Helping Ama and Mama with the cooking

Echo was up for helping Ama and Mama with the cooking. I just wish I could get into a sitting position like that again.

Three Sisters from the Dee Wright Observatory

This first shot is a composite of three shots as I wanted it to be sharp from front to back. So, I put the focus on the sign in the bottom of the frame, then the second shot with a focus at the mid-point and the third on the Sisters out there in the distance. At home I used a filter in Photoshop to stitch the sharp parts together. Fun stuff. The sundial thing in front of me is from the top of the observatory and it points to the dozen or so peaks you can see on a clear day. The Sisters are pretty well clouded out on top but still make for a fantastic view. Below is more of a close up and you can see the glacier peaking through in the middle of the peaks.

Dee Wright Observatory at the McKenzie Pass

The Dee Wright Observatory is just a pile of lava rocks built up on top of the McKenzie Pass giving stunning views of about 8 to 10 peaks in the distance, depending on the weather. Homesteaders used to cross this pass in wagon trains. Just amazing to think that could be done. 

Starr Time

Had a great time seeing Ringo Starr and his 2018 version of the All-Starr Band. Great time was had by all, including the members of the band who appeared to be having a great time on this tour.

Mount Washington Lava Field

Lava Rule #1: Lava flows downhill. So, from Mount Washington in the distance, this lava field flowed to where I am standing about 2,700 years ago and continued down the mountain. Imagine trying to take your wagon over these bolder sized rocks. The lava flow underneath kept moving as the surface cooled and the motion of the underneath flow broke up the top layer into these huge boulders.

Under Water in Greensboro, NC

Visited Charlotte, Raleigh and Greensboro this week and saw a tiny bit of the aftermath of Hurricane Florence. Mostly, the hurricane went south so these cities didn't get hit too hard. Still, all the water flowed into the rivers and just about everywhere they are over their banks. When taking off from Greensboro took this shot with my cell phone and caught a view of a small part of this golf course under water. Rivers are really brown too....

Looks like the water is high if you look at the tree line along the water. Hard to tell but there isn't any river bank showing. Much worse further south and east towards the coast.

Mount Washington has a point

Near Windy Point up the McKenzie Pass scenic loop road, you get great looks at over a dozen major peaks. Mt. Washington, the peak here is distinguished by a sharp point, which is the old volcanic shaft that was once the inside of the lava chimney. Now that the top of the mountain as worn away, the tougher volcanic tube column remains. Up top, you get to see the 2,700 year old lava field. Quite the view up and over the pass.

Willamette National Forest and McKenzie Pass

This is the view of the beginning of the McKenzie Highway which is now a scenic highway over the McKenzie Pass, the original 1860 wagon trail over the mountains and until 1935, the main road out of the town of Sisters north towards Portland. (A four land bypass Highway 20 serves that purpose now). I can't imagine this road, as it winds up to the top, could have handled any traffic as you barely had room for two cars at spots. Plus the road gets snowed in from October to June. Up higher, you can see the evidence of massive forest fires )below) from an area that must go 10 miles or so along the road. 

Three Sisters outside of Bend Oregon

Driving into the town of Sisters from Bend, Oregon, you get quite the view of the Three Sisters. This area has some amazing views. I could spend weeks here visiting all the peaks in the area.

South Sister---framed

Heading into the town of Sisters, Oregon, caught this great view of the South Sister Mountain, framed in a ranch entrance. Just an amazing area of the country.

Picturesque Bend, Oregon

Got to visit Bend, Oregon for the first time ever on a business trip. Very picturesque view out my hotel window. That area used to be a paper plant, now turned into a restaurant and shopping district. A strange parallax effect happened when I looked at this same scene further back in my room. When at the window, I saw what you see in the shot above. When I went to the other side of the room and happened to look up, I saw the view you see below. I sort of jumped, thinking, what a minute, the paper plant is right next to the hotel. I don't quite understand the shifting perspective, but it was very weird.

I did not zoom the lens. It is set to the same wide angle as the previous shot. Very strange effect.

Things you see on the road

I think I can get through that gap.

Things you see on the road out west

On my long, long road trip from Chicago to Portland and return--9 days of windshield time over 10 days-- I got a lot of shots while on the road. It always seem like the best shots are in areas where you can't safely stop. Here is a shot from somewhere in Wyoming.

Little Big Horn Battlefield National Monument

Visiting the Little Big Horn monument was very emotional and very moving. The biggest surprise is that the Native American portion of the display wasn't approved until the George H. W. Bush presidency and not installed until 2003. Until 1991 it was still called the Custer Battlefield National Monument. That oversight is now rectified with a beautiful memorial next to Last Stand Hill, with grave markers now in place for both Native Americans and members of the 7th Calvary at approximate places where they fell. You can see how portions of the battle played out just by looking at the clusters of grave sites. Just a wonderful monument to the beginning of the end of the free tribes.   While the hill was Custer's last stand, the battle was really the last stand for the Lakota, the Sioux, the Crow and the northern Cheyenne as the Native Americans never won another battle after that engagement. 

Huddle Up

Are you ready for some football? These horses are as they instinctively huddled up to call a play.

Human size the environment

Sometimes it helps to give scale to a scene when you put something in it, in this case, Michael Jr. From our trip last week through Badlands National Park.

Yellow Mounds, close up

The thing about national parks is that there are so many photo opportunities it is hard to decide what to post. These are areas we need to preserve and to continue to fight for when corporate interests sometimes want to exploit the parks for commercial profit.

Badlands: Hill Top View

The thing that is strange about the Badlands in South Dakota is that they come up on you so suddenly. It is grasslands, corn or soybean fields for days and then, "wham", without warning (except for a ranger station that asks you for a park pass) you are staring at these huge formations in the ground. Pretty cool to see.

Big Shot in the Badlands

This shot is a composite of 18 separate shots that I took and therefore it was a huge file and difficult to load to Blogger and Facebook. I think it might be my shot of the year as the colors and landscape in the Badlands was spectacular at this location. You have some yellow from the Yellow Mounds and some red above that with grassland mixed in under a blue sky. Wonderfully fun shot to take. I shot a strip of 3 HDR shots (dark, average and light) across 6 vertical panoramic slices, all handheld and then stitched together in Lightroom. Anyway, enough technical stuff. It is a beautiful landscape and right now is my shot of the year candidate.

Yellow Mounds of the Badlands

There is an area inside Badlands National Park that highlights something called the "Yellow Mounds" so called as they display a distinct yellow color resulting from the sediments of an ancient sea that stretched from Canada to the Gulf of Mexico, splitting the continent in half. In the dry, mostly sandstone coloring of the Badlands, the Yellow Mounds bring some nice color to the area. The yellow comes from when this area was a large inland sea. The red, which is higher up, is from when the area was a wet forest. The colors tell the story.

The Badlands National Park

My rescue trip to bring Michael back from Portland was a long one! I drove over 4,000 miles, on the road usually 7 to 8 hours a day on 9 of the 10 days of the trip. The one day I wasn't driving we were moving Michael's stuff into the camper. The upside of all that (besides getting Michael home where we hope he can finish his recovery from concussion) is I got to see the country...and a lot of it. We stopped at the Badlands National Park and I got a number of wonderful shots. Here is a pano of one of the locations.