Sunday, April 17, 2011 - Utah Rt 12, East of Escalante UT
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Desert Catfish, Dead, with Toes, Escalante UT, April 17, 2011
Dang, I did it again
You may recall I lost most of my nesting Great Blue Heron pictures a while back to that certain fuzziness caused by forgetting to turn the auto stabilization off when I had the camera on the tripod, trying my darndest to get some nice clean shots from farther away than I would have preferred.
Well, this morning I went walkabout with the camera, took some neat shots... and forgot to turn the stabilization ON. The sun was low in the sky and the shutter speed was adequate with image stabilization. But not without!
Tomorrow morning, maybe I'll go walk the route again - or maybe not. Clouds are rolling in. I think there's a storm brewing. If so the light won't be worth a darn. Darn.
Night camp
Boondocked - Utah Route 12 East of Escalante UT
- Adequate Verizon cell phone 1x service is available here - no broadband.
- Locate on my Night Camps map
- Check the weather here
Wind on the Gangplank
There was almost no soil in that part of the range - just twelve miles' breadth of rough pink rock. "As you go from Chicago west, soil diminishes in thickness and fertility, and when you get to the gangplank and up here on top of the Laramie Range there is virtually none," Love said. "It's had ten million years to develop, and there's none. Why? Wind - that's why. The wind blows away everything smaller than gravel."
Standing in that wind was like standing in river rapids. It was a wind embellished with gusts, but, over all, it was primordially steady: a consistent southwest wind, which had been blowing that way not just through human history but in every age since the creation of the mountains - a record written clearly in wind - scored rock. Trees were widely scattered up there and, where they existed, appeared to be rooted in the rock itself. Their crowns looked like umbrellas that had been turned inside out and were streaming off the trunks downwind. "Wind erosion has tremendous significance in this part of the Rocky Mountain region," Love said, "Even down in Laramie, the trees are tilted. Old-timers used to say that a Wyoming wind gauge was an anvil on a length of chain. When the land was surveyed, the surveyors couldn't keep their tripods steady. They had to work by night or near sunrise. People went insane because of the wind." His mother, in her 1905 journal, said that Old Hanley, passing by the Twin Creek school, would disrupt lessons by making some excuse to step inside and light his pipe. She also described a man who was evidently losing to the wind his struggle to build a cabin: