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Archive for the ‘National Park’ Category

My son and I spent a long weekend camping and hiking in the Sequoia National Park in California. It was the first time I had ever been there despite living only 4 hours drive from there. For some reason, I always ended up in Yosemite and not going the extra 100 miles or so to this awesome place.

The park, as the name suggests, is home to a large number of Sequoias. Sequoias are a red wood (a pine tree family member) and grow to enormous proportions. The coastal redwoods, that grow near Mendocino are taller than the Sequoias, but not as thick around the trunk. The Sequoias are huge and majestic. The national park is home to a tree called The General Sherman, allegedly the largest tree in the world, by volume. In other words, there are a few trees taller and there are trees that are thicker, but this is the tallest “thick” tree. It was indeed huge. Apparently, when these trees were first seen in the mid-1800s, nobody back east believed the reports, calling them a hoax. The trees are indeed absolutely huge and their color is distinctly different from the other pines in the forest. They are much redder as seen below.

This is an HDR comprised of 3 shots two stops apart. The HDR process does a marvelous job of accentuating the colors and the textures of these magnificent trees. I’ll be sure to post more soon.

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I have always been fascinated by ancient cultures and the Mesa Verde National Park in Colorado is a great place to visit in order to satisfy that interest. In fact, it is one of my favorite parks, because it offers the historic aspect as well as the beauty of Mother Nature.

The park protects over 4,000 known archeological sites, including an amazing 600 cliff dwellings or Pueblos.

The park offers a spectacular look into the lives of the Ancestral Pueblo people who made it their home for over 700 years, from A.D. 600 to A.D. 1300.

This picture is of a Kiva, a round meeting room you enter from the ceiling. I did not have a tripod and used a ledge to support the camera.  I love how the light shines down through the opening, illuminating the ladder and parts of the interior.

Mesa Verde is Spanish for green table.

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Hell’s Half Acre, that’s the name Rudyard Kipling gave to the Midway Geyser Basin when he visited Yellowstone in 1889. Midway has two of the largest (and most colorful) hot springs in the world: Grand Prismatic Spring and Excelsior Geyser, seen in the picture below.

Excelsior Geyser erupted some 300 feet high before the 1900s and was then the largest geyser in the world. It is now dormant and considered a hot spring, discharging more than 4000 gallons of boiling water per minute. The water is 199F (93C)!

You need to walk past this spring to get to the Grand Prismatic, which is perhaps more popular with tourists today. As a result many people hurry by and don’t pay too much attention to this beautiful and colorful spring. The water has this amazing, intense blue color as you can see here. Various vents boil and churn up the water covering it, almost perpetually, in a blanket of steam.

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While the blooming of wild flowers had peaked, there were still lots of flowering plants throughout Joshua Tree National Park. This rock protected the flowering shrubs from wind and, well, I guess it doesn’t rain much in the desert.

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