These are all taken on the Ukiah-Comptche Road in Mendocino County – a road that’s not very long but runs from nearly sea level (well downhill of the shot just above), to a reasonably high crest in the coast range (a bit further above the images below), before dropping down to Ukiah in its narrow valley. At that bottom, Lake Mendocino on the outskirts of Ukiah.
Since our last two posts have featured guest contributions from my cousin Sam, I thought perhaps we’d use this turn in the series-go-round to feature photos from our recent family outing in celebration of things Mom introduced us all to. These all come from probably her favorite place on earth, Storm King Art Center, which is named after nearby Storm King Mountain. Sam’s one of three Oberlin graduates you’ll find the gallery below, the other (thanks for joining, Chris) being an additional contributing photographer for some shots. Thanks, Mom, for helping more of us get to know this fabulous place.
Above, Mt Rainier from on high. Another contribution from Sam: thanks! Below, more snowy mountains, this time in northern Greenland as I flew by in April en route to SF. Theme = snowy mountains, to mentally cool those sweating through hot days :-).
My dear cousin Sam, who’ll soon start featuring as an occasional guest photographer with us, asked what’s happened to my “Lake Living” series after viewing a recent post. As in, has it stopped being about lakes and started being about living on water. So herewith a few principles I’ve been working on for these “coasting” and “lake” categories. Because you might look at these photos and say “it’s not a coast, it’s a river.” Or you might look at the previous post that Sam questioned and say “that’s not a lake, it’s a bay!” But in our recent explorations here at smw, slt we’ve learned much more about water management & what what water connects to what other water, than we knew when first we got close enough to Zeeland to see the maeslantkering, which we featured in an earlier post.I’m proposing that a lake is a body of water that’s primarily fresh because it’s protected or cut off from the tidal flows that would come with extensive connection to an ocean. And that a “coast” is where a body of land that’s connected directly to a mainland-continent type landmass meets a body of water that’s close enough to the open ocean as to make nearly no difference. To whit,the city of Vlissingen, which is what you’re seeing here and which just happens to be the last stop for any train heading into the province of Zeeland from the rest of NL, is the only place south of the maeslantkering itself where the North Sea has free access to the interior of Zeeland. In other words, though Bergen Op Zoom – subject of that Lake Living post Sam queried may look on a map as though it connects by estuarial channels fairly directly to the North Sea, it in fact deliberately no longer does, due to all the massive water works NL did after the floods of the 1950s to build dams, dikes and the maeslantkering in order to protect as much of the interior as they could. If curious, please see a clear map in this link of all the many places where the North Sea’s access has been cut off by dikes and dams, which are now generally being upgraded to rise higher due to global warming and NL’s natural hope to remain an inhabited country despite American consumer’s addiction to gas-guzzling cars…and other carbon over-use issues. I’ll do one more explanation later on, when we get to the large body of water to the north and east of Amsterdam…which, until my visit two weeks ago to the castle so beautifully introduced in a recent post, I thought incorrectly was also salty & connected to the North Sea. But otherwise, assume these are my current working definitions of coast & lake…and ponder how global warming and Dutch ingenuity + determination give rise to interesting questions :-).
a) This canal’s actually well within the city of A’dam, so it’s urban even if it’s doesn’t look like it; b) Oops, I skipped this series on the last run of numbers :-/.
Since our last two posts have featured guest contributions from my cousin Sam, I thought perhaps we’d use this turn in the series-go-round to feature photos from our recent family outing in celebration of things Mom introduced us all to. These all come from probably her favorite place on earth, Storm King Art Center, which is named after nearby Storm King Mountain. Sam’s one of three Oberlin graduates you’ll find the gallery below, the other (thanks for joining, Chris) being an additional contributing photographer for some shots. Thanks, Mom, for helping more of us get to know this fabulous place.
(so much world, so little time....) 