Category: Environment

I’m always drawn to the mountains, first, to the White and Green Mountains of New England, and the Adirondacks over the past twenty years. Hiking in the mountains requires that you be in reasonably good shape. My mountain watch words are: food, water, energy, and weather (along with  protection from the latter). Failure on any of these can result in serious consequences. Most people know this, which is at least one reason why the trails are not crowded (though the trail head parking lots certainly are on summer week-ends).

After a five-hour ride and checking in, we went off to explore the South Meadows area of the High Peaks. It turned out to be a real dud for photography–too many trees.

Although I didn’t realize it when I planned the trip, this week-end would include the rise of a super moon on Saturday at the reasonable hour of 8:30 PM. We knew the moon would rise at 112° shortly after sundown on July 11 so the local cemetery seemed the perfect place. Unfortunately, there were a few trees in the way (the Adirondacks are loaded with them), as you can see in the above photo.

We picked a better place on Saturday. Unfortunately, it was cloudier than expected. Forty-five minutes after moonrise we saw nothing. The mosquitoes were vicious so we packed it in. Just as we were leaving, we saw the moon break the ridge! We jumped out, set up, and I got one shot before the moon became almost completely obscured. My friend set up a minute earlier than I, and he got the better shot!

Back track to dawn of that morning. We managed to get to Chapel Pond where we got a number of shots, here are two, one in B + W and one in color.

After shooting, we went back to the local diner and got some breakfast. Thereafter we headed to the Adirondack Mountain Reserve Club. These are private lands that allow hiking on designated trails. We hiked portions of its East and West Ausable River trails where upon we came to the South Meadows Falls. That’s my friend, immortalized in the red hat.

A little further down the trail we came to a beaver pond, complete with beaver hut. Boy, these guys were busy, but I guess . .  . .

We continued on and finally came to the Lower Ausable Lake, as shown in the photo, below. Thereafter, we returned to the trail head via the club’s dirt road. This hike was sentimental since it was my wife’s and I last hike together. We never finished that hike, because my back was bothering me. My friend and I easily finished.

Aside from light, photographers are always thinking about how to use form and texture to advantage in their photographs. As I pondered this, I got the idea to go and photograph a quarry. I located an abandoned quarry since most working quarries are fenced off and hidden for a variety of reasons.

A few mornings ago I managed to get up at 4 AM so I could be in position to photograph at dawn. You can see my subject in the following photos that I panned starting at ENE and ending at SSW. As with strip mining, there’s not much that can be done with quarries once their resources are exhausted. Unfortunately, one thing you can do is illegally dump trash into them, as shown by the debris in the second photograph. What you can’t see is a refrigerator, chair, and other items that were at the bottom of the ledge where I was standing.

The sun broke completely free of the clouds as it rose for the shot, immediately above, showing that quarries can also provide aesthetic views. Note the stratified layers in the rock, each layer likely taking thousands of years to develop.  To better see this I zoomed in for the shot, below, where the blurred water reflections meet the sharply delineated rock and trees above.

There was a moon present so I also set a shot showing it. It took some time since the camera was tripod mounted. Every time I wanted to make this shot the clouds moved in front of the moon. Finally, I decided to leave the camera set for this shot and just waited.

Just a bit further down the road, across from the main entrance of the working quarry I spotted an old steam shovel, seemingly set out for exhibit. This was probably state of the art equipment in the 1930s.

As with so many things in industrial life, quarries pose a conundrum. We want the rock to meet all sorts of construction needs, but quarries permanently scar the earth. As time goes by there will be ever more scars.

After a hiatus of several months I’m ready to resume blogging, though my environmental focus will be more on landscapes.  This past February a friend of mine and I snowshoed up to Avalanche Pass and Lake from the Adirondack Club Lodge, a round trip distance of 11 miles with about a 1,000 foot incline. The high for the day was about 8º, though it might have been colder at high elevation. At these temperatures it was almost impossible to operate the camera, even while wearing photo gloves. My finger tips, which had to be protruded, became numb within two or three minutes of touching the camera. Nevertheless, I managed a few good shots.

The area is so named due to a major avalanche that drastically redefined the mountain sides and the lake many years ago. According to Wikipedia, “A large avalanche occurred on August 20, 1869, that created a number of the landslides on Mount Colden, the rubble from which substantially raised the level of the lake. Another avalanche in 1942 caused further slides that raised the lake level by 10 feet (3 m).”

Our hike’s first stop was Marcy Dam, where we were the first to arrive that morning, as shown by absent foot prints in the following scene. It’s a desolate but beautiful landscape. Multi-layers and warm, quick-dry synthetics were the dress of the day!

A couple of hours later we reached the pass and lunched on the lake’s edge, protected from the wind. While on the lake, I took the following photos. The first shows the trail left by four hikers, seen in the background, as they headed southwest down the lake. The second photo is the face of the mountain where we had lunch, showing windblown pockets of snow on the craggy edges of the face.

I photographed the hikers in the third photo as they hiked northeast on the lake back towards the pass. It’s really something to see so many people deep in the mountains under such inhospitable conditions. Of course, like us, I’m sure they knew the forecast was for sun and light winds all day.  Still, mountain forecasts are prone to abrupt change. Hiking was also made more critical due to the short period of daylight during early February.

On the way back I shot the following photo, which shows a set of tracks from folks venturing on up the mountains.

The next day we made a quick hike up Giant Mountain to photograph Keene Valley from the top of the falls. The water was frozen solid, allowing us to stand on the part about 25 feet away from where it went over the ledge (yikes!). Here’s what we saw, shown in the following photo (the dark straight line is highway 73 running through Keene Valley).

So much of our modern environment consists of chemicals, power lines, buildings, roads, parking lots, radio energy, and others. Although these are things upon which we all depend, our bodies, that have evolved over the millennia in nature, are not designed to work effectively in these settings, since they expose us to pollution and make proper diet and exercise less obtainable for many.