Thursday, December 08, 2011

SoCal Trip

I was in southern California for the last several days -- an entirely different universe, as far as the weather goes. Beautiful sunny days with blue skies....

Best part of the trip was a Segway tour of the Gaslamp Quarter of San Diego, and seeing friends I hadn't seen for too long.

Pasadena had a huge windstorm the night before I landed, with winds up to 97 miles-per-hour. There were trees down on the streets and the NY Times said up to 40 buildings will need to be torn down. I took a few pictures of the mess at the Huntington Botanical Gardens:





Some pictures from the plane, of clear cuts in southern Oregon:





And some unusual ground features in southern Oregon or northern California, that I haven't yet figured out:



7 comments:

John Fleck said...

Marc Reisner has a great line in the opening passage of Cadillac Desert: "anyone who flies in an airplane and doesn't spend most of his time looking out the window wastes his money".

Lars said...

I think that the bottom-most one is a volcanic cone, David.

Dano said...

You can definitely tell where the CA border ends and OR starts when you fly north out of CA. And I agree with Lars those last fotos look like evidence for volcanism.

Best,

D

David Appell said...

Dano, do you mean you can tell because of the clear-cutting? Is it not allowed in CA?

Dano said...

It used to be 40 ac max, David, with a strip between each patch of a distance I can't remember. 100 feet maybe.

Best,

D

David Appell said...

Dano, I'm sorry, I still don't understand. What is "ac?" acre? Where was it 40 acres -- OR or CA? Do you mean a clear cut of 40 acre was allowed (where?) as long as there was 100 ft between cut patches?

Is clear-cutting allowed in CA or not? How can one recognize the CA-OR state line from an airplane?

(Sorry for the dumb questions -- I'm not from the west.)

Mike Mangan said...

Dano, like most True Believers, has never been the clearest of communicators.

Nice shots, Dave.