Category: Travel

Inside (Southern Illinois III)

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The Giant City State Park has its name because of the sandstone that has eroded into blocks (houses), separated by streets. After walking around last time, today we enter.

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The whole place is quite spooky, even during daylight, and it is easy to get lost.

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Some paths have exists, fortunately.

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The location of the next two images was most impressive. It looks rather artificial, but not made by humans.

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Who would design something like this where even the trees contort in desperation?

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(to be continued)

Around (Southern Illinois II)

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In the middle of the Midwest, there is the small College town Carbondale. The nearest airport is in St. Louis, two hours away by car, if you survive the trucks that rush towards Chicago. However, it is not just rolling hills and corn fields. There is Giant City State Park, which is not, as I was afraid, another amusement park.

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Instead, it is one of the best hidden gems of the midwest. The numerous trails take you through lush forests and along sandstone cliffs.

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Some of the boulders have a distinctive organic appearance, and you begin to wonder whether they could come alive… Also, everything seems to tilt in unexpected ways.

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Is it that these wall want to keep us out, or keep something inside?

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To be continued…

Forward (Arizona V)

Not only looking down is worthwhile, but also looking ahead.

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So this is my collection of pictures of tree bark from Arizona. The textures are beautiful, and one wonders why the trees are making this effort.

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After all, the visible outer layer is just dead cells.

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So, more precisely: Does the beauty we (or is it just me?) see in these structures provide some evolutionary advantage?

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Not for the trees, I am afraid.

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But maybe for us,

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because the beauty we believe to see helps to keep looking forward, despite all the decay.

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Down (Arizona IV)

When you look down in Indiana, you see either mud or decaying leaves. This is of course exaggerating it, but the contrast to Arizona is so stark that I ended up taking a considerable number of pictures by just pointing the camera downwards.

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It of course always depends on where you are and what you do. I don’t envy the brave NASA scientists who have been staring for decades at red desert rocks from Mars. What will the first plant on Mars look like?

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Then there are the forests, smelling of pine and juniper.

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The proximity of decay and growth shows how fragile is what we have,

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and how much it depends on water.

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Oscillograms (Arizona III)

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About an hour car drive away from the desert landscape of the Petrified Forest in Arizona, one finds oneself in the large National Forests of Arizona. Change can happen quickly.

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For a little while, melt water from winter snow leaves scenic lakes where tall pines try to protect the smaller birches in early morning light.

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Summer draughts and quickly progressing privatization threaten all this.

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After sunset, when the few humans have retreated into their safe houses and the winds have subsided, the landscape becomes very quiet. The perfect reflections of the resting trees look like oscillograms of unheard cries.

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Change happens quickly.

Bucket of Blood Street (Arizona II)

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The little town Holbrook in Arizona offers convenient accommodation after visiting the Petrified Forest National Park. This is not a wealthy town, but  the downtown area has its own nostalgic charm. You wonder what life was like here a hundred years ago.

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Then you come across this street sign. Choosing a name is a delicate thing. Apparently, in the good old times a saloon shooting ended in such a way that the establishment was renamed the Bucket of Blood Saloon. In the long run, this didn’t help much, and after the building fell apart, the name survived as the street name, to this day.

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Other local attractions allude to that bit of the town’s history in appropriate color.

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The moral? Appearances change, names stay. But it seems the town hasn’t quite figured out whether that name is a curse or an opportunity.

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Moonscape (Arizona I)

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My obsession (?) with taking pictures in moonlight is not so much due to a romantic trait of mine, but rather because of my more general fascination with alternate lighting.

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The Blue Mesa of the Petrified Forest National Park is part of the Painted Desert. The eeriness of the landscape increases in the moonlight, which brings out more blue than is really there.

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The pictures here were taken shortly after sunset with rapidly decreasing light and increasing exposure times.

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These last two pictures were taken in almost complete darkness. They show the landscape as we would see them with more sensitive eyes.

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My thanks go to the friendly park rangers who didn’t fine us despite staying after sunset.

Treescapes (Red River Gorge State Park III)

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Even more than the curious Natural Bridge and the Rock Garden, a highlight of Red River Gorge State Park is the view of distant treescapes.

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Compared to Indiana, the vegetation of Kentucky has deeper reds and more pronounced greens in late Fall.

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Living with daily views like these would be paradise for me. Admittedly, I like complicated things.

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Rock Garden Trail (Red River Gorge State Park II)

I am a big fan of rock/tree formations, and thus the Rock Garden Trail in Red River Gorge State Park was a must for me.

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The rock garden is, expectedly, very different from designer Japanese landscapes. Because everything is here by chance, all depends on the viewer.

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It is hard to say what I like about these landscapes. They are clearly not everybody’s taste.

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Maybe they vaguely suggest archaic temples to me — either unfinished, or in utter destruction. The trees serve as columns, while the rocks are material for more permanent structures, to be used or in slower decay.

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The Nihilist’s Bridge (Red River Gorge State Park I)

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The Natural Bridge in Red River Gorge State Park (Kentucky!) doesn’t bridge anything, like most natural bridges.

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One can walk under and across and thus use both functions of a bridge, contemplating the pointlessness of the act in this case. It helps that the bridge is more or less on top of a mountain.

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That there are trees on top is giving hope, though.

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