Mountains Beyond Mountains Beyond Mountains.

This is a very subtle photograph and I love what it shows.  Be sure to click on it to see it larger.  We are looking west toward Mexico.  There is a mountain in the foreground, and behind that another mountain range and another very faint range beyond that.  I love the subtle differences in each range as they recede into the distance.  In the second range behind the dark range in the foreground, do you see a little "notch?"  That is 14 miles away, and is called Santa Elena Canyon, and the Rio Grande river flows through that notch!  I also love the clouds in this photograph because in a way they seem to mirror the shape of the mountains.  I may make a large photograph print for my wall, of this image.

 

Double Lenticular

I am switching my subjects around so you won't get bored.  So back to clouds, if I may.  I thought this was a lenticular cloud, but to be sure I asked my friend George who was a meteorologist earlier in his life, and who is involved in "The Cloud Appreciation Society."  He gave me the gift of membership in the group.  I get an email each day with a different photograph of a cloud.  People send in photographs of clouds from all over the world.  So he mentioned that this is actually a double lenticular.  I love the three different mountain ranges in the lower left of the photograph.  What amazing scenery in Big Bend.

I Stole This Photograph

OK, I confess...   I stole this photograph!  Yeah, I did.  Stan and I were in the visitor center and I saw him take this photograph on his cellphone and I asked to look at it.  It grabbed me immediately, and I said that I was going to shoot it as well.  Stealing a close friend's photographs is allowed, I think.  I hope it's OK.  I was trying ti figure out why I was so attracted to this and I think I figured it out.  Big Bend National Park is huge with an area of 1,250 square miles!  It is all about wide open spaces and seeing from horizon to horizon.  So it seems so strange with distant horizons in every direction, that I would limit myself to just this narrow view through this window.  I guess that's what attracted me to this scene.

 

Texas Building, Texas Truck, Texas Sky

Back to Marfa, for this one.  Remember I talked about the early morning light on the way to breakfast?  This building is only about 100 feet from the restaurant where we had breakfast.  I may have noticed the building as we passed it on the way to where we were eating, but it was only after breakfast that I started looking at it, and then the white pickup truck pulled up and parked!  Perfect!

 

Ocotillo Blossom

This photograph of a blossom on an Ocotillo was taken maybe 30 feet from the photo of the plant I did yesterday.  Is this astounding or what!  Look at all the stuff that is going on in this blossom.  I went back and looked at yesterday's photo more carefully and I think I can see some yellowish things on the tips of some of those branches.  Notice in this photograph, behind the bright red parts are yellow parts.  I found this blossom on a smaller plant and it is only about4 feet off the ground.

This gives a good sense of where the blossom is located

And here is the smaller plant but the blossom is not showing.  I looked at the original photograph which is much larger, and there seem to be yellowish blossoms on the ends of most of these branches.  What amazing things I discovered when I looked at an individual plant instead of the whole landscape and then when I examine just one branch! I also discovered that Ocotillos reach their maturity in 60 to 100 years!  Wow they outlast us!

 

Cactus Lesson

We drove to this trailhead where a one mile hike would get you to an interesting site called Lower Burro Mesa Pouroff.  It was almost one hundered degrees so instead of hiking we took photographs of the landscape and the cacti within a short distance of the car.  This is an Ocotillo.  While often called a "cactus" it is not a true cactus but rather a unique desert plant related to the tea plant, and blueberries!  I would not have guessed that!  I love finding these Ocotillos in the landscape because they grow so high and make wonderful foreground objects for landscape photographs.

 

Clouds and Rocks

This photograph was not hard to take.  It is essentially the view from the front porch of the lodge where we stayed!  I came outside one morning to see these beautiful cirrus clouds over this rock formation which is only about 200 feet away.  I did walk over closer to the formation and then I could move left or right in the street to position the clouds where I wanted them in relation to the top of the peak. Beautiful skies, rocks, mountains and desert.  What more could one ask for in one place!

 

For Sale - Used Car, Needs Work

The first time I saw this car on the street in Marfa, we were going fast enough that it didn't register quickly enough.  But the second time I told Stan to stop!  I had to photograph this!  I jumped out of the car with the toy camera and made about 8 exposures, four of them close, like this and four like the one below.  I like the photograph below for a sense of place, but I think the impact of the close up is a great way to begin the blog.  Please click on this because it is an extra large image and you can see it in better detail.  I have never seen a car this beat up, on the street. Ever!  I guess in New York State this car wouldn't even be allowed on the street because there is no way it would pass inspection looking like this.  I guess in Texas the requirements are less stringent. 

 

Green Sotol, Again

Believe it or not, I showed you this Sotol plant yesterday, but as a close up looking down into the plant.  Then I stepped away from it, and crouched down, and I put the camera almost on the ground and did this photograph so that I could get the mountain in the background.  So interesting after looking in detail into the plant to see what it really looks like from the outside.  You might not guess that this is the same plant as yesterday, but it is.

 

Green Sotol

At one of our many stops where we parked the car and walked around, I spotted this plant.  I believe it is a "Green Sotol" which is in the same family as the "skeleton" I showed you the other day.  But these leaves are much thinner than the broad ones in the dead plant I showed you.  And look at the sharp "hooks" all along each leaf!  You would not want to fall into one of these plants accidentally.  Watch where you walk!  I believe that at a time in the future, a central stalk will appear, as you saw in the other plant I photographed.  Be sure and click on this to see more detail!

 

Lenticular Cloud

We had stopped to eat our sandwiches for lunch while out exploring.  Stan said "Hey, look at that cloud over the peak!  I immediately grabbed my camera, thinking that this looked like a spaceship hovering over the top of this eroded mountain.  I recognized it right away as a lenticular cloud, Lenticular clouds are stationary clouds that form mostly in the troposphere.  They are often comparable in appearance to a lens or saucer. As air travels along the surface of the Earth, obstructions are often encountered, including natural features, such as mountains or hills,  which disrupt the flow of air into "eddies", or areas of turbulence.  If the temperature at the crest of the wave drops below the dew point, moisture in the air may condense to form lenticular clouds. This cloud sat there, unchanging in its appearance for all the time we were having lunch.

 

The Century Plant

This is known as a Century Plant.  Its name is Havard Agave and believe it or not, it is a member of the Asparagus Family!  This species lives for 8 to 30 years before blooming, setting seed and dying.  It is astounding looking, right?  When I mentioned to the woman at the reception desk that I had photographed it, she said "You are looking at a skeleton."   That had never occurred to me even though I could see that the plant was dead, as you can see.  The leaves at the bottom are all brown and hanging down. 

What's really wonderful is that the National Park Service doesn't knock it down and take it away - they leave it to decompose on its own, as a lesson about the life of this plant.

And look how beautiful and complex the top of the plant is!  I would love to see one of these in bloom sometime.  In fact, I think I will go look up photos online of one of these in bloom.

 

A Slight Change of Plan

Today is our day to fly home.  It is an early flight at 7:11.  We were up at 3:15 AM and our car was turned in and we were through security and sitting at the gate before sunrise.  Saw this aircraft being moved by a tug to take it away from the gate.

This is my view of the plane next to us from my seat as we prepared to push back.  Tug pushed us back from the gate and we awaited engine starts.  But we sat there and sat there and heard some strange noises but had no idea what was going on.  After 10 or 15 minutes the captain announced they couldn't start the right engine!  So we were pulled back to the gate and everyone got off the plane.  The short version is after an hour they still didn't know and an hour after that they took all our baggage off the plane.  Not a good sign!  So after all that delay we talked to a gate agent and because the next plane to DFW wasn't until 5 PM today, he suggested we fly from El Paso, to Chicago, and then on to New York.  We elected to do that because it seems like a more sure thing.

Here is a couple across from us trying to figure how they could get to where they were going.  The pilot and first officer left the plane and as they came through the gate area I followed them and got to ask what caused the problem, and they were really nice and explained some technical things, but they still didn't know what the problem was.  The one thing that was annoying is, we had to leave the secure area, go fetch our bags, and then start checkin and go through TSA security all over again!  

We are not sure when the mechanic arrived because some of them were working on the rear of the plane where the Auxiliary Power Unit is installed, but they told us that was not the problem.  So we watched him work for a bit.  We were no longer going to take our original flight but they kept setting back the time it would finally leave for DFW.

Then a couple of hours later this notice appeared on the screen behind the gate agents!  "Flight Canceled!"

Man oh man, we made, with the gate agent, the right decision to switch routes.  We may actually get home tonight!  More news tomorrow.  As I finish this, our aircraft is just pulling in to the gate, and we should be boarding soon!

 

A Walk to Breakfast

We left Big Bend National Park yesterday and drove to Marfa, Texas because we wanted to see and photograph some of the works of Donald Judd at the Chinati Foundation.  More on that in another post. This morning we woke and decided to walk from our hotel to a breakfast place we found.  We could not go more than 50 feet without finding something to photograph, such is the nature of the buildings in Marfa.  This is the old Godbold feed mill which has been a landmark in town forever.  It was recently sold and will become a distillery and a restaurant.  But this is a classic scene all over parts of Texas.  I photographed the first one of these I ever saw in San Angelo, TX when I went to visit my friend Ginger back in February of 2007.