Hey, this is cool: CoolLAj Magazine includes this shot in La La Land at It’s Best: Photos of LA:
It was near the end of a series of flights from Copenhagen to Santa Barbara, and easily the best of the bunch.
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Above is a picture of the Station Fire, taken from the plane I was riding from Santa Barbara to Denver on Monday afternoon. I believe the water body at the bottom is the San Gabriel Reservoir. It lies in the midst of the San Gabriel Mountains, most of which are in the Angeles National Forest, much of which got burned up in the last two weeks.
I didn’t see this scene myself, since I was seated on the left side of the plane, with a view of the Mojave desert. But I knew the fire was there, below the right side of the plane, which had a perfect view of the burn area. So I handed my camera over to people sitting on the right side, and they made the shots.
The fire has been burning itself out in the back country, which it was doing on Monday when that shot was taken. Current stats: 160,357 acres, 71% contained, 3,647 personnel, containment expected on Tuesday September 15th, 2009, at approximately 6:00 PM. (Yes, they’re that precise.)
Tags: Angeles National Forest, fire, los angeles, San Gabriel Mountains, smoke, Station Fire, stationfire, wildfire
Above is the latest (as of this morning) MODIS satellite map (on Google Earth) of Station Fire spottings in the Angeles National Forest north of the Los Angeles basin. Near the center I’ve marked the Stony Ridge Observatory. While less familiar than the famous Mt. Wilson Observatory (and little known outside its own circles), Stony Ridge has a long history and is much loved as well as relied-upon.
This story in the LA Times raised concerns that Stony Ridge might be lost, but the latest word on the observatory’s own site, as well as the map above, suggest that it has been spared. I wonder to what degree this is because firefighters worked to save it, or that the fire simply avoided it. In any case it looks like a hole in the donut of surrounding fire—and that most of the fire spreading currently is away from populated areas.
Tags: Angeles National Forest, california, fire, los angeles, Mt. Wilson, Station Fire, stationfire, Stony Ridge Observatory, wildfire
Shows here in EdHat that there’s snow on Mount Baldy. That means there’s skiing in Los Angeles. Or close enough. Mt. Baldy is the highest point in the San Gabriel Mountains, which overlook Los Angeles from the North. Imagine a 10,064 mountain on Staten Island and you get the picture.
Skiing on Mt. Baldy is a trip. Mainly, a short one. Ignoring traffic (which you can do if you leave early enough), you can be there in under an hour from most of the L.A. basin. On a clear day you can see it from nearly anywhere there too. Its the big snow-capped one.
Here’s a photo set that gathers a few of my shots of Baldy, both from the ground and from airplanes.
And here’s a post I put up after a day of not-very-good skiing there. The snow wasn’t too bad, considering. The main problem was rookie snowboarders who crashed into the kid and I when they weren’t sitting on their butts like a bunch of traffic cones. From that post…
Rules for snowboarding on Mt. Baldy:
| 1. Fall on your ass. |
| 2. Sit on your ass, for as long as possible. |
| 3. Wait for your friends to come and fall on their asses next to your ass. |
| 4. Sit on your ass with your friends on their asses, for as long as possilbe. |
| 5. Do all this in the middle of a trail. The narrower the trail, the better. |
| 6. If possible, fall on your ass in the path of somebody else. |
| 7. Have no skills. Other than falling on your ass. |
| 8. When actually snowboarding, run into people. |
| 9. When running into people, fall on your ass again. |
| 10. Bonus: get the people you run into to fall on their asses too. |
Anyway, the kid is skiing this weekend in the Sierras somewhere, while I work in Atlanta. That’ll be fun too, but not quite the same.
Tags: baldy, los angeles, mtbaldy, mtsanantonio, oldbaldy, skiing
So I’m here in the Bolt Bus from Boston to New York. There’s wi-fi on board, and power outlets in the backs of most seats. But the wi-fi is slow, so I’m on a Sprint EvDO card. Getting about 1Mb down and .6Mb up. Not bad.
Anyway, I’ve recently uploaded a pile of photo sets to Flickr, where my inventory of photos is now approaching 26,000. Here is a list of just a few sets, mostly shot from airplanes and other moving vehicles:
- A drive from San Francisco to Santa Barbara in the Spring, when everything is still green.
- A trip that went from Las Vegas to Boston by way of Los Angeles. Many shots here, among them some amazing ones, mostly of desert.
- A winter flight from Boston to Santa Barbara, by way of L.A. Shot with a video camera in still mode. I still lacked a real digital camera back then (early 2005), so this had to do. Needs tags on the pix.
- Los Angeles in Winter, when L.A.’s mountains (the San Gabriels, which overlook the basin from the north) turn into alps. I love skiing there when the show’s thick (like right now), on Mt. Baldy. There are people who go skiing on Baldy in the morning and surfing in the afternoon. One of the fine graces of SoCal living.
- Four SoCal mountain sets I just put together: San Gorgonio (highest), San Jacinto (second highest), Baldy (third highest, and still above 10,000 feet), and San Gabriels.
- The Swiss Alps, shot on departure from Zürich earlier this month. Also crossing the Jura on the way into ZRH a couple hours earlier.
- Here are shots of the same Alps, still awaiting snow, only a few weeks earlier.
- Flying out of San Francisco last month.
- Flying in and out of Warsaw last month.
- Flying across Norway.
- White cliffs — not of Dover, but downcoast from there along the English Channel from Brighton to Eastbourn.
- New York at night, flying into LaGuardia from BWI in Baltimore. Shots of the Bronx Whitestone and Throggs Neck Bridge lights, were shot by The Kid.
- Colorful Salt Ponds, mostly on San Francisco bay, but with a few out in various deserts where they are all that remain of Pleistocene lakes.
- Boston to San Francisco last month.
- Flying into Las Vegas in September.
Wow. It’s snowing now. Hard. We’re still in Connecticut, approaching the Westchester border. The Weather.com map is quite colorful:
Hm. Not taking. Guess I need a separate post for it.
Tags: "Santa Barbara", aerial, alps, aviation, Boston, desert west, flying, france, germany, jura, las vegas, los angeles, mountains, Photography, san francisco, sky, spring, switzerland, winter