Skeleton forests can happen from any cause of mass tree death, the most common being fire and (as here) flood. A large grove of deceased cottonwoods bathed in shallow water, along an arm of western Nebraska's Lake McConaughy. Warm late-spring winds whistled through the upper reaches of the arboreal graveyard, their gentle gusts offering a rhythmic ode to the cycles of life on the water's edge. … [Read more...]
Iridescent Altocumulus Translucidus Undulatus
Right in my front driveway, one chilly morning, the most amazing display of cloud iridescence I've seen breezed by in the mid-troposphere, within a patch of altocumulus translucidus undulatus that was wavy horizontally as well as vertically. I placed my big ol' fist before the sun and deliberately underexposed the surrounding blue sky by a few stops, in order to capture the fullest possible … [Read more...]
Reunion Fog
A foggy day gets foggier the higher one goes into the stratus (fog here being a stratus cloud with no base, just more translucence closer to the ground). Dallas' iconic Reunion Tower became nearly invisible above the 500-foot level, where its attached dome of light fixtures encloses a revolving restaurant and observation deck. Shallow ponds and wetlands below the Trinity River's massive … [Read more...]
Magpie Falls (Ontario)
Tumbling over hard, Precambrian igneous rocks, the Magpie River will take a very, very long time to erode these cascades upstream. The remaining part of Magpie High Falls, not submerged by the reservoir above it, isn't outrageously high, with a vertical drop of about 75 feet. Still, this is one of the widest of the dozens of waterfalls that adjoin Lake Superior. As on all the other streams … [Read more...]
East Texas Sundown
A slow process leaving Norman, and some delays getting there, meant a "late" arrival at my dad's gravesite. So what? This was the blessing that greeted me at the end of my visit, as if this was how it was supposed to happen all along. A long zoom into the most colorful part of the sky was the same thing my eyes did, searching for the strongest color and deepest meaning of the moment. A … [Read more...]
Middle Gooseberry Falls
The largest and most complex of the Gooseberry Falls series, its middle cascade spreads the Gooseberry River across a series of stair-stepping ledges of Precambrian lava flows (basalt and diabase) of varying textures. The water reaches Lake Superior soon, for the river's mouth is just a few hundred yards downstream. One of my favorite views actually was through an uncommon gap in the forest … [Read more...]
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