More Yosemite
Pardon some of the incomplete, rotated croppings, but I squeaked out a few more via
some “processing†… I don’t think the blog has much interest in them, but you might.
Adam
Tuesday, November 25, 2008
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I’m not “the blog” but I enjoyed those very much. First I clicked on salt marsh and then the exhaust fan … and then I went through the whole show and didn’t regret any of it. Well, maybe the unidentified landforms, because I get very frustrated when I don’t have the answers. What ARE those? It looks like broad water erosion (floods) cleared away the area around those mounds.
Comment by Jenn — November 25, 2008 @ 10:16 pm
You are, too “the blog” — see anybody else either side of you? Whoever else shows up is the blog, too. And private kvetching to Michael is actually fairly low on the list of things not to write to him about if it can’t become public.
Glad you liked the pictures — I’m fascinated by aerial views and spend most clear weather with my nose (and almost as often, camera) glued to the porthole window. Doesn’t always work out, but with smooth air, chances are good. I missed some excellent images banking into Salt lake City on the way out, but my camera was too deeply buried in my bag, so I settled for salt marshes. Great Salt Lake has really receded, though — I’d heard, but it’s sobering to see.
Comment by adam — November 26, 2008 @ 11:52 am
Like you, adam, my eyes are glued to the window pane on flights over interesting geography. Have any idea what your camera was pointed at, exactly, in “Sierra Nevadas”? Just asking. In all my flights over the Sierra, I’ve never been able to identify what I was looking at — Sequioia, Yosemite, Kings Canyon,…
Loved your pix, especially the one of the chimneyer.
Comment by rakkity — November 27, 2008 @ 1:05 am
I think about that all the time rakkity, but I’ve rarely followed through. In addition to the landscape aerials I posted, I have interesting, artificial, settled lakes; a smokestack whose plume shadow stretches a mile; geometric arrays of who-knows-what, and other such curiosities. Without a GPS (forbidden at cruising altitude and probably non-functional inside an aluminum tube anyway), it would be quite hard to pinpoint any location or artifact, though. Maybe I can plot the flightpath and take an educated guess at the area of the Sierra Nevadas or the Wasatch, though …
Comment by adam — November 28, 2008 @ 2:36 pm
these images are extraordinary, Adam….I’d like to order a poster size one of Upper Climbers.
Comment by bird brain — November 28, 2008 @ 8:28 pm
“Unknown landforms”!??! What the heck are those crazy lumps?
Last year in Utah I saw a strange bright blue landform from Dead Horse Point. Then last week in Moab I learned what they are. (Potash holding ponds.) In a landscape of muted browns, oranges, and blood reads, their surreal color is very unsettling.
Your lumpforms are unsettling too, in a different way.
Now I’ll take my UL off my mental shelf for odd images and add your UL to it.
Ditto on BirdBrain’s comment regarding your photo of the climbers standing together on a sloping ledge!
Comment by rakkity — December 1, 2008 @ 11:18 pm
Rakkity, I took you up on your implicit challenge and tried to I.D. some of my aerial images. Despite hours with most excellent Google terrain topos, I’ve yet to I.D. those ridgelines of the Sierra Nevadas, but I’m happy to say that I can name those weird landforms — the lower is called “Obsidian Dome”, just NW of Crestview off 395, at the foothills of San Joaquin Mountain just a few miles below the readily identifiable Mono Lake, and the smaller, circular one above that is Wilson Butte. I got Delta’s route map off their online magazine, rotated it in Photoshop to match the Google terrain maps and superimposed it to determine roughly our flight path into Fresno. Having I.D.’d Bass Lake, Mono Lake and those obsidian formations fom the flight out, and assuming that the way in and the way out are separated only by a few miles), I gauged how far off/beside the flight path the objects I photographed were. Assuming a similar displacement to the south on the way in, I think those ranges are in the vicinity of Four Gables, just North of Mt. Humphreys, but the photo is looking south, and Google topos are naturally north-oriented, so it challenges the Tetris part of my brain …
Comment by el Kib — December 2, 2008 @ 7:09 am
Hmmm…Maybe we should ask the google geeks to add a rotation capability to their maps, so we can have south at the top (or west or east). Maybe even northeast, south-by-east, etc.
Comment by rakkity — December 4, 2008 @ 5:46 pm
Mount Humphreys did you say? I recall seeing that mountain on one of our backpack trips in 1999 or 2000. I’ll have to check my photo collections to see if I have a picture.
Comment by rakkity — December 4, 2008 @ 5:48 pm
Not that this was still on anybody’s radar screen, but I did finally locate the area in that Sierra Nevada image, and that IS Mt. Humphreys middle left (+/- 37° 17′ 11.5″N x 118° 40′ 31.9W), with Desolation Lake just peeking in foreground right. It took Google Earth terrain flyover and finding the right altitude and view angle, but I managed to arrive at a confirmatory image
after a silly number of hours spent looking. Thankfully, Google Earth lets you rotate your point of view in both direction and inclination — pretty darned cool, actually.
Comment by adam — December 8, 2008 @ 9:45 am
Very nice, Adam. I’m not sure I’d have the patience to do what you did, but I have some Utah pictures taken from airplanes that I’d sure like to locate. It would be nice if airlines would give passengers GPS or Lat/Long coordinates of their flights. On trans-oceanic flights, at least you can look at a monitor and see where you are in real time. (Which was nice when I flew over Greenland, a couple of years ago.)
Comment by rakkity — December 10, 2008 @ 6:39 pm