi Germany. The swastikas under the cockpit indicate that this Spitfire shot down five German aircraft.

And here's one of the Spitfire's chief adversaries, the Stuka! This is one of only two WWII Stukas left on the planet! This lethal dive bomber had a dive siren that added to the intimidation factor when it attacked a target. The Stuka had an early version of autopilot that would automatically pull the airplane out of a dive if the pilot blacked out, which happened fairly often due to the abrupt loss of altitude.

And in the same museum, the U-505, the only German U-Boat captured by the Allies during the war! The Americans turned the trick, in late 1944. I saw a show on this on the Military Channel less than a year ago, and I thought to myself, "I would really, really like to see that U-Boat!" And now I have! I went aboard and took a tour. The crew lived and worked under oppressive conditions...the temperature onboard was almost always at least 95 degrees, and a deployment lasted three months, during which nobody showered! And enlisted men shared bunks on a rotating basis...yeech! The officers were more privileged...they each had their own bunk. But they still didn't get to shower. And the mortality rate among U-Boat crews during the war was well over 50 percent. U-505 had a captain that was quite humane and cared about his men, and thus he surrendered when he was encircled by allied ships. There was only one German fatality, and none on the American side. About 20 years later, the American and German captains had a reunion here in Chicago at the boat. Very cool.

The Americans captured a ton of important stuff on the U-505, none more so than this Enigma machine. This was the Germans' primary coding device. A four reel Enigma machine had over 9 times 10 to the 21st power possibilities (21 zeroes), so the Germans thought their code could never be broken. However, ingenious English codebreakers at Bletchley Park, with help from the Poles, broke the code by 1943. But this machine added greatly to the decyphering effort.

This is an Enigma code book captured from the U-505 by the Americans. The binding is edged by lead weights, so the book could be quickly tossed overboard and sunk. However, the Germans didn't manage to do that in this case.

Also at the museum is this 1895 Benz, a really early motorcar!

Now we're at the Shedd Aquarium, on the shore of Lake Michigan. They have several beluga whales; this one appears to be as curious about humans as we are about him!

They have some fine reef exhibits at Shedd, featuring many colorful fishes. Also an excellent dolphin show that focuses on training techniques. Shedd and Monterey are both world class aquariums, but very different. You need to visit both!

Now we've moved on to the Art Institute of Chicago. The Institute has one of the best collections of Impressionists in the world, which is right up my alley...I love impressionism. This is a fine seascape by Cezanne.

Van Gogh's bedroom is a classic.

And a self portrait! It seems to me that Vincent depicted his own haunted personality very well here. Love those short brush strokes...blow the pic up for more detail.

Here's a beautilful Monet...the gnarled trees remind me of the oaks at my own home.

This painting by Georges Seurat, Le Grand Jatte, shows a different impressionist style...instead of short brush strokes, Seurat simply dabs paint on with no strokes at all...a style called pointillism. Seurat added a whimsical touch...note the elegant lady on the right side of the painting, holding a monkey on a leash.

Auguste Renoir, another impressionist, painted these two young ladies. The painting is titled "Two Sisters" but the girls were not sisters, simply models hired by Renoir.

Many of the impressionist painters were not affluent, especially early in their careers. I learned from a docent that the author of this work, Gustave Caillebotte, sponsored some of his peers. Born into an affluent family, Caillebotte, beside being a fine painter in his own right, helped his fellow impressionists on many occasions. This painting depicts a typical Paris street scene in 1877. I love the way the cobblestones reflect the rain.

Going back about 350 years, this is the bottom of a Renaissance painting depicting St George slaying the dragon. Badass dragon! But you see the spear...the dragon's gonna be toast.

Field Museum

2011-09-05T19:17:00.000-07:00

Probably the three main reasons I wanted to visit Chicago were to see a Cubs game at Wrigley Field; to visit several world class museums; and to check out the innovative architecture that has been a hallmark of the city for over a century. From the architecture side, here's a gorgeous high rise with vast views of Lake Michigan. I wouldn't be surprised if you could see across the lake to the Michigan shore on a clear day.

The Field is one of the world's leading museums of paleontology and anthropology. This is Sue, the most complete Tyrannosaurus Rex skeleton found on the planet. 90 percent of Sue's bones are bona fide bones. The other ten percent have been reconstructed.

These are the hides of the actual man eating lions of Tsavo that stopped work on a railroad the British were trying to build between Mombasa, Kenya and Uganda in 1898. Seems that the lions were discreetly picking off a few workers each night and gobbling them down for dinner...in all, they ate up to 135 people in less than a year! Work on the railroad was stopped, I would imagine because it became difficult to recruit men for the job. You think??? Well, in the following year an intrepid Brit gunned down both lions, work resumed, and the railroad was completed. About a quarter century later, he sold the skins to the Field Museum and taxidermists did the rest. These are male lions...maneless because of the arid climate of their habitat.

More predators. This is one of the earliest alpha land predators, Eryops. He lived almost 300 million years ago, well before the dinosaurs.

Eryops was succeeded in the badass position by this guy, Dimetrodon...Permian period, 260 million years ago. The bones on his back supported a large sail. It is thought that Dimetrodon could regulate his body temperature by exposing the sail to the sun...or not. This fellow died out in the mass extinction at the end of the Permian period, which eventually led to the Age of Dinosaurs.

There were badass critters in the ocean as well as on the land during the Mesozoic Era. This is the skull of Mosasaurus, a real live sea monster...30-40 feet long, agile, and real mean.

The Field has a fine collection of mammals from the last 65 million years. Here are a couple of Ice Age beasts, a wooly mammoth and an Irish Elk, known for its impressive rack of antlers. Many specimens of this fellow exist, mostly found in peat bogs in Ireland. They are excellent at preserving dead things from Ice Age mammals to humans several thousand years old.

The Field has many artifacts from South Pacific island tribes, and also a good collection of ancient Egyptian stuff. These are genuine hieroglyphics, written by a scribe in Egypt over two thousand years ago.

And in the background, the Chicago skyline. Now THIS is a skyline! World class. Lake Michigan adds perspective. This pic was taken on the afternoon of Sep 4...the lake was calm. 24 hours later, after a long period of gusty north winds, the lake looked like an ocean...whitecaps everywhere, and large breakers smashing against the rocks, throwing spray into the air. It's fascinating to a west coaster how fast the Great Lakes can change moods.

Chicago's skyline is not a recent concept. This was one of the original homes of the skyscraper...they've been building them here for over a century. This pic shows some of the older highrises near the lakefront.

Pilgrimage to Wrigley

2011-09-03T18:59:00.000-07:00

There are two iconic ballparks remaining in major league baseball: Fenway Park and Wrigley Field. I have visited Fenway once, in 1987, but had never been to Wrigley...until today! I've dreamed of attending a game here since the 1960s, when I watched Ernie Banks, Billy Williams, and Ron Santo star for the Cubs. Even before them, Wrigley had seen many legends. Rogers Hornsby, Hack Wilson, Grover Cleveland Alexander played here. The opponents were equally illustrious; Babe Ruth hit his called shot homer in the 1932 World Series here. Musial, DiMaggio, Ott, Mays, Spahn all came to town opposing the Cubbies. The ballpark was actually built in 1914 for the Chicago Whales, a team in the upstart Federal League that lasted two years before folding in late 1915. The Cubs moved in for the 1916 season and have been here ever since.

Ernie Banks..."Mister Cub" 512 home runs and a hall of famer. At 80, he's still an ambassador of the game.

Wrigley is an URBAN ballpark. No tailgating here...there are no parking lots! Instead, fans party in the neighborhood bars surrounding the park. And that's the thing about Wrigley...it's in the 'hood. The ballpark was built around the neighborhood, not the other way around as in most of the new parks. And it's not surrounded by a vast expanse of concrete, as is the case in many suburban parks. It just blends into the neighborhood, like Fenway.

The bleachers atop the apartment houses on Sheffield Avenue, beyond Wrigley's right field seats. You're a long way from the field in those bleachers, but they've become very popular. These seats were developed in the 1990s. Previously, only the residents had these views; they'd just go up on the roofs and watch the game for free, in small numbers. But then, owners of the apartment buildings decided to open up the view to outsiders, charging admission and making money. This led to a conflict with Cubs' management, which was resolved by giving the Cubs a cut of the out-of-ballpark gate receipts from the rooftop seats.

The scoreboard in center field. Mostly manually operated, this is not a retro board...it was around waay before retro was cool. It was installed by Bill Veeck in 1937; he also planted the ivy on the outfield walls that year. The flags indicate the standings in the three National League divisions.

Alfonso Soriano at the plate, hitting a shot toward third. Blow up the pic and you'll notice that the Cubs have the bases loaded...The ball is just to the right of the Cubs' runner leading off second. In fact, Soriano batted four times during this game with a total of ten runners on base...very unusual! He drove in four of them, but none on this play; the Pirates' third baseman made a good stop and threw home to force the runner coming from third.

Cubs fans sporting their colors...predominantly blue. They suck down a lot of beer, too...a young couple sitting just to the right of me left eleven empty beer cups when they left! 77 dollars worth of beer. And they were both slim...at least for now.

The game started in bright sunshine, but by the seventh inning a long awaited cold front arrived, and we had an hour and a half rain delay with a robust thunderstorm. The ground crew did a fine job racing the tarp over the infield. Well trained! Rain delays are kind of a novelty to a Californian...it rarely rains in Cali during baseball season.

Eventually the rain let up, and the crew removed the tarp, squeeged away most of the standing water, and sanded the infield. Play ball!

Well, the Cubs were probably hoping the game would be permanently stopped by the downpour. When play was halted, Chicago was ahead 5-3 in the bottom of the seventh...if the game had been scrubbed at that point, it would have been official and the Cubs would have had a victory. But play eventually resumed, and in the top of the ninth, with the bases loaded and two out, Derrick Lee, a well liked ex-Cub, deposited a pitch into the basket atop the left field wall for a grand slam home run and a 7-5 Pirate victory. Here the blokes D-Lee drove in are congratulating him after he crosses home plate. Good game! With the rain delay, the contest lasted five hours and I spent the entire afternoon at Wrigley. Can''t think of a better place to spend an afternoon! It was every bit as neat as I anticipated.

2011-09-01T19:44:00.000-07:00

I roamed around downtown Milwaukee this morning...it's my first visit to the city. The 1895 city hall is classic ornate Victorian architecture. The newer building to the left seems to have been built to mesh with the older structure...a nice touch.

The Milwaukee Art Museum is a stunning structure on the shore of Lake Michigan. It was built, I believe, by the same architect who designed the Sundial bridge in Redding CA.

The inside of the art museum is no less amazing than the exterior.

A lakefront shot of some of the downtown skyline. The art museum on the left, and the US Bank building to the right of it, appear to also have been designed in harmony with each other.

Trompe l'oeil at its best! This side of a building has no windows, no reflection, no indentations in the brickwork...really!

An alternative look at the interior of Miller Park, approaching from beyond center field.

This shot is a little grainy, but I had to take it. Looked behind me, and there, in the flesh, was the Ueck!! Looking good despite recent health problems...hope he continues to roll. Bob Uecker is legendary, and for good reason. How many people can be a major league baseball player, a Hall of Fame broadcaster, a good actor, and a standup comedian?? That's the Ueck!

And of course, a Brewer game wouldn't be a Brewer game without the sausage race! The Bratwurst, in yellow on the right, won today.

The Brewers, alas, did not. The primary agent of their 8-4 demise was Albert Pujols, who went 4 for 4 with two homers, one an opposite field grand slam. Here, Kameron Loe of the Brewers is "holding" Pujols to a single. Blow up the pic to see the ball flying off his bat. Recently I did an analysis and found I had seen in person just over half of the players who have hit 500 major league home runs. I hadn't seen Pujols live before, and he will most likely go over 500 in 2013.

Crusin' the Prairies

2011-08-31T19:23:00.000-07:00

Your correspondent is covering new...or almost new...territory as he cruises eastward across the prairies of the Midwest. As far as southwestern Minnesota, my last trip here was 40 years ago...beyond that it has all been new territory. The scenery doesn't change nearly as rapidly as it does in the West, but it does vary from west to east. Here, in South Dakota west of the Missouri River, the plains are mostly treeless. The main crops are hay, rolled into thousands of loaves, and sunflowers.

The Missouri River from Chamberlain, South Dakota. In 1971 I went down to the river and obtained a bottle of water, such was the exoticism of the legendary Missouri in my mind. Nothing like that this time, but the river is still impressive. For one thing, it served as Lewis and Clark's highway to the west 200 years ago. The river is very wide at this point as it is dammed downstream...and upstream, multiple times.

In 1971 we bypassed the corn palace in Mitchell, SD. Not this time! East of the Missouri, the predominant crop is corn...all the way to Lake Michigan.

The Corn Palace gets its name from the murals on its side, which are made of...corn! Blow up the pic and you'll see the intricate detail. I was unsure whether the entire structure was made of corn...this seemed impractical, and indeed, it's basically steel and stone. But the murals are all corn, of varying colors.

The corn empire reaches its apex in Iowa. This was my first visit to the Hawkeye State, and corn is everywhere! Most structures you pass are tidy farms with silos, and acres and acres of corn, with a few soybeans mixed in, plus a large elongated structure that I assume is a hog barn...Iowa leads the nation in corn and hog production. The land here smells good. It's aromatic with the scent of erupting life, in the humid air. Fecundity run wild! There is a lushness here that is not found in the west, except possibly in the Willamette Valley.

The Awesome Badlands

2011-08-29T20:08:00.000-07:00

Montana is almost as large as California, but has only about as many people as the city of San Jose. Soooo....there are lots of wide open spaces. US 212 between the Little Bighorn battlefield and the Wyoming border is typically empty...of people, but not of scenery. Rolls of hay are common, but often lie in uncommonly beautiful spots.

Traveling southeast from Broadus, the weather deteriorated rapidly. The 25 knot southeasterly outflow winds in Broadus were a clue! The glowering skies in the pic quickly gave way to rain that fell for a good 80 miles, often quite robustly.

Well, as seems to often be the case I am chastising myself for not paying more attention to a wonderful place...in this case the Badlands! I visited today for the first time since September 1971. It wasn't even a national park back then...just a monument. 40 years is waaaaay too long an absence from such a gorgeous, surreal, mystical area. The rain today really brought out the colors of the sedimentary rocks that make up the terrain hereabouts. And the clouds were dramatic, to say the least.

A typical shot, with a nice blend of prairie grasses and colorful rock formations.

The shapes and contours of the Badlands make it a mystical place. It reminds me of Bryce Canyon.

If the exotic rock formations weren't enough, the sky was filled with surrealistic clouds today! Living on the west coast, it's easy to forget how dramatic and harsh...and spectacular...nature can be farther inland.

No, the Solara wasn't photoshopped into this picture! Simply amazing....and breathtaking. A little dark...but it was a gray day, and I had to underexpose the shot to do justice to the clouds.

Another Badlands pic of dramatic landscape and awesome clouds. I'm kind of scooting east, and gave Montana and western South Dakota only two days. Three weeks would be more like it! I have neglected these two states...this is only my fourth visit to Montana and third to SD. More time needs to be spent here. The scenery...and the weather...are spectacular, and there are vast reaches to explore. Even Interstate 90 provides awesome views! You don't even have to leave the freeway to enjoy this area...though, of course, there are many fine side roads too. US 212 in SE Montana is highly recommended.

Fascinating day on the Prairie

2011-08-29T19:45:00.000-07:00

I cruised across the Great Plains today through Montana, Wyoming, and South Dakota. Stormy weather was the rule, and made for spectacular skies, and dramatic photos. Here the clouds are looming above the grasslands near Billings. I had almost forgotten how dramatic cloud pictures are here...makes Monterey look verrry tame.

I visited the Little Bighorn National Monument for the first time. Here, on Last Stand Hill, is where Custer and about 200 of his troops were wiped out by about ten times as many Lakota Sioux and Cheyenne warriors. The Indians charged up this hill, surrounding the US troops, who died on this spot. Custer fell about where the black monument is located in the middle of the picture. Both sides fought valiantly, but it should be remembered that the cause of the Sioux war in 1876 was the massive incursion of white prospectors into the Black Hills in 1874, when gold was discovered there. This was in violation of the 1868 Fort Laramie treaty, which gave the hills to the Sioux, who loved them and would not sell them to the US government when such an offer was made.

Near the top of Last Stand Hill is this memorial to the Native Americans who fought and died at the Little Bighorn. It's pretty awesome, especially when silouhetted against a stormy sky.

This pic gave me an idea of the terrain contested during the battle. The Indians had a large encampment, about 7000 people, in the river valley among the trees and in the open country. In the early stages of the battle, Major Marcus Reno attacked the encampment with only a couple hundred troops. Bad idea. The Sioux and Cheyenne quickly routed his forces, and they retreated up the ravine in the middle of the picture and made a stand near the spot where I took the photo. Though many of Reno's troops were killed, others survived to tell the story, unlike Custer's men.

The area between Last Stand Hill and the Reno-Benteen memorial is private land, used for grazing. Horses still roam free here, a symbol of the Old West.

This plaque is at a rest area near Broadus, in far SE Montana. Blow it up to read the inscription better. Kind of sums up the mentality hereabouts...drive over the vast prairie for awhile and you'll understand.

Hiking at Mount Rainier

2011-08-25T20:54:00.000-07:00

I did a hike near Mount Rainier with some friends yesterday. It was a spectacular day, fine and warm. There was still an unusual amount of snow around for late August...a snowy winter was followed by a long, cold spring. The old snowbanks have been eroded by melting and evaporation into surrealistic patterns.

This snow mosaic is at an elevation of only about 6000 feet. ..on the 24th of August. Some of this snow may not melt before the first batch of autumn covers it.

An alpine tarn is bordered by boreal forest not far from the timberline. Noble fir and Englemann spruce predominate (I think).

Another fine view of a lake. The country on this hike, the Naches loop, is spectacular even by mountain standards!

Speaking of spectacular, The Mountain had a double cap cloud over the summit for most of the day. Rainier never fails to awe me with its massive dominance of the landscape. I visit almost every year, and always take a ton of pictures. Of course, with the changing weather, the scene is a little different every day.

An old snowbank holds out against the August sun.

Another shot of The Mountain, fronted by boreal forest.

Puget Sound Nostalgia

2011-08-23T22:44:00.000-07:00

I visited the University of Washington campus today for the first time in several years...I believe the last time I was here was 2004. Though there's a lot of construction going on, as usual, many things are unchanged. One is the Northlake Tavern, which was already an institution when I began going there upon turning 21 in 1972. I have been back several times since I graduated in 1973, and the pizza has remained constant...absolutely delicious! My old roommate Dick and I scarfed one down together, just as we did when we attended the UW all those years ago.

Denny Hall, built in 1895, remains on campus, still looking like a medieval building as it did decades ago. Inside, however, remodeling has been done and it's considerably nicer than when I was in school.

This mosaic is in Bagley Hall, a chemistry building where Dick took many of his classes.

The Lizards here are matriculating at the UW! They're showing their studious side in the classic Suzzallo library.

The Broken Obelisk at 40 has corroded a bit, but remains prominent in Red Square. It was erected during my tenure at the UW.

Alas, my old dorm is about to meet the wreckers ball. I was a charter mamber of Unit 5 when it opened in the fall of 1969; the name was soon changed to Mercer Hall. Dick and I were roommates here in winter and spring quarters of 1970. The Kingsmen played at our dorm party in the center courtyard twice while I lived here. And now, after just 42 years of service, it's about to be demolished. The car park has already been dug up. I'm not sure what they're replacing ol' Unit 5 with, but its demise is sad to a former resident.

The previous day, rain fell for the first time this

August. Before the precip began, the Olympics were bathed in a beautiful glow as seen from the other side of Hood Canal.

A tug tows a barge across the tranquil waters of Puget Sound, near Port Townsend. I've always liked being by the sound on such a day, with gray skies, light wind, few people, and a brooding aura of tranquility.

A house on Officers Row at Fort Worden state park, near Port Townsend. This is where the movie Officer and a Gentleman was filmed. The fort was used as a coastal defense post from the early 1900s to 1953, when, of course, it became obsolete.

This is the big kahuna slug! This fellow is a good six inches long, which probably makes him the alpha slug at Fort Worden.

Kickin' it in Oregon

2011-08-23T22:17:00.000-07:00

Fine shot of the Oregon coast. The buildings just upper left of center are the Inn at Otter Crest...looks like a nice place to stay.

Wendy and I booked rooms at this Irvington mansion...it's a B&B called Portlands White House. Verrry nice.

Ramblings on the Oregon Coast

2011-08-23T22:16:00.000-07:00

Traveling on the Oregon coast is a feast for the senses. The air is fresh and cool. The scenery always catches the eye, both on a large scale and in smaller scenarios. The ocean roars, untamed and vigorous. Birds and other wildlife abound. It's never the least bit dull here. I came upon this barchan dune just south of Gold Beach. This dune is only three or four feet high, but there are sand formations of identical shape in the Sahara that soar hundreds of feet into the air, shaped by the same process. See wiki for details.

My friend Wendy visited Oregon for the first time, and loved it. What's not to love in the summer? In six days we explored the Columbia Gorge, the coast, the Cascades, and Portland; we visited wineries, Timberline Lodge, and hiked in the rainforest, along the coast, and in the city. All cool. Here Wendy's at a covered bridge near Lincoln City.

The view from our condo at Lincoln City, with the sun lowering in the west over the tranquil Pacific.

We hiked the trail to Cape Lookout, north of Lincoln City. I remember the first time I walked here. It was on a stormy November day in 1977. The wind was howling in exposed areas, blowing sheets of rain horizontally. At the start of this trail, deep in the woods, it was calm, but overhead the 150 foot Sitka spruces were swaying...an eerie vibe. But, not last Sunday! It was sunny and warm, almost hot in exposed areas like this.

The southern Oregon coast is rather isolated, far from the urban areas of the Willamette valley. But it's probably the most spectacular part of Oregon's shoreline. This pic is in Samuel Boardman state park north of Brookings.

Yosemite in Flood

2011-06-18T22:24:00.000-07:00

A snowy winter and a cold, wet spring have delayed the runoff to unusually late in the year in most western mountains. In Yosemite, the waterfalls are blasting at levels seen only one or two years each decade. The roar of Yosemite Falls echoes across the valley into the mountains beyond.

I hiked the Panorama Trail from Glacier Point down to Ililouette Creek, just above the falls of the same name. I overextended a bit...the hike descends 1400 feet in a little over two miles...at over a mile above sea level...and I knew the climb back up would be seriously hard...which it was...but having been on the trail about 15 years before, I knew the hike was worth the effort. Here's a view of Half Dome with Nevada Falls...on the upper right...and Vernal Falls...lower and to the left. The Mist Trail...which ascends just to the right of Vernal...must have been really really wet yesterday!

Eventually, hiking down from Glacier Point, I reached the top of Ililouette Falls, a wall of water plunging into the canyon.

The water that goes over all those falls eventually winds up in the Merced River down in the valley. Needless to say, it's flooding; not seriously, but enough to close some boardwalks.

Farther down the Merced, the river roars by, now fed by the slamming waters of Bridalveil Falls. El Capitan stands sentinel in the distance.

More Irish Scenes

2011-06-07T21:10:00.001-07:00

In this set of pix I've included some surreal natural scenes; some historic shots; modern pix; and some others. Ireland is really a diverse place with an abundance of natural beauty, historic sites, and modern energy, sometimes whimsical and fun loving. This is another basalt shot at Giants Causeway in Ulster. In the western US there is a lot of columnar basalt, but you usually see it in full column form, from below. Here you walk on the top of the columns...a different perspective.

A good shot of the Carrick-a-Rede rope bridge...yes, I did go across.

Guinness is good for you! I had about a pint a day whilst in Ireland, and I actually did have a bit more spring in my step!

One of the old city gates through the walls into Derry. The walls are almost 400 years old.

And, just a couple blocks away, a shining new pedestrian bridge is being built over the River Foyle. It's very similar in design to the Sundial Bridge in Redding...probably built by the same architect.

Roaring Meg, still sitting on the Derry walls after over 300 years. Though the civil strife of the Troubles has been pretty much over for at least 20 years, for some reason Roaring Meg is pointed right at...Bogside, site of Bloody Sunday at the height of the Troubles in 1972. Is this a coincidence??

Roaring Meg was cast in 1642, as the inscription shows. It was shipped from London to Derry for civil defense, and was used seriously in the 1689 siege.

The grave of William Butler Yeats, one of Ireland's foremost poets and playwrights in the early 20th century. It's just north of Sligo town; he loved the county and spent much of his life here.

Salthill, a seaside suburb of Galway. Ominous clouds in the background.

Towering cumulus loom above Galway cathedral. This cathedral is perhaps most notable for NOT being centuries old...in fact, it was built in the middle of the 20th century, completed only in 1965!

More Ireland

2011-06-02T20:51:00.001-07:00

I'm home from Ireland, but was lazy the last few days there and didn't blog. In Northern Ireland I went to a couple major tourist spots. One was Giants' Causeway, a promontory of columnar basalt extending into the North Atlantic. It's quite cool...the columns are a bit surrealistic. I've seen this stuff before in all three west coast states, but it's always interesting.

Just east of Giants' Causeway is Carrick-a-Rede rope bridge. It was originally constructed to provide access to an island used for fishing by the locals, but is now almost exclusively a tourist attraction. My friend Wendy would love it...she has acrophilia, a love of heights. The bridge is roughly 100 feet above the ocean.

This is a street sign in Derry. The odd name derives from the fact that this section of Bishop Street is within the city walls, constructed about 400 years ago. The section of Bishop St outside the walls is named Bishop Street Without.

Sligo, a pleasant city in northwestern Ireland. There is a nice riverwalk in the heart of town.

I finished my trip in Galway. The central city is teeming with energy...there are tons of shops, restaurants, and pubs...great grazing and bar hopping! It's a college town and there are many young people, who together with the tourists give the city a fine cosmopolitan air. Great place!

Derry Murals

2011-05-27T14:02:00.000-07:00

In the 1990s and early 2000s, three Derry residents painted a series of murals in Bogside depicting scenes from The Troubles. Most of the slums in Bogside have been razed, but the end of this house with the famous phrase has been preserved. It dates from the Battle of Bogside in 1969, when citizens of the 'hood erected barricades and evicted the Royal Ulster Constabulary from the area.

This mural is titled Petrol Bomber.

Here's Bernadette Devlin. Devlin was elected to the UK parliament...at 21 the youngest MP...and also led protests against British rule and anti-Catholic discrimination. Protestant Ulster paramilitaries tried to assassinate her in 1981 and shot her seven times...despite the fact that her house was being guarded by British troops at the time. But she survived and remains civically active in Northern Ireland.

Bloody Sunday. Note the British soldier standing on a bloodstained civil rights banner.

Left mural is Motorman...this was the name of the military operation conducted by British troops to take back the Bogside. On the right is The Runner.

This one is titled Civil Rights. The protesters in Derry felt they were kindred spirits with anti Vietnam war protesters, civil rights marchers in the US, and other such groups 40 years ago.

Hunger Strike. This commemorates the hunger strikers in the Maze prison in Belfast who went on a protest hunger strike in October 1980. They were arguing for the retention of their status as political prisoners, which had been revoked by the British. They also refused to wear prison issued clothes, thus are clad only in blankets. I remember Bobby Sands, slowly starving to death during that strike, on world news almost every night. It was amazing to me, and a little horrifying, that someone would have such deep convictions to do that. I was kind of neutral in the whole dispute...a nonreligious, non Irish American, but the pictures and stories of that time were still very moving. Ten hunger strikers starved.

Death of Innocence depicts Annette McGavigan, a 14 year old girl shot by British troops on 6 Sep 1971. She was the 100th person to die in The Troubles. The butterfly represents a hope for peace; the broken rifle depicts the failure of violence.

This mural commemorates the 25th anniversary of Bloody Sunday, depicting the 14 people who died.

Derry

2011-05-27T13:26:00.001-07:00

I'm now in Northern Ireland, in Derry...known in English circles as Londonderry, but none of the Irish in the Republic call it that. The site of Derry has been inhabited for at least 1500 years, but the current city is relatively new by European standards...400 years old. Several earlier settlements were destroyed or abandoned. When the current town was started, the planners decided to make it more defensible and built this sturdy stone wall around it, from 1614-1618. The walls are still almost completely intact...the only Irish city with that distinction. They were tested twice later in the 17th century and were never penetrated by an invader...thus Derry's nickname, The Maiden City.
This is Roaring Meg, the largest cannon on the walls at 1794 kilos. Meg was built for the city in 1642 on the first occasion enemies tried to breach the wall. The cannon was used extensively, probably in this very spot, during the 1689 siege when James II, the deposed Catholic king of England, was trying to win his kingdom back. But Derry would not yield, and after 105 days the siege was broken by a fleet allied with William of Orange, which came up the River Foyle and chased James away. There of course have been many disturbances since then. Though things are fairly calm now, I find it ironic that Roaring Meg is pointed...right at Bogside. That neighborhood was of course a central spot of The Troubles that plagued Northern Ireland from the late 1960s til the early '90s.

One of the most tragic events of The Troubles occurred right here, in Bogside, on 30 January 1972. Derry was crawling with British troops then...there had been violence at times for over three years. On this day paratroopers fired into a crowd demonstrating against a policy of internment without trial, an emergency measure imposed the previous year. Thirteen unarmed protesters were killed on the spot...another died of his wounds several months later. Another twelve, also unarmed, were injured. Two inquiries were held into the shooting. The first, by the British government, merely found that the shootings "bordered on the reckless". This finding destroyed what little faith the Catholics had left in the British authority. After peace had returned decades later, a second inquiry was held. This time the shootings were declared "unjustified and unjustifiable" and British prime minister David Cameron made a formal apology on behalf of the British government.

Of course, it's still a hot topic here, but discrimination against Catholics has been reduced significantly and these days disputes are almost all settled with words instead of guns. I had been interested in The Troubles for many years...I remember watching the unrest on TV during my college years and thereafter, and thinking it was sad that a Christian first world country would have so much sectarian violence. It was rather emotional to visit Bogside, where a lot of the trouble went down.

Of the fourteen people killed on Bloody Sunday, six were younger than me...a seventh was just about the same age. For almost four decades since, I've been carryin' on...they should have been too.

Derry has been renovated considerably in recent decades, but there are still many rows of old homes on the narrow side streets.

Whoa! Look who's on the UK ten pound note. Charles Darwin his own self. Now can you imagine what an uproar would go down in the US if Darwin made an appearance on our money? The creationists would go postal!! And in the UK, when Darwin published Origin of Species in the mid 1800s there was a ton of controversy. But since then, faced with a mountain of corroborating scientific evidence, apparently the large majority of English have accepted his theory of evolution, and the remaining dissenters are politely ignored. A refreshing difference from the US.

County Donegal

2011-05-26T10:41:00.000-07:00

The past two days I've been in County Donegal, Ireland's northernmost county and one of its most beautiful...which is saying something. Here's the Triangle in Donegal town at dusk, which comes around 10 PM this time of year. We're at latitude 55 here, well north of Edmonton Alberta.

Slieve League, the highest sea cliffs in Ireland...600 metres straight up out of the ocean. It was a primeval day when I visited. Gray, foreboding skies added to the majesty of the cliffs. 40 knot winds enhanced the bleakness deliciously. I would have liked to stay a long time...there were picnic tables, but 50 degrees and 40 knots did not constitute ideal picnic weather.

Loch Beagh, near Glenveagh Castle. The clouds parted just enough to let in some magical sunlight, on an otherwise rainy day.

Today I hiked the McSwynes Gun Loop trail near Dunfanaghy, where I'm staying. This proved to be a gorgeous 9 km trek over dunes, through grasslands, high above the sea, and through farmlands dotted with sheep and ruins of ancient houses. The wind howled, and the ocean roared. Raw nature in spectacular form. This is Tramore Beach.

Grassy dunes just inland from the ocean were almost as awesome as the surf. This far north, the light for photography is awesome.

More scenes in Connemara and Mayo

2011-05-25T11:29:00.000-07:00

On the grounds of Kylemore Abbey is a small but exquisite Gothic church, built by the owner in the late 1870s in remembrance of his wife, who died of dysentery during a holiday in Egypt.

This stained glass window is in the church.

Within the church, five kinds of marble are used, coming from each of Ireland's four historic counties...Ulster, Connacht, Leinster, and Munster.

Near Westport, this sculpture is a memorial to the victims of the Irish potato famine from 1845-51. It's a depiction of one of the ships that brought over two million emigrants out of Ireland during that time, mostly to the US. Another million died in Ireland from starvation and disease. Before the famine, about eight million people lived on the island...the population is still less that that after all this time, about six million.

The figurehead on the famine ship. Many people were already in a bad way when they boarded, and died en route to America. The famine was caused by a severe potato blight, enhanced by prolonged cold, wet weather (no surprise there!) that killed the lumpen, the spud eaten by most peasants. The British government proved uncapable (or unwilling) to supply the peasants with alternative food.

Out in far western Ireland on the peninsulas lies the Gaeltaecht, areas of the country where Irish is spoken as an everday language by much of the population. Folks in the Gaeltaecht also speak English, but many of the signs are in Irish only...bit confusing to us tourons. The pictures help.

I swung over to Achill Island yesterday. It has tranquil interior scenes...many working peat bogs. The coast is spectacular!

The Victorian Class System

2011-05-24T11:40:00.000-07:00

Yesterday I visited Kylemore Abbey, one of Ireland's top tourist attractions. The Victorian mansion was completed in 1870 for a wealthy family, who enjoyed it up to 1903. The mansion was then sold to an English count who lost it in a card game. Rather a dissolute fellow...living off his rich Cincinnati wife's money. Eventually in 1920 the mansion was purchased by an order of Irish nuns who made it into an abbey and girls' school. It's still owned by the nuns and now run jointly by them and the Irish government.

When it was a private residence, the mansion of course had a large staff of caretakers. There was a world class Victorian walled garden, now restored. This was the dining room of the gardeners...distinctly rustic.

The Head Gardener, though, was in a much more prestigious position, running one of the top gardens in the British Isles. He and his family lived a comfortable middle class life...this was their dining room. Still not large, but much more comfy than the one used by his subordinates.

But of course, the mansion's proprietors lived in upper clahs splendor, dining in this ornate room with a black marble fireplace and the family crest on every glass. This table, fine as it is, seems a bit small for the room, and our tour guide said that larger tables were frequently used when houseguests were present.

Thus, Kylemore Abbey presents a neat vision of the UK class system during the Victorian era. Ireland of course was still in the UK in the late 1800s.

It was quite a blustery day yesterday. A 975 millibar low passed just north of Ireland and the predicted winds of 70-100 kph verified. It was reallly howling when I took this pic...blow it up and check out the streaks of spindrift on the water!

Logistics in Connemarra

2011-05-22T13:59:00.000-07:00

There have been a wide variety of human activities in Connemara over the centuries, some of them a bit unusual by modern standards. Here's the staircase at Aughnanure Castle in County Galway. It was built by the O'Flaherty family in the 16th century. They were a rambunctious bunch, and often warred with their neighbors, so they built some shrewd defensive measures into the castle. Take this spiral staircase. It goes upward in a clockwise direction...we're looking down in this pic. Now if you are a right handed swordsman like most people, you can only get a full swing off if you're a defender, above the people trying to attack you and get upstairs. Their right handers are inhibited by the stone wall on the inside of the staircase. So the attackers would be at a severe disadvantage unless they had a bunch of lefties heading up the stairs.

Here's a wide view of the castle. The walls sloped a little outward at the bottom, meaning defenders could pitch, say, rocks or boiling oil from the battlements at the top and that stuff would ricochet outward toward the attackers. There was also a "murder hole" in the floor above the main entrance to the castle. Defenders could shoot arrows or throw stuff at the attackers trying to get in the front door, without risk to themselves.

All this was fine until the English employed modern technology in 1572...artillery! Murder holes turned out not to work very well against cannonballs. But, the O'Flahertys eventually reacquired the castle through peaceful means, and turned it over to the government in the mid 20th century; it's now a national historic site.

This is a memorial to John Alcock and Arthur Brown, who, it may surprise most Americans to learn, were the first people to fly nonstop across the Atlantic from North America to Europe! They did it in 1919, eight years before Lindbergh, and landed in a bog a couple miles from here, near Clifden in Connemara. There is, however, an asterisk...they took off from Newfoundland and landed here in Ireland...of course both are islands, but considered parts of North America and Europe respectively. Lindbergh was the first aviator to do a nonstop from mainland to mainland, which was a considerably longer flight.

Ireland is a boggy place. Here in Connemara the average annual rainfall is about 65 inches; the average annual evaporation is around 20. Can you say waterlogged? For millennia this soggy land has processed the grass, gorse, etc into peat, which is several feet deep in many places. When cut up into strips and dried, the peat makes excellent fuel...burning without a spark (good if you live in a thatched hut) and coming in very handy if you don't have forests for wood or buffalo for chips. This pic shows an old peat bog...blow up the image and you can see neat cuts that have been made over the years to extract peat. The area is now in Connemara National Park and is not used anymore...who knows when it was? Could be 20 years ago, or 200. Peat is a renewable resource...but long term, like timber. Don't know how fast peat replenishes itself...a guess would be a foot a century or so.

Here's a closeup of a modern, ongoing peat operation. The hillock in the background is being gradually shaved back and the peat cut into strips (foreground) and left out to dry. A problematical task as it rains nearly every day here! You can buy peat in stores, take it home, and use it for fuel...Wiki says more than 20 percent of Irish homes are heated by peat!

Dingle Sojourns

2011-05-21T12:52:00.000-07:00

The Dingle countryside is fascinating. On one hand it's full of natural beauty...soaring ocean cliffs, rugged hills, pristine beaches. On the other, there's history everywhere. This is Kilmakeder church, built in the 12th century. Blow up the pic and you can see rather intricate artwork in the doorway. The site was used for worship long before the church was built...there are relics, including a sundial and a cross, on the site that are several centuries older.

Though the church is a ruin, the adjacent cemetery is still being used, intensively in fact...many graves are new. Some are inscribed in Irish, which is spoken routinely by many of the inhabitants in this area. They all speak English too, but roam around Dingle and you'll hear people conversing in Irish. To an English speaker, it's an exotic language...unlike French, Spanish, and German, few words are like their English counterparts. And the pronunciation is baffling. For example, the Prime Minister of Ireland, Enda Kenny, is known as the Taoiseach. This is pronounced tee-shock. Go figure.

One day I parked my car at Brandon Point, and hiked far above it to a stone cairn, perhaps a grave or memorial dating from the distant past. I met a man relaxing there, perhaps a decade older than me but in better shape. Turns out he works for an NGO and was just home from Sudan...what a change! Lots of turmoil there...his jeep was shot at one day. He's a local resident and comes to this spot for a tranquility fix. Different world from Sudan. We talked about Africa, and Obama, and some of his favorite spots nearby. He was into the spirituality of the land, of the people that had gone before him, and in this place, I understood perfectly. Kind of a mystical experience.

The islets you see offshore are some of the Seven Hogs, like my neighborhood pub in Castlegregory.

My acquaintance told me about Cahir Conree, an Iron Age fort inhabited, legend has it, by the high king of Munster over two thousand years ago. He suggested I hike up to it. Well, it's a long way up. I'm maybe two thirds of the way up there, and if you blow up this pic and look just above the center, you may be able to see my car...a loooong way down.

Alas, I didn't make it to the fort. As near as I can tell, it's on the top of the peak to the left...I made it to the little saddle on the ridge just right of center. Not only was the latter part of that trek hellaciously steep, but much of the trail was pure Russian Front...massive quagmires of mud. But, the country was vast and beautiful and it was a great workout. Slid on my butt a couple times on the way down and got wet and muddy, but fortunately the rental house had a very efficient washer and dryer so my wardrobe made a complete recovery.

Hangin' in Kerry

2011-05-18T11:03:00.000-07:00

I'm in my rental house at Castlegregory, on the northern side of the Dingle Peninsula. No internet at the house so I'm at the Seven Hogs, sipping Guinness and eating delicious fish 'n chips whilst using their internet tonight. This area has some of the best beaches in Ireland...long, vast strands that are hugely wide when the tide is out. The weather was sketchy last weekend but made for some fine storm pictures.

From my house you go a couple miles north, and you're at the beach. Go four miles in the other direction, and you're in the midst of the mountains, with gorgeous lochs all round. The country looks and feels like it's about ten thousand feet up in the Sierra or Colorado Rockies...there are patches of forest giving to tundra-like scenes, it's cool and windy...but I'm less than a thousand feet above sea level here! By the way, blow up this pic and check out the stone wall going up the mountain a little to the right of the trees. Some serious work was done to build that!

Near the town of Dingle there are many historic sites from ancient Ireland. Some of the settlers circa 6th-8th centuries AD lived in beehive huts like this one. Looks rugged but they apparently kept the wind and rain out pretty well. And lasted a long time.

Dingle is a small town...only about 2000 people... but it's a major tourist hub. This is a typical street...it's a great place just to walk about and explore. It's only medium lively right now but in summer I guess it's packed. Nicer this way... you can easily get a parking place.

On the peninsula west of Dingle is Gallarus Oratory, an ancient church built circa 11th century. From what I've read, it hasn't been restored...it's remained intact for about a millennium! Couldn't get a shot with no people around as I arrived along with two tour buses.

Ramblin' on The Ring

2011-05-13T14:34:00.001-07:00

The Ring of Kerry is simultaneously extolled as one of the most gorgeous parts of Ireland, and denigrated as touron chaos. Exploring in mid May, I've hit it lucky; the first part of the equation is spot on, and it's very quiet, in between the early May bank holiday and the summer high season. Ate at a fine restaurant in Sneem tonight, recommended by my B&B hosts, Friday night, not too early... 7-8PM...and I was the only diner!
Like any great scenic area, the Kerry coast produces some surreal scenes. Look at this water...green and crystalline. Bahamas? Hawaii? Nope. Ireland? Sure!

Went hiking on Valentia Island today. It's on the Skellig Ring, a smashingly scenic drive west of the Ring of Kerry. Only a few people here. I walked high upon a grassy headland, blending with the sea, sky, and land.

Here's Bray Head, looking out to the Skellig Islands. The right island, Great Skellig, was home to Christian monks from about the 6th to 13th centuries. It's harsh enough here on the mainland...cool and windy most of the time. It's cooler and windier out there. They built beehive-shaped huts out of stone, tended gardens in wind sheltered areas, fished, and traded goods with passing ships. But still, on a stormy winter day...REALLY harsh.

Late this afternoon, I drove through the resort town of Waterville, and caught the light just right. Blind pig syndrome at its finest.

After a sunny afternoon, the rain returned this evening. This shot was taken from my room at the B&B. I have a fabulous view...I can see the sea and sky changing all the time, and as dusk falls the light at The Bull, a rocky islet shrouded in the rain in this shot, starts beaming.

2011-05-13T13:46:00.000-07:00

On the west coast of Ireland, you encounter vast coastal vistas. The air is fresh and bracing; the scenery is stunning; and the countryside is balanced between land and sea, and between civilization and wildness. It's stimulating and awesome. Long ago, Ireland was densely forested...no wonder, with a climate similar to the Pacific coast from Northern California to Vancouver Island, where the big kahuna trees grow. That's not the case now...no more than 10 percent of the country is forested. Most of the trees were cleared for farming centuries ago. Others were cut down and became masts for His Majesty's British Navy ships of the line. But a few patches of old growth forest remain, such as this forest park near Glengarriff. Here, large old oaks such as this one, and ancient pine forests are still thriving. In other areas, pine and fir forests have been planted in recent years...some will probably be commercially logged. These are fairly common, and I reckon that by 2050 Ireland will be considerably more forested than it is today.

Healy Pass, on the Beara Peninsula. It's a barren, cold, windy, alpine scene...at only a thousand feet above sea level! Scenery consists of grand rocky heights, grasslands, and sheep.

The light for photography in Ireland is outstanding. The northern latitude gives low sun angles which accentuate colors. The mix of clouds, sun, and showers brings clear air and constantly changing hues. This is the shoreline near my B&B on the Ring of Kerry.

At 8 PM it's still over an hour before sunset. The shades of the rocks, sea, mountains, and sky become mysterious and magical.

Mussels cover rock and compose a modernist scene. The coast here is ancient, beautiful, wild, and surreal. It's easy to get absorbed into it.

2011-05-11T13:00:00.000-07:00

Driving on the Sheep's Head peninsula, I rode high above Bantry Bay to the north...where this picture was taken...and Dunmanus Bay to the south. Sweeping vistas, fresh, bracing air. And traces of the past everywhere.

Strolled a short segment of the Sheeps Head Way, a 90 plus mile long hiking route that traverses the length of the peninsula. A couple of the locals sauntered over to get petted when I walked by.

I'm staying in the small town of Baltimore, in extreme southwest Ireland. Very quiet this week after a major trad festival last weekend, which I unfortunately missed. This coastline reminds me of Maine...the same rocky meeting of land and sea; quaint towns; and nine months of tranquility outside the summer touron season.

A beach near Mizen head on a gray, pensive day.
Like my old stomping grounds in Oregon and Washington, Ireland has a lot of such days.

I'm on the Old Head of Kinsale here. This is a monument to the 1198 people who died when the Lusitania was torpedoed 11 miles offshore on May 7, 1915. A German U-boat did the deed. Britain considered it a heinous crime, but it appears the Lusitania wasn't playing by the rules...it posed as an innocent passenger liner, sailing from New York to England, but was carrying munitions as well as civilian passengers. Apparently the Germans knew this. Some of the local fishermen took to sea and rescued survivors. The sinking, which killed 128 Americans, played a large part in turning US sympathies against the Germans, though it was another two years before the US entered World War I.

2011-05-09T13:16:00.000-07:00

This is the cathedral at the Rock of Cashel in County Tipperary. This was a seat of power for Irish kings as far back as the 4th or 5th century AD. This structure was built in stages from the 12th to 14th centuries. Like most old Irish historical sites, it had a stormy history, but when it was abandoned in the 18th century there wasn't really any drama. The cathedral is on the top of the rock...a natural fortress...and the parishoners simply tired of trudging uphill...or trying to drive their carriages downhill...when attending services. So the church was abandoned and a new one built on level ground below in the town of Cashel.

The Glen of Aherlow in county Tipperary...a setting as lovely as its name.

St Fin Barre's cathedral, in Cork. By Irish standards it's a new structure, dating from the 1870s. This is an Anglican church.

A swan on the River Lee in Cork. Water's flowing a bit high and muddy after several days of rain.

Row houses on Connaught Ave in Cork. There's a university nearby...University College Cork, so I imagine many of these places are occupied by students. Cool place to live.

Kilkenny

2011-05-07T12:43:00.001-07:00

I spent today roaming around Kilkenny. The town is a fascinating blend of medieval history and modern energy, a combination that doesn't exist in the States. This is St Canice's Cathedral, which was completed in 1285. There had been other places of worship on this site before. A wooden church burned down in 1087. The structure on the right, the Round Tower, predates the cathedral by centuries...it was constructed in 849. The cathedral used to have a bell tower. This collapsed as the end result of a downright medieval scandal. It seems a prominent woman in town, Dame Alice Kyteler, ran through four wealthy husbands in a suspiciously short period of time. As a result the local bishop, Richard Ledrede, charged and convicted her...and her maid...of witchcraft. Alice's nephew, William Outlawe, was also implicated. After all, he WAS an Outlawe! In the end Dame Alice bailed to London. Her maid, left behind, was burned at the stake. William was very strongly encouraged to finance a reroofing of the bell tower, which he did. In those days the roofing tiles were made of lead, and the weight of the new roof caused the tower to collapse in 1332. It is not known whether or not this was William's intention! The bishop also fell into disfavor, but returned after a 20 year exile and refurbished the damaged building. He's buried here. The first picture shows his sarcophagus.

Magnificent stained glass windows adorn the cathedral...for a really good pic you'd need a tripod. These are new by European standards...built in the 19th century during a renovation which is ongoing. This was required because Oliver Cromwell trashed the place in 1650. He destroyed the ancient and reportedly exquisite windows, deconsecrated the church, and used it as a stable for his horses. This was all rather typical of the depredations Cromwell visited on Ireland...he's not a popular fellow in these parts.

The cathedral has a model of Kilkenny as it existed in 1642. It hasn't changed all that much, except the buildings have all got nice new coats of paint. The streets are still narrow and not very conducive to cars, so it's better to walk.

The 1642 model depicts the city's walls. Several segments of the old stone barriers still exist, including this gate.

Another shot of Kilkenny Castle, shown yesterday as well. Most of the Butler Family, who owned the castle from 1391 to 1967, are buried at St Canice's.

Cliffs and Castles

2011-05-06T13:27:00.001-07:00

Yesterday I explored The Burren, an area of limestone uplands in County Clare. The Burren is a mystical place, with surreal rock formations, windswept highlands, and a loooong history. This is the Poulnabrone dolmen, a megalithic tomb constructed between 5 and 6 thousand years ago. Underneath the burial mound, archaeologists unearthed the remains of 33 people. It's hard to explain, but in stark areas like this I feel the spirits of many generations of past people, lost in antiquity. The land has been farmed and grazed for millennia.

Danny highly recommended I see the Cliffs of Moher from below, on the ocean, as well as from above. My hosts at the B&B in Doolin said the same thing. Yesterday I took a cruise below the cliffs, and they were right! Spectacular.

The sea stack in front of the cliffs in the previous picture is home to thousands of birds, who have made it an avian condo. Mostly kittiwakes and cormorants.

It was a rough trip out to the cliffs as we sailed into the strong southerly swell and winds. On the way back to Doolin, though, we surfed home with a nice tailwind. We raced a squall approaching from the south.

Today I drove to Kilkenny, in southeastern Ireland. Right downtown is one of the finest castles in the country. It was built in 1192. A single family occupied it from 1391 to 1935. Now it's a museum. Kilkenny is a bustling modern town on one hand, and a medieval time capsule on the other. I'll explore it in depth tomorrow.

First Day in Ireland

2011-05-04T23:16:00.000-07:00

I'm in Ireland...first time here, only my third in Europe. The continent has been badly neglected! These are the cliffs of Moher, rising over 600 feet straight out of the Atlantic. Foggy, showery morning, but the grandeur is still evident. It's wild, ancient country.

I'm staying in Doolin, a tiny town near the cliffs. This is the view from my B&B.

O'Connor's pub is on the main drag, a block from my B&B. This is one of the country's hotspots for Irish traditional music, known as trad. I went to a trad session last night...great music, and a lively, convivial atmosphers with a mix of locals, Americans, and Euros. O'Connor's also serves great food...had dinner there. Trad music is totally Irish...it's been around in various forms for centuries.

Here's the B&B where I'm staying, with the resident horse. The overview pic of Doolin was taken from my room. So, I have an ocean view, am within walking distance of a great pub, and have horses (and cows) for neighbors. A nice setup!

Looking out toward the Aran Islands in the evening, with the wild Atlantic. Sunset isn't til after 9 PM, and there was still a hint of twilight at 10:30 when I left the pub.

Joshua Tree Ramblings

2011-04-05T20:07:00.000-07:00

I'm on the way home from Arizona. As usual, I drove thru Joshua Tree National Park. And, like last year, there are a lot of fine spring flowers after a wet winter. The winter was also cold, so the blooms are a bit late. A lot of cactus are not yet blooming, but this beavertail was a spectacular exception!

JTNP has flowers in the spring, and cool rocks all year round. Here desert dandelions carpet the ground with a big ol' rockpile in the distance.

The various types of hardy plant life in the desert are often bizarre and artistic when viewed close up. Here a cholla cactus bristles at the photographer. Not good to get too close!

The Lizards, of course, love the desert; it's their natural habitat. And here Lizard and Verde have found a friend...a real lizard! The picture is a little deceptive...the lizard in the background is actually on a different rock. The Lizards enjoyed hanging out with a fellow member of the species.

JTNP has a lot of big rockpiles. Actually, these stones were once underground. They were split by magma intrusion, then exposed by erosion, and then weathered by millennia of freezing and thawing. JTNP is one of my favorite places...it's beautiful and surreal. I was thinking of staying here another day, but it's supposed to turn cool and windy tomorrow so I probably won't. Sometime, though, I''ll come back and poke around for several days instead of just passing through.

Jerome

2011-04-01T21:40:00.001-07:00

Ol' Dave and The Venerable Pinniped took a road trip to Jerome earlier this week. It's an old mining town about 120 miles NW of Sun City, 20 miles W of Sedona. Copper, gold, and silver were extracted here from the late 1800s until 1953, when the last copper mine closed. In its heyday in the 1920s there were 15,000 people living here, but by the late 1950s the number was less than 100. Now it's about 400-500, not counting throngs of tourons. However, most of them are daytrippers, crowding the streets during the afternoon but leaving the town quiet in the night and morning hours. This is the main drag.

We stayed at the Jerome Grand Hotel. The building was a hospital from 1927 to 1950; then it was mostly abandoned til the mid 1990s, when it was purchased from the mining company of Phelps Dodge and converted into a hotel. The hallways are decorated in period furniture. There's a cool old style cage elevator, too.

Here's a view of the hotel from outside. Rumor is that it's haunted, but all Dave and I heard was each other snoring.

The hotel sits high on a hill overlooking the town and the Verde Valley, 2000 feet below. The entire town is perched on the hillside. There are lots of good restaurants and saloons...Jerome is highly recommended!

Spring in the Desert Southwest

2011-03-27T19:03:00.000-07:00

I'm kicking it in the desert southwest. This has not been a great flower year so far...the winter was rather cold, so the blooms are late. They should wind up being rather prolific in Cali, where a lot of rain has fallen, but it's been drier in Arizona so the season may be mediocre. Still, there's some color. This is a Chia flower in Joshua Tree NP.

A fine chuparosa in JTNP.

Macro shot of a desert dandelion. I'll go thru JTNP again next week...the flowers will probably be much more numerous than they were on March 18, when this pic was taken.

A cristate saguaro in White Tank Mountain Regional Park, west of Phoenix. The crested top is a growth anomaly that is very rare. However, this is one of two within about a mile and a half of each other in the park.

The only cacti I saw blooming in White Tank last week were hedgehogs...this is the best one of the lot, and quite a good one indeed.

Cali Coast in Winter

2011-02-12T19:10:00.001-08:00

Twelve days into February, almost every day in the region from Monterey to Mendocino counties has been sunny and mild...crisp at night, balmy during the day. This is not too rare...it's certainly more common to have a stretch of fine weather like this in February than in July. I do a lot of hiking and exploring in such conditions. I was hiking at Point Lobos a few days ago and came upon this deer, grazing in the forest. She is obviously accustomed to humans to the point of being blase. She posed for several photos.

Cypress trees are by nature gnarly. When exposed to the wind and weather along the coast at Point Lobos, gnarliness becomes an art form.

A few days ago I ventured up north. Here's the mouth of the Russian River at Jenner. It looks like summer...the river is entering the ocean through a channel only a few feet wide. It's a little different during floods...the Russian rages into the Pacific and hundreds of yards offshore you can see a sharp boundary between muddy river water and the clear blue ocean. But there have only been a couple days of rain in the past six weeks, so the Russian is unseasonably sluggish right now.

I'm currently hanging at The Sea Ranch, one of my favorite spots. These are pebbles at...Pebble Beach...Sonoma county version, 240 road miles north of the Pebble Beach currently hosting the golf tournament.

What would a visit to The Sea Ranch be without paying a call on the sloats?? There are many here; they hang out on the rocks, soaking up the sun. These are harbor seals, so they don't make much noise.

Nature's Abstract Winter Art

2011-01-27T21:09:00.000-08:00

Spent a couple days at Yosemite this week. There were plenty of people at the Lodge, but very few in the park otherwise, so overall it was quiet and uncrowded. The park received substantial snowfall in December, but there has been virtually no precipitation for over three weeks. The snowpack thaws a little every day, freezes every night, and is trampled by the tourons. Thus, it has evolved into quintessential Sierra Cement...almost solid ice. Beautiful to view, treacherous to walk upon. Winter seems to be conducive to a lot of abstract nature photos. You have to put up with the cold, and walk carefully on the ice...the Fargo walk, kind of a waddle putting your feet straight down and lifting them straight up...works well. But it's worth the beauty trip.

This pond in a valley meadow has been long frozen, with some broken ice added. Late in the afternoon, the light becomes wondrous.

Yosemite Falls, reflected in the Merced River during a calm morning.

When the river gets a few ripples, an impressionist effect is achieved.

A boulder draped with old snow. This was the first time I had visited Yosemite in midwinter. It was peaceful and gorgeous, unspoilt; perhaps like the park was all the time a century ago. I saw a bear, a coyote, and a bobcat during my stay. I'll make more winter visits!

2011-01-07T19:55:00.002-08:00

When I wander around the desert southwest, I realize that it presents unlimited opportunities for immersing myself into landscapes that are absolutely fascinating, spiritual, and beautiful. And the beauty takes many forms. Basically, this is a harsh land, with little precipitation, extreme temperatures, and rugged terrain. But within this framework is endless diversity of scene and atmosphere. It's mystical here. Even in simple pictures, magic appears. These snow crystals have been created by several days of afternoon thaws and nighttime hard freezes...daytime temperatures are in the 40s, and at night the mercury drops to zero or below. When you toss a handful of crystals into the air, they sparkle in the sunlight. And at some point, a critter passed through. The air is crisp and clean. It's totally refreshing. It's no wonder that countless artists have made their home in this part of the country.

Here's the work of one of them, who grew up here. This is a mural by Fred Kabotie, a Hopi painter and silversmith. It's inside the Desert View Watchtower, a 70 foot high structure built by Mary Colter in 1932. Colter was the chief architect for the Fred Harvey Company, the national parks' main concessioner in the first half of the 20th century. She build many notable structures in the desert southwest.

Back in Sedona, I hiked the Courthouse Butte Loop today. Though the temperature was in the 50s, snow does not melt much in shady spots in the calm, dry air. There was a storm last week, with wet snow and possibly some rain. Probably, some melting did occur during and right after the storm, but as soon as the skies cleared, temperatures plunged, and the water froze that night as it ran over the red rock on the north side of the butte. A week later, status quo.

In sunnier areas, a trickle of snowmelt runs down a rocky wash. This almost looks like a satellite photo of a large river running through a desert. But, the stream here is only a few inches wide, the picture taken from eye level above it.

A little farther down the wash, altocumulus clouds are reflected in a pool. Water in the desert is always noteworthy; mix it with clouds, and you have really good photo ops.

Desert View Tower

2011-01-07T19:06:00.000-08:00

Yesterday I visited the Desert View Watchtower, at the eastern entrance of Grand Canyon NP. I had neglected this spot far too much, usually zooming past on my way out of the park. Recognizing this, and being retired and thus not really in a hurry, this time I stopped to investigate. It turns out that this structure is on the US register of historic places. It was built by Mary Colter, a renowned architect of the first half of the twentieth century, who conceived the design and supervised the laying of every stone. The building was completed in 1932; it's more modern than it appears as it has a steel framework hidden underneath the rock and adobe. There is a gift shop on the ground floor, and the upper floors serve as an observatory with nice views of the eastern Grand Canyon. The tower is 70 feet high.

The interior of the tower is filled with cool murals that were painted by Fred Kabotie, a notable Hopi painter, silversmith, and educator.

There are four floors within the tower; murals dominate the second and third levels. Spiral staircases lead upward.

Cedar Mountain, an old volcanic cone, is prominent to the east, just above the rim of the canyon.

2011-01-05T19:45:00.000-08:00

I'm hangin' at the Grand Canyon, at least in the vicinity. Actually I'm staying at the Best Western a few miles south of the South Rim. I stay at BWs so often that I occasionally get upgraded to suites. For 80 bucks, I'm currently residing in a huge place almost as large as my townhouse. The bathroom is vast and has a jacuzzi tub and even a bidet! As for the canyon, well, look at it! A foot of snow fell last week and is still mostly in place. I've never been here with more than a dusting of snow on the ground...until now.

This tree is growing on a ledge without any visible means of support for its roots. But somehow, it manages.

The snow, low winter sun, gnarly trees, and the canyon rocks make for unlimited photo ops. There are a lot of tourons at the official lookouts but if you go a couple hundred metres down the Rim Trail, it's quiet and peaceful.

I'm enjoying my winter holiday in northern Arizona! After the big storm last week, the days have been sunny and mild...in the 40s and lower 50s, with no wind...actually ideal hiking weather. As for the nights...well, I don't go out. At Tusayan, where I'm currently staying, today's high temperature was 51, after a morning low of ... 6 below? Yup, they have loooong thermometers here. You need a t-shirt and a parka, both of which I have. I love the contrasts of the West. The canyon is only about three hours from the palms and saguaros of Phoenix. It's a different world, within easy reach.

On south facing slopes of the canyon, snow quickly melts. But below the south rim, shade is almost perpetual during the winter and the snow stays for a long time. It creates neat patterns on the canyon walls.

Winter Magic in Oak Creek Canyon

2011-01-04T16:53:00.001-08:00

Went out to go hiking today, and thought I'd try one of the lower trails south of town where there was almost no snow. Alas, the paucity of snow was accompanied by an abundance of mud! Signs advised against travel, and they were right...the day was sunny and mild, but the track was a crimson quagmire of sticky red goo. So, I changed direction and went north of town, up Oak Creek Canyon, and found...a winter wonderland. About ten miles north of Sedona, at the junction of Oak Creek and its west fork, at an elevation of around 5500 feet, there was nooooo mud...just a foot of snow and a totally cleansed, pristine landscape. What a treat! Here is the West Fork, mostly frozen. I had to ford the creek three times but it was no problem on the ice.

Although the snow had stopped falling five days ago, the trees were still loaded with it, creating an impressionist scene throughout the canyon.

The red rocks were coated with powder. On south facing slopes, much melting had occurred; but the northern slopes retained the dusting administered last week.

On the southern exposure slopes, daytime melting and nighttime freezing have created empires of icicles!

Though I don't live in snow country...and am happy to see greenery and flowers year round...I still love the clean, pristine aura of a countryside cloaked in white. On a day like today, with clear, dry roads and mild temperatures, it's a delight to tromp around in the snow.

Winter Ramblings in Sedona

2011-01-03T16:28:00.000-08:00

I'm hangin' in Sedona. There was a serious winter storm last week on Dec 29/30, and the higher terrain around town still has lots of snow on the ground. I went hiking today...strictly Russian Front conditions, with snow, ice, slush, and mud... but absolutely beautiful.

There are still around 6 inches of snow just north of town, around 5000 feet, and the landscape is shrouded in soft powder.

The town is surrounded by red rock formations... there's a different great view everywhere you go. These rocks are facing south and have lost their snow cover. It's still deep winter on the north facing slopes.

Rocky panorama just north of town. The setup here is like at Zion...red rocks down low, white rocks higher up. The snow adds a neat dimension that is usually missing...Sedona gets only occasional winter dustings.

Saguaro NP

2011-01-01T19:20:00.000-08:00

Earlier this week I roamed around the western part of Saguaro National Park, near Tucson. This has been a favorite spot for many years. I noticed that there were a lot of young saguaros there, a good sign that the desert is healthy and self sustaining. This saguaro is only a few years old, maybe 3-6. It has sprouted under a paloverde tree, a common occurrence. The tree shelters the seedlings from animals who might eat it; humans who might trample it; and the weather. Many saguaros grow to maturity from underneath a desert plant.

These are older saguaros, probably aged a century or close to it. When I first visited this park in the mid 1970s, most of the cacti were young, with few or no arms. Now, 35 years later, the cacti are that much older and the cactus forest is reaching a mature stage, but with many young plants as well, indicating a promising future.

Yeah, I've taken many pictures of saguaro spines close up, but it's always worth a shot. The gnarly plants of the desert are major factors in its surreal atmosphere.

A fishhook barrel with fruit. No cactus flowers now; but with decent rain so far this winter the coming spring could be glorious.

This winter trip has not been to the lizards' liking with all the rain and cold weather. But they did get a little saguaro time here.

Rainy Desert day

2010-12-25T16:54:00.000-08:00

On Wednesday Dec 22 I drove from Twentynine Palms to the Phoenix area, most of the way through a serious rainstorm. In 29 Palms an inch and a quarter of rain fell overnight; Palm Springs was soaked by two inches, almost half their annual average! The rain filled the arroyos and sent water onto the roads in many places. Here, a normally dry arroyo in 29 Palms was roiling robustly in the morning.

There was a flash flood warning up for Joshua Tree National Park that morning. However, when I checked with the rangers they said there were no road problems. So, I drove through the park. Water was flowing over the road in only one place...right here, at high elevation near White Tank campground. It was only a couple inches deep...no problem driving through but ideal for photos. It was cool to see water in many of the arroyos.

The gray rocks of JTNP outlined against a storm sky.

Raindrops on paloverde branches.

Just southeast of the park, I came upon these desert mountains shrouded in scud. I've never seen this before in the desert! The arid lands don't get clouds similar to those on the Olympic peninsula very often.

Cuyama River Kickin' it!

2010-12-21T20:14:00.000-08:00

Here's the Pineapple Express in action in California today, Dec 21. Rain has poured down for several days in the central and southern part of the state, and the Cuyama River, east of Santa Maria, is flowing high, fast, and brown. It's usually dry. Santa Maria had 6 3/4 inches of rain in the previous three days, about half their average for an entire year! And it probably rained more in the hills of the Cuyama watershed.

In the Pineapple Express

2010-12-21T20:08:00.000-08:00

Here's the Hawaiian end of the Pineapple Express. This video was taken from my Lanai at my rental Hale in Hana on Dec 10. Just a good rain...no flooding. We even had thunder!

Pineapple Express hits Cali

2010-12-21T20:00:00.001-08:00

The Pineapple Express has been raging in Southern California. Enroute to Arizona, I have been driving through it for two days. Rarely are the deserts of the south so sodden. This is Rabbit Lake, near Lucerne Valley in the Mojave desert. The vast majority of the time, this is a salt flat. But, several inches of rain have fallen here in the past few days, along with runoff from the surrounding mountains, and voila! Instant lake.

The light was really fine for much of my drive today. Here a bare, gnarly tree rises against a wintry sky on highway 166 west of New Cuyama.

In New Cuyama, the light seemed to highlight this church.

Gray skies, backlit by a few sunrays, glower over the Cuyama Valley.

East of Santa Maria, the normally dry Cuyama River races muddily along.

Last Days in Hana

2010-12-18T19:46:00.000-08:00

On the Maui coast near Hana, the scenery resembles the Big Island's in places. Surf, lava, sky.

Red Sand Beach in Hana. It's a partial volcanic crater. The beach is made of fine cinders...coarser than normal sand but easily walkable in bare feet. A nice place to sloat out.

My last sunrise at my Hana hale. (sigh!) As our outgoing governator would say, Ah'll be back!

An 1860 vintage church in Ke'anae, about 15 miles west of Hana, off the highway. Very mellow spot...I've passed it by several times in the past and finally went in to investigate on my way to the airport. Glad I did.

Winter surf at Ke'anae. You can tell it's winter in Hawaii by the nights...when the wind drops the temperature plunges well into the 60s and you turn off the ceiling fan and pull a blanket over you. But of course, when the sun comes up it's toasty warm again in no time. My kind of winter!

Hana Ramblings

2010-12-13T23:59:00.000-08:00

I've been hangin' in Hana for several days. It's quiet and very isolated...over a two hour drive to the nearest supermarket! The countryside is lush and peaceful, and has attracted a number of celebrities over the years, including Charles Lindbergh. Lindbergh was a national hero after he became the first person to fly solo across the Atlantic in 1927. He had ticker tape parades, massive fame...he was a rock star, like Babe Ruth, Jack Dempsey, Charlie Chaplin. But Lindbergh was actually rather shy and reclusive...he didn't like the bright lights, especially after his family lost their baby in a botched kidnapping attempt. Finally, late in his life, he discovered the Hana area, which was then even more isolated than it is today. He lived his final years here, dying in 1974. This is his grave, in a pretty little churchyard by the sea about 10 miles from Hana town.

I hiked the Pipiwai trail today...third time, but the first in about a decade. It's an exotic trek, through jungle, past waterfalls, over a rushing stream flowing through a gorge cut from lava. Much of the upper part of the two mile trail goes through a dense bamboo forest. When the wind blows the bamboo makes a clacking sound...quite bizarre.

At the end of the trail is Waimoku Falls, 400 feet high. There's also a 200 foot waterfall along the route, along with many smaller cascades.

At the bottom of the trail is 'Ohe'o Gulch...fine swimming here! Water is about 72 degrees, cool and refreshing but not uncomfortable on a warm, humid day. The Old Sloat had a dip, as he has done on previous visits in his younger days. This area was given the name Seven Sacred Pools for tourist purposes. In reality, the area has never been sacred, though the ancient Hawaiians enjoyed swimming here as much as anyone. And, counting the pools upstream from the bridge, there are many more than seven.

Midway along the Pipiwai trail, before you come to the bamboo, this huge banyan tree is encountered. Also exotic. There are actually several banyans along the path...this is the biggest.

More Maui Views

2010-12-10T22:19:00.000-08:00

Ol' Dave left his oatmeal bowl on our lanai the other morning, and the resident cardinals quickly moved in. They're cheeky blokes...they started salvaging when he was still sitting at the table!

Wailea Beach on the south Maui coast. Apparently, it has been voted the best beach in the world on occasion. It is awfully nice, good swimming and snorkeling, but a little short on waves most days, including this one. Behind the beach is the Grand Wailea resort, an opulent five star property. I didn't work hard enough to be able to stay there.

Polo Beach, just south of Wailea. A pleasant shoreside path connects the two. The Moorish looking hotel in back of the beach is the Fairmont Kea Lani. Didn't work hard enough to stay there, either. Good snorkeling near the rocks just to the right of the picture. I was glad to see that both here and at Napili Point, there was a lot of brightly colored, healthy looking coral. A nice contrast to the dead reefs seen in many places.

Ho'okipa, on the north shore of Maui. This is a world renowned spot for both board surfing and windsurfing. Here a couple surfies are riding medium-large waves...they get a lot bigger than this! Local custom is that the board surfers have the beach til 11 AM, then the windsurfers take over. However, on this day, on the eve of a Kona storm, there was only a light south wind, so the board guys were out in the early afternoon.

Nearing Hana, Waianapanapa State Park is a fine spot to stop. There's a black sand beach, sea caves, a blowhole, and lots of jagged lava rock. The last eruption in the area was about 500 years ago.

2010-12-06T22:39:00.000-08:00

I went up to Haleakala Crater yesterday. This was my third visit. The first time, in 1985, knowing the temperature was 30 degrees colder than at sea level, I took a set of warm clothing for hiking. But I also took a ski jacket! A friend dropped me off at the airport in Denver on a snowy morning, and I forgot to give the jacket to him to take back to the weather office, so I had to cram it into my suitcase in the checkin line. Well, I got up here, and the temperature was 50 degrees with a 50 mph wind, and I put on my ski jacket in Hawaii, and I was comfortable while all the tourons were freezing! This time no serious hiking was planned, and I simply wore a sweatshirt; it was again only 50 degrees, but with light winds. By the way, on my second visit to the crater about 10 years ago, it was fogged in; didn't see much of anything. Yesterday was a beautiful day, and the crater was fantastic.

This is one of the few places in the world where you climb almost two miles virtually straight up from sea level. As my friend said, it's like being in an airplane when you're at the top, at Pu'u Ulaula.

Haleakala is a power spot. The landscape is variegated, stark, and otherworldly.

The silversword grows here, and nowhere else. Like the yucca, the plant assumes this aspect for a long time...around 50 years...then blooms spectacularly once, then dies.

Haleakala used to be much larger...a huge shield volcano like Mauna Loa. Over the millenia the summit eroded away, then new eruptions produced the cinder cones in the crater. There have been several eruptions in the past thousand years, the last in the late 1700s.

Wipeout!

2010-12-02T22:18:00.000-08:00

Awesome surf at Napili Point, right at my resort, brought some of Hawaii's elite surfers out to battle the big waves. I saw a lot of spectacular rides, but anytime you have big surf, and surfies stylin' to da max, wipeouts happen.

2010-12-02T22:09:00.000-08:00

Maui Surf!

2010-12-02T21:53:00.001-08:00

High surf advisory is verifying on Maui! The spray on the right side of the picture is perhaps 40 feet above sea level as the waves crash on the cliffs below.

A side view of the surf pounding the coast. Molokai in the background.

When I made a reservation to stay at Napili Point, about 10 miles north of Lahaina, I had no idea that it was a primo surf spot during big wave events. But it is...and with today's huge waves, the elite surfies came out to play. Great athletes in a fabulous natural setting...quite a spectacle!

Sunset at Napili tonight...Dec 2. Big swells still coming in. Pic taken from my Lanai. This is my first visit to Maui in about ten years...I should come more often!

Compare the previous pix to this one, taken two days earlier on Nov 30, again from my lanai. No surf at all! It's always fascinating to be by the ocean, which is constantly changing and never boring. Though you can't see them in this pic, sea turtles hang out in this bay. Usually they swim with snorkelers during the day, as they did later on Nov 30. But today...Dec 2...the high surf kept the snorkelers away and the turtles shared the bay with the surfies. Lanai island is in the background.

Hetch Hetchy

2010-10-25T20:22:00.001-07:00

I went to Yosemite last week to chill for a couple days. Here's the classic shot of the Valley from Wawona tunnel. Bridalveil Falls on the right...flowing strongly. Some other falls are dry at this time of year.

Yosemite is not known for fall color, but there is some. This is near Hetch Hetchy.

Wapama Falls, running into Hetch Hetchy reservoir. It's about 500 feet high.

Hetch Hetchy reservoir. It's beautiful as a lake, but until the valley was dammed in the 1920s, the scene was described by John Muir as being equal in grandeur to Yosemite.

Granite and water meet in Hetch Hetchy, enhanced by the low autumnal sun. The large rocks in the foreground are glacial erratics, left behind after the passage of the Pleistocene ice sheets.

Carson Pass Autumn

2010-10-09T18:51:00.000-07:00

On Friday Oct 8 I drove home from Tahoe via Carson Pass. In most areas, the leaves were not turning yet; I was about a week early. But just east of the junction of highways 88 and 89, near Sorensen's resort, I found a patch of aspens in full color. There were many photographers swarming over the site. Next weekend...Oct 16-17...should be just right.

Aspens are beautiful from afar, or close up.

At Carson Pass, I went for a stroll and discovered legions of white fir cones on the ground. The tree is common in the Sierra at high elevations.

Snow fell at high elevations earlier in the week. Here, at Carson Pass, the remnants created fine patterns of color and light on the forest floor.

Caples Lake, with fresh snow on the peaks in the background.

Autumn Vistas at Tahoe

2010-10-08T20:51:00.001-07:00

I spent the past several days at Lake Tahoe. It was a five day trip...leave Monday, return Friday. When I retired, I envisioned doing a lot of these excursions, but in reality most of my journeys have been shorter or longer. I was fortunate enough to be able to stay at a friend's house at Tahoe and just cocooned for four nights; did a lot of reading and guitar playing while the rain poured down. But, lots of clouds are great for photography; the light is dramatic and rapidly changing. This pic is at Secret Harbor Beach, on the Nevada side. You have to hike about a mile to get here, and on a summer weekend there are a lot of folks skinny dipping here. But on an October weekday with the temperature in the mid 40s, it was just me, in jeans and a heavy duty sweatshirt.

On a cold, overcast day, the normally azure lake metamorphoses into a gunmetal gray. I have a mix of emotions. The scene is tranquil, yet ominous. It's beautiful. Growing up in the Pacific Northwest, this type of weather is in my DNA. I enjoy it...for a few days.

The autumn sun tries to shine weakly through the clouds, producing awesome light.

More fine light. Tahoe mesmerizes me, no matter what type of weather is occurring. It's a magical place. If I was wealthy enough to have two homes, I'd have one here.

This past Wednesday was fairly sunny, with a brisk northeasterly wind kicking up some surf. I reckon the deserted beach speaks of summer past, while the snowcapped peaks show that winter is on the way.

Return to the Ridge

2010-09-17T21:22:00.000-07:00

Today I hiked up to Snively's Ridge in Garland Park, Carmel Valley. Until last year, I had done this at least once annually for over a decade. The ridge rises 1500 feet above the valley, and the views are spectacular; spring wildflowers are excellent. But in 2009, I didn't make it; one day I tried, and couldn't do it as I had grown too old and fat. And in the first half of this year I knew I couldn't make the ridge: the last mile of trail goes up about 1000 feet; an ascent of 500 feet in a mile is steep! But, during my trip in July and August I hiked a lot, got into better shape, lost 10 pounds...and today, I made it back up to the ridge. I had thought I might never get there again, so this trek was a boost to the morale of the aging Venerable Pinniped. This pic shows the trail, with Carmel Valley in the background. It's hard to tell from the pic, but the trail is massively steep! And there's very little letup in the grade for a mile.

Carmel Valley is lit thru a break in the clouds in this pic taken from the ridge. Blow the pic up and you can see the parking lot by highway G17 and trails on the Carmel River floodplain; that's where you start the hike to reach the spot where I'm shooting from. The last pic in this post was shot from the floodplain.

Stratus was dominant today, and fog raced over the ridgetops near Snively's. The weather was similar the last time I was here, in the summer of 2008. From the ridge, on a clear day you can see Monterey Bay over Laureles Grade, and you can see the ocean near Carmel; but both vistas were fogged in today.

This pic was taken from the flats shown in the second photo from the top, looking up to Snively's, in the center of the pic. Yeah, it's pretty much straight up. Blow the pic up and you can see the trail just below the ridge, just left of center.

Hiway 50

2010-09-03T18:23:00.000-07:00

I drove toward home thru Nevada on or near US 50, which is advertised as the Loneliest Road. It is pretty quiet through eastern and central Nevada, though there's more traffic than in the Australian outback. It's wiiiide open spaces, very relaxing to drive. The countryside is vegetated by sagebrush and pinyon/juniper forest...known as P/J to fire weather forecasters. Here the Lizards are hangin' in the P/J. This pic was actually taken on Nevada highway 722, which loops off of US 50 and is even less traveled than the Loneliest Road.

At the end of August, the sagebrush was blooming, softening the starkness of the scene.

The Lander County courthouse, in the town of Austin, on US 50. County courthouses are often architectural gems, many of them built in the 19th century. You could amass quite a neat photographic portfolio of old courthouses around the country.

Classic shot of US 50, between Eureka and Austin. I kinda messed up here...should have put the Lizards on the center stripe.

The Eureka county courthouse, in Eureka, Nevada. Although there are only 600 people in the town, for some reason there's a Best Western there. The town is verrrrry quiet. At first I wanted to say that the sidewalks had been rolled up at 6 o'clock on a Saturday night, but then I realized they had probably never been unrolled. As an Old Sloat, that's fine with me.

Castle Valley and Canyonlands

2010-08-28T19:27:00.000-07:00

This is a picture of Castle Valley, where I stayed for three nights while visiting Arches and Canyonlands. No special effects used...the rocks are really that color in the morning and evening hours! The valley is completely surrounded by red rock walls...it's like a lost world.

Here's a shot from the valley floor, near the B&B where I stayed. Castle Valley Inn...highly recommended! Hosts Jeanette, Jason, and Ashley (the Cat) are all friendly. Great brekkies, and a hot tub and hammocks too. And the setting...can't be beat! The tall spire on the right of the pic is Castleton Rock, the signature formation of the valley.

Here the Lizards are at Deadhorse Point, where the Colorado River almost doubles back on itself. This is a fine area west of Moab. You can find a chunk of slickrock, engage in slotation, and be at peace with the grandeur of nature.

Canyonlands NP, near Grandview Point. I first visited the park in the late 70s...just drove in and camped. Roads weren't paved, no services...nothing but dramatic landscape and solitude. The main roads have since been sealed but otherwise it's still about the same...a wild, remote, rugged, absolutely grand place.

This shot is on Utah highway 12, between Capitol Reef and Bryce. The light was just right. Breathtaking scenery is everywhere in southern Utah. The summer monsoon season provides dramatic cloud formations...it's probably the best time to go for photography from a light perspective. But the countryside will be spectacular in about a month, when the aspen leaves turn a brilliant gold. If you can combine the golden aspens with a late season thunderstorm day you've hit the jackpot.

More Bryce Images

2010-08-28T19:11:00.000-07:00

Had to throw in some more Bryce shots. At sunset the rock formations get ghostly.

Gnarly old bristlecone skeletons near Yovimpa Point, in the southern end of the park. This section is little visited, and very quiet. On a day with glowering skies and nobody around, it's magical...and spiritual.

Took this shot as I hiked down into the canyon on a gray, drizzly day. Such days are prized by photographers...bright sunshine washes out the colors.

Hiking up Wall Street. Is this an exotic trail or what? I did this in the '80s...1988 I believe...but I didn't remember how amazing it was. The folks on the trail are hiking up switchbacks carved into the bare rock. Steep trail, but worth every step...and the steep part is rather short. Blow up the pic for the best effect.

Annother type of weather that is good for photographers at Bryce is convection. Thunderstorms produce odd and ominous clouds, and all sorts of neat light. Sometimes you just sit on a rock, look out, and stare in awe and amazement. Splendid!

2010-08-27T20:51:00.000-07:00

I've been visiting Bryce Canyon for the past two days. The place is so visually stunning that anyone can take a slug of great pictures. I'll be posting them for a while, but here's a start...I went to Bryce Point last night at sunset to get this shot of hoodoos mingled with forest.

The last rays of sunlight illuminate the hills.

The colors and landforms at Bryce are unbelievable. The former are caused by various minerals in the rock...the landforms are due to erosion caused by wind, rain, and especially freezing and thawing, which occurs on about half the days of the year here.

I hiked down into the canyon today, and came up on Wall Street, an almost unique trail that runs through a narrow cleft in the redrock that, amazingly, is dotted with Douglas Firs! The only other place I've seen, or heard, of this phenomenon is in Zion.

At the far southern end of the park, I took the Bristlecone Pine trail from Rainbow Point. I found this ultra gnarly tree, perched on the edge of the outcrop, under glowering skies. It was just awesome here. More posts in future days!

Ramblings in the Rockies

2010-08-27T18:01:00.000-07:00

I spent last weekend in Breckenridge. I like to rent a condo there, within walking distance of downtown. The condos are plush and have some nice furnishings, like this lamp.

I hiked up to an old mine at 11,500 feet last Sunday. There were buildings, tailings, and rusted equipment all over the place. Imagine what kind of a life it would be, living in a little cabin like this, at timberline, lugging all your gear up miles of dirt road and enduring bone chilling rain and cold temperatures...in summer! Worse the rest of the year. Talk about hard work.

The mine was in an amphitheatre at timberline. Here, in late summer, there was virtually no snow left and the air was balmy, but the countryside still had a forbidding appearance.

This is the highest tree in the amphitheatre. It defines timberline. I found a nice rock and achieved alpine slotation here.

At lower elevations, the weather is more benign, and the country more gentle. This is in Glenwood Canyon, next to I-70, a little over a mile below the other pictures in this post. The canyon is a fine venue for river rafting, cycling, rock climbing, and hiking. I should mention that although I did a lot of hiking and backpacking in Colorado when I lived here, I only saw one (1) bear. And it was only a few miles from here! I was driving in the fast lane of I-70, just a mile east of downtown Glenwood Springs, when I saw a black bear running in the slow lane of the freeway...in the middle of the day. I paced him on the left, and a camper from Florida drove behind him in the right lane for awhile. Then the bear hopped over the guardrail and proceeded toward the river. More than a little surreal.

The Splendor of Arches

2010-08-26T20:25:00.000-07:00

A few days ago I visited Arches National Park in Utah. I had been there three times before, but not since 1990. As usual, I made the trek up to Delicate Arch. The trail goes over slickrock in many areas, marked by stone cairns. Except...for this section, where the slickrock is so steep that some very diligent individuals carved steps out of the rock.

Classical shot of Delicate Arch...it's on the current Utah license plates. Blow the pic up and you'll see a touron underneath the arch, giving a sense of scale.

The Lizards rule the Arch! They hitched a ride up in my pack, so they didn't have to crawl or scuttle up, or whatever it is that lizards do when on the move. Our saurian friends are hanging out right below a natural rock chair, from which the observer can view the Arch and a vast amphitheater from above. It's a bit of a clamber and I didn't get up there this time, but on previous visits I scrambled up and felt like a Roman emperor presiding over the throng below. Delicate Arch would be an awesome sight for a really high quality rock concert!

This is Landscape Arch, the longest in the park at 306 feet. As you can see, it's leading a rather precarious existence and could collapse at any time...maybe tomorrow, maybe 300 years from now. Actually, a large chunk of rock fell off the right side of the arch in 1991...nobody was killed or seriously hurt, but due to the geological uncertainty of the situation, the area under the arch has since been closed to foot traffic. I reckon I wouldn't go under the arch anyway.

Double Arch is much more massive. This complex rock formation developed when water seeping through a crack in the rocks above the arch eventually eroded away enough rock to form first one arch, then two. They're huge...well over 100 feet high. At the end of a long, hot day of trekking, I was beat, and sought shade under the arches with dozens of Euros. The Euros love Southern Utah...there's nothing like it in Europe; in fact I don't know of any other area in the world with such numerous, colorful, and amazing rock

formations. The Euros come in droves to soak up the exotic nature of the place. At my B&B near Moab, most of the guests were Euros...my neighbors all three nights were French families.

Fisher Towers

2010-08-24T19:43:00.001-07:00

Highway 128 is incredibly scenic. When I first drove this road, in 1978 or 1979, part of it wasn't even paved. Now it is, but it's still very quiet. It follows the Colorado River for over 30 miles. In this shot Fisher Towers is in the center distance.

The lizards are back in their element! After weeks in the rainforest, then another gig two miles above sea level, our saurian friends have returned to their natural habitat...the desert. They dig Fisher Towers.

Blow up this pic and look in the center, at the top of the rock formations, and you'll see what appears to be a double beaked gargoyle...or maybe he has a single beak and is extending his arms, or wings, or whatever gargoyles have. I have been fascinated by this rock pattern for over 30 years.

Here's a good shot of Fisher Towers, taken from the end of the road. There's a campground here if anyone wants to spend the night at the scene.

This pic was taken from my deck at the Castle Valley B&B. Not bad! The valley is entirely surrounded by red rock formations like this one.

I'm currently chilling at an isolated yet luxurious B&B in Castle Valley, a shangri-la about 17 miles east of Moab. No cell, no TV, sketchy internet, delicious food, hot tub, hammocks. Roughing it in style with the Euros! Mais oui, I'm thinking in Francais whenever possible as my neighbors are French. Most of the other people here are German...naturally the French and Germans communicate in English. On the way here I visited Fisher Towers, a rock formation that has always intrigued me since my first visit here in the late 1970s. It's a surreal spot, a couple miles off scenic highway 128 on a dirt road.

Ambling in the Rockies

2010-08-21T18:40:00.000-07:00

For the past couple days I've been hanging out high in the Colorado Rockies. Here the Lizards and I are at Loveland Pass, 11,990 feet above sea level. Blow up the pic and you can see I-70 far below. We are above the Eisenhower Tunnel at this point. Temp here was a chilly 54 degrees, an hour after my car thermo registered 86 in Denver. Here we're a little more than 6000 feet above Denver, so the air is warming dry adiabatically as it descends from here into the city.

Summit county is a year round recreational mecca. Of course in the winter everyone skis or snowboards, but it's equally busy in summer with white water rafting, hiking, camping, and cycling...there are many miles of bike paths that are then used for cross country skiing in the winter. This is Lake Dillon, nicely full...not like a few years ago when it was very low due to drought. Notice the old beaver lodge in the foreground...I have no idea when it was built.

I'm currently staying in Breckenridge, 9600 feet above sea level...and all the hiking trails go up from there. This shot is along the Spruce Creek Trail, just south of town, at an elevation of about 10,900 feet. At this elevation on Mount Rainier, you've got...glaciers! But here, far to the south and well to the east, summer temperatures are much warmer and snowfall, though plentiful, is considerably less than on Rainier.

I was surprised to see these massive mushrooms growing near timberline, around 11,300 feet. The largest 'shroom is about a foot across.

A tranquil scene. The log and the grass to its lower left are real...most of the rest of the pic is a reflection. I hiked about 5 miles today, with around a thousand feet elevation gain and loss, all above 10 thousand feet elevation. All by noon. Not bad for an old sloat! I've done a lot of hiking on this trip and have gotten into noticeably better condition than a couple months ago. Loooong way to go on that score, though.

Western Scenes

2010-08-18T06:25:00.000-07:00

I drove Trail Ridge Road enroute Denver a few days ago. Here's a pic looking toward the Gorge Lakes, accessible only by a rigorous cross country trip. I've always been intrigued by this spot, visible from the road to throngs of people but the lakes reachable only by a few hardy mountaineers. Blow the pic up and you can see two lakes in the lower left center...the higher one is Inkwell Lake, the lower is Arrowhead.

The Lizards make an appearance above timberline, almost 12 thousand feet above sea level.

This is the aptly named Flaming Gorge reservoir in northeastern Utah. The gorge was named by John Wesley Powell, who led the first expedition that rafted through the Grand Canyon.

The Morrow county courthouse in Heppner, Oregon, a classic stone structure built in 1902. A year later Heppner was hit by a massive, catastrophic flash flood that killed over 200 people...almost a quarter of the town's population. Due to its sturdy construction and elevated location, the courthouse survived.

An old, abandoned grain elevator in Ione, near Heppner. These desolate elevators have become a symbol of the vanishing farm towns across America. However, in Ione this picture is a little deceptive...there are two defunct elevators in the vicinity, and two functioning ones that have simply replaced the old structures. Amazingly, despite having grown up in Portland and visited many times since, I had never been to Heppner and Ione, though they are only about two hundred miles away. With all the traveling I do, I still find many roads in the west that I've never driven, and others that I haven't traversed in a quarter century or more.

Roaming the Gorge

2010-08-13T21:14:00.000-07:00

Yesterday I spent a day rambling through the Columbia River Gorge, one of my favorite spots. Between the river, waterfalls, massive basalt cliffs, verdant forests, and amazing geology and meteorology, the Gorge is endlessly fascinating. Here's a good example...the trail to Ponytail Falls goes behind it!

Farther downstream, Horsetail Falls descends beyond the graceful arches of the old Columbia River Highway, built around 1915..a thoroughfare and a work of art.

Basalt rises above the river, forming the walls of the gorge. 12-15 thousand years ago, the gorge was sculpted by the catastrophic Missoula Floods...I've blogged the floods before. Now, wind is a major player, shaping the vegetation dramatically.

This view from between Hood River and The Dalles shows the drier eastern end of the gorge. To the left center of the pic is the Washington town of Lyle, built on a gravel bar deposited by the Missoula Floods. From just west of Hood River to just east of The Dalles, a distance of about 30 miles with negligible elevation change, the gorge transitions from lush Doug Fir forest to barren sagebrush desert. I know of no other place in the world like this.

Wind blasts through the gorge year round. West winds bring marine air from the ocean, moderating the temperature; east winds bring continental air from the interior, resulting in extreme temperatures. Here, at the western end, these trees have almost no branches on their east sides. 40 miles farther east, at Hood River, the trees are branchless to the west.

The Sidewalks of Portland

2010-08-13T20:13:00.000-07:00

I roamed around Portland a couple days ago, doing my ongoing sidewalk contractor photo shoot. I've been interested in the old contractors' stamps in the concrete since I was a kid...the only other city where I've seen so many of them surviving in the pavement is Coronado. They're rare or nonexistent in most cities that I've walked in. In the Irvington district in NE Portland, many of the stamps have been lost...they were usually located at corners, and many of the corner sidewalks have been repaved in recent years to make curb ramps for wheelchairs. But one contractor...Elwood Wiles...put his name in the middle of many blocks that he paved...over a century ago. Thus many of his stamps still exist.

When the sidewalks in Irvington and other older areas of Portland were laid in the first years of the 20th century, horses were of course still in wide use in the city. So rings were installed in the curbs and people could tie up their horses on the streets. Again, I've never walked in another city that still has horse rings! This one appears to have been installed lying to the left when the concrete was not yet dry, leaving an imprint.

This curb in Irvington reflects the street naming method before 1931. In that year, the city was divided into five districts...north, northeast, southeast, northwest, and southwest. East-west lanes were designated as streets, while avenues ran north-south. Thus, about 20 years after this curb was laid, the street became Northeast 18th Avenue.

Irvington is a gracious neighborhood of old, well kept homes. Look at this one...how'd you like to vacuum and paint it? Of course, the owners can probably afford to have someone else do it. What a fine porch...on both the first and second floors! Great for outdoor living. Irvington has been upscale for a long time...my mom recalled that when she was a girl in the 1930s, the rich kids lived in Irvington. Living north of Fremont Street during the depression, she was in the "poor German" demographic.

This is one of the oldest stamps I've seen. This one is not in Irvington but on the corner of NE 26th and Halsey. I recall seeing a 1903 in the past, but none in the 19th century.

The art of the contractor stamp is not dead! Here's a brand new one, near Grant High School. The design has changed a little, and it's cool that the contractor is named Cindy! I would guess that there were not many female sidewalk contractors a century ago.

Nisqually Glacier

2010-08-03T22:05:00.000-07:00

Rainier gives birth to a river

2010-08-03T20:59:00.001-07:00

I've been roaming around Mount Rainier the past two days. I'm staying in a rustic but cozy cabin with no cell service, no TV, only two electrical outlets, but...internet access is good. Call it 21st century rustic. Here's the obligatory shot of the intrepid Solara and The Mountain, which looms over all.

Mount Rainier is only about as high as the tallest mountains in Colorado, a little over 14 thousand feet. But while the surrounding countryside in CO is over 5 thousand MSL and there are many peaks close together in the 13-14K MSL range, Rainier is twelve thousand feet above its surroundings, and stands alone. And it's massive! Thus, it looms over its landscape, dominating it clear to Puget Sound. Now, on the right of this pic is Nisqually Glacier, coming down the right side of the mountain...

And here's where the Nisqually glacier ends. Water is flowing out of the snout of the glacier as the warm summer sun melts ice and snow wikiwiki. This is the start of the Nisqually River. The ice at the snout is mostly buried under rock and silt transported down the mountain by the glacier. Thus, glacier snouts tend to be grungy.

Look in the lower right of this pic, between the trees, and you can see the snout of the glacier. At the bottom center is the terminal moraine, made up of silt and rocks transported down the mountain by the glacier in colder times, when it filled its valley much more than it does today.
Blow up the pic and you can see waterfalls coming off the mountain above the moraine. Rainier is shedding much of its moisture as ice and snow melts. But in about eight weeks, the trend will reverse, and for the following seven months or so, the mountain will accumulate much more snow than it sheds.

About ten miles downstream, the Nisqually River runs strongly, but fills only a small fraction of its channel. During floods the river assumes massive proportions, most recently in 2006 when a Pineapple Express storm raised the snow level far up on the peak and produced devastating flooding that trashed much of the National Park. Notice the trees in the center of the rocks...grim survivors, barely, of the floods. Now, in quieter times, the river flows with the silty runoff from the glaciers and snowfields on the slopes of Mt Rainier.

Annual YVR Visit

2010-08-03T19:46:00.000-07:00

After two weeks on islands...primarily Pender and Vancouver...it was time to return to the mainland. Had a fine cruise on the ferry from Nanaimo to Horseshoe Bay. Almost tropical!!

As usual, I got a room at the Blue Horizon Hotel, on Robson Street in the middle of everything. The lizards enjoyed chillin' out with a tinnie of ice cold Kokanee. They are 17 floors up here...no acrophobia in this bunch!

My friend Wendy is afflicted with acrophilia...a love of heights! Thus, I had to take her to the Lynn Canyon suspension bridge in North Vancouver. Doesn't show up well in this pic, but this is a swinging bridge 150 feet above Lynn Creek.

One of the rituals in the YVR is sunset at English Bay. You saunter down there, find a spot on a log, and enjoy. I've been doing this for 40 years...it's always good.

The city lights up on a summer night, as seen from my balcony at the Blue Horizon.

2010-07-30T08:24:00.000-07:00

The Mystical Shore of Ucluelet

2010-07-27T21:15:00.001-07:00

The coast at Ucluelet is storm battered. Many ships have been wrecked along these shores, some as recently as the mid 20th century. In 1905 the English windjammer Pass of Melfort foundered here, with the loss of all 29 people on board. The next year the Amphitrite Lighthouse was built. High waves washed it away in 1914, and this current structure was built in 1915; it's now automated.

The weather is frequently cloudy and foggy here, but to me, that adds to the serenity of the place. From this spot on the Wild Pacific Trail I could here a foghorn moaning, a buoy clanging, and the soft rush of the gentle summer surf. It must be quite a spectacle during a winter storm! I need to come back and check it out...a lot of people do, making Ucluclet a year round destination.

Relentless onshore winds sculpt the vegetation into surreal forms. Add fog, and a sense of mysticism prevails. Indigenous First Nations people have lived here for over four thousand years...it's a spiritual place.

Rows of trees disappear into the gloaming. I love scenes like this...it's thoroughly enjoyable to just soak up the beauty and tranquility, and be at peace.

These trees have been pruned as well as sculpted by the wind. What's behind them, land, water? I've forgotten...all was lost in the fog.

Fine Vancouver Island Forests

2010-07-27T20:34:00.000-07:00

Some people say Vancouver Island is just a big tree farm. This is at least 50 percent correct...it seems that half or more of the island is regularly logged. Trees grow everywhere, and with abundant rain and long growing seasons new crops can be harvested every 35-50 years. However, there are fairly large areas preserved in provincial and national parks, and in these areas majestic old growth forests can still be found. This is the biggest tree in McMillan Provincial Park, in the center of the island; the Douglas fir is over 800 years old and 76 metres tall...about 250 feet. This grove is named after its donor, HR Macmillan, who ironically was one of the biggest lumbermen on the island during the middle of the 20th century.

The exact date on which these trees fell is known. It was January 1, 1997, during a massive storm that affected a vast area. High winds downed dozens of trees in the grove...I first visited in September 1998 and the park was still being repaired after the storm. The tempest was a classic Pineapple Express. While devastating the forests on Vancouver Island, it brought torrential rain and major flooding to Northern California; there was a big flood on the Russian River. Monterey was in the warm sector of the storm; at the stroke of the new year of 1997 the temperature in Monterey was 70 degrees, which is uncommon on a summer afternoon!

Notice that the tree in the foreground, down only 13 1/2 years, is already well into its nurse log career, nurturing many young firs.

Not far from MacMillan grove, but a thousand metres higher, is a boreal forest. This is in Strathcona Provincial Park, in the center of the island. Here winter snows are heavy and the growing season is short. On July 25 there were still patches of snow only a little above 3000 feet elevation. The marshy ground of the Forbidden Plateau, as the area is called, further inhibits growth. Thus, the trees here, though abundant, are not very tall and are slender, with short branches. Go 300 miles north from here, in the interior of BC and Alberta, and the forests look like this.

Now we're in the rainforest at Pacific Rim National Park, between Tofino and Ucluelet on the Vancouver Island coast. Here, just a short distance from the ocean, the temperature is usually between 30 and 70 degrees year round and 120 inches of rain drench the land every year. The forest floor shows that Van Gogh's got nothing on Ma Nature...she does impressionism well!

In the park there are many neat boardwalk trails. This one goes right past a quintessential nurse log! Go down the line and you can see four good sized trees growing from the nutrients in the one old log. Yeah, I know...I take tons of nurse log pictures. But nurse logs are cool! This forest was better lit than many, and this was a particularly prolific nurse log.