View from Clava Cairns

I love Scotland. Maybe next year I can go back.

Mistaken identity at Clava Cairns

This was one of the pictures I'd never processed—me walking next to the main cairn.

I didn't really look that closely at it, apart from wondering whatever happened to the bag I was carrying since I don't remember it at all.

Then it occurred to me: Wait, who took this picture? I was there alone; the driver I'd hired for the afternoon was waiting for me outside the park. I realized that this wasn't me, this was some other woman with baggy jeans and a gray hoodie and a camera around her neck. (You can also see her off to the side in the previous picture of the cairn.) But I honestly thought it was a picture of me.

I found another picture from that day, obviously taken by the driver, and I was wearing a red jacket, not a gray one.

The jeans, alas, were just as unfortunate.

Flashback: Clava Cairns

The most famous of a group of cairns around Inverness. I posted pictures at the time (here, here, and here) but here's another that really shows the ring of standing stones around the cairn.

Flashback: Inverness

A spectacular day on the river Ness in 2015.

Sunday bird blogging

Another flashback to Hilton Head and a great blue heron.

Sunday bird blogging

An anhinga drying its wings after a dip in the Atlantic in Hilton Head in 2019.

Flashback: Glen Coe

The Scottish Highlands.

Glen Coe is famous in Scottish history for a notorious massacre during one of the Jacobite uprisings, but in 2015 when I took this picture it couldn't have been more serene: spectacular mountains looming over a narrow valley, some otherworldly light effects, and a lot of hikers.

And probably some sheep.

Saturday reflections

The Cherwell by Magdalen College in Oxford last summer. The floating leaves on top of the reflection make a nice effect.

Knicks!

Back in the (relatively) here and now: watching the Knicks ticker tape parade.

On TV, obviously—I would have liked to be there (and in fact I was supposed to be renewing my driver's license this afternoon at a DMV office near the parade starting point but rescheduled when the parade was announced and I realized there was no possible way I could get there.) But I definitely couldn't handle the crowds or standing for hours, so I'm celebrating from home.

Flashback: Peru

One more Peru image that never got posted: the train platform when we arrived back in Ollantaytambo after having been to Machu Picchu.

Flashback: Lima

The Museo Larco has an extensive collection of pre-Columbian art and the various cultures that lived in Peru before the brief reign of the Incas, including a truly astonishing collection of erotic sculptures. (I particularly remember a pitcher or teapot of sorts with an anatomically detailed spout.) These sculptures were on the wall outside the bathrooms, which made me laugh at the time and still makes me smile.

I am trying to move books and furniture to make way for the installation of new air conditioners tomorrow. It is not going well, so I can use all the smiles I can get.

Sunrise at Wonder Lake

We stopped at Wonder Lake on our way out of the park to watch the sunrise on Denali.

And that's it for Alaska. I'll have to see where I'm going to revisit next.

Flashback: Leaving Denali

I was miserably sick with a cold the day we left Denali, and it was a long travel day, first by bus, then by train, to Talkeetna. So I am surprised I managed to take any pictures at all on that bus ride, but how could I resist these landscapes?

Flashback: Wasilla

I was in Alaska only a few years after Sarah Palin had been the Republican nominee for Vice President, so we'd all heard of Wasilla, where she'd been mayor before becoming governor of Alaska. I seem to remember we saw her house across the water.

But we weren't in Wasilla to look up the Palins, we were there to visit Iditarod headquarters. We got to see lots of sled dogs and hold puppies, and go on a short training ride with one of the dog teams. There wasn't any snow yet, obviously, so the dogs pulled a wagon instead of a sled, which conveniently had room for four extra riders. It was tremendous fun; I'm not sure I've ever wanted to do anything as much as those dogs wanted to RUN.

One last glacier

This is basically a historical artifact at this point, as the glaciers in Prince William Sound, like most glaciers on our poor wounded planet, have been rapidly shrinking. So it's a flashback in every sense.

PWS waterfalls

More Prince William Sound

I wrote at the time that I was disappointed not to see whales during the cruise around the sound, but that the glaciers made up for it. I hadn't been to Iceland or Antarctica then, so these were my first glaciers, and I took far more closeups of blue frozen water with streaks of dirt than even I can find a need for.

The glaciers on the mountains were gorgeous though.

Flashback: Prince William Sound

I uploaded this picture without realizing I'd posted a virtually identical picture in 2014. But this one has that kittiwake flying over the water, and it's definitely a view worth looking at twice.

And now for something completely different

At first I though this must be some kind of bison, but it's actually a muskox.

There used to be herds of muskoxen across Alaska, Arctic Canada, and Greenland, but the Alaskan population was wiped out by the early 20th century. They've since been reintroduced in several of the parks and wildlife refuges.

It's too bad the sun was behind her (I think this is a female) so I couldn't get better pictures of this very strange creature.

Another youngster

This is a young elk.

Plus a moose!

Most of the moose I saw in Alaska were at a distance, so I couldn't appreciate that strange squarish snout they have. This moose at the AWCC was a juvenile—old enough to have been abandoned by its mother, but not old enough to have turned into an asshole.

But it turns out I had more reindeer

I found a folder, cleverly named AWCC, that I had clearly never investigated. So here are some more pictures of the reindeer.

One last look at Wonder Lake

I'm done with Denali—the mountain anyway; I may find a few more pictures from the bus ride through the park. So here's Wonder Lake again; it was, without exaggeration, one of the most perfectly beautiful places I've ever been.

Between the mountains

Looking down on the spaces between Denali and the surrounding mountains.

Twin Peaks

Denali has two summits. The South Summit is the taller one.

And we're here!

 

Getting closer

And Denali comes into view.

Looking up the Alaska Range on Wikipedia reminded me that Denali, measured base to peak, is the tallest mountain in the world on land. Mount Everest gets half of its elevation from its location on the Tibetan plateau; the actual mountain is 12,000 to 15,000 feet, compared to Denali's 18,000 feet. (Mauna Kea is taller than either one, but it's mostly under water.)

Approaching Denali

After we left the airfield, we flew over tundra approaching the mountains. The Alaska Range is not part of the Rocky Mountains, though both are part of the American Cordillera; it stretches 600 miles across south-central Alaska into the Yukon.

And still more Denali details

Some really fun swoops and pillars of snow.

I think that streak of white in the upper right is a reflection. I was taking all of these pictures through an airplane window, and there was very little room to maneuver and I couldn't always avoid getting the window or parts of the plane in the picture. And, because the cabin wasn't pressurized, I was gasping for air when hoisting the camera around.

Anyway, so very worth it.

More Denali details

These icicles make me think that the mountain has grown teeth.

Denali details

It still amazes me that I actually got in a tiny plane and took a scenic flight around the mountain. And spectacular as it was, I would most likely never do it again. Probably. Well, really it depends.

But even if it was once in a lifetime, getting to see these mountains up close, with details like those whorls of snow or the woody texture of that rock, was incredible.

Denali

This mountain view is of course a little more dramatic.

I posted many pictures of Denali—then still officially Mount McKinley—at the time. But there were at least a hundred pictures from the scenic flight around the mountain that I never got to. Many duplicates and a few duds, but some definitely worth looking at as well.

View from the AWCC

I'm guessing I ignored this picture of the mountains behind the wildlife center because I'd already posted so many pictures of mountains, but it's still pretty.

Flashback: Alaska

I posted some pictures from the Alaska Wildlife Conservation Center back in 2014 when I visited it, but I somehow ignored this disconcerting creature.

Reindeer are not native to Alaska; as in South Georgia, they were originally imported as a food source. Alaska Native populations were starving because the whaling industry was disrupting their traditional food supplies, and arrangements were made to bring in reindeer from Russia to supplement the increasingly scarce caribou. Reindeer and caribou are the same species, but different subspecies, and since all of the reindeer in Alaska are semidomesticated, a century and a half of breeding has increased the visible differences between them.

There are fewer than 20,000 reindeer left in Alaska, and by law only Alaska Natives are allowed to keep them.

If I ever knew how these two ended up in the AWCC, I've long since forgotten it. Perhaps they needed rehab to learn to walk with those ridiculous antlers on their heads? They remind me of Max the dog in the original cartoon of How the Grinch Stole Christmas.

Sunday bird blogging

Another Alaska picture: a kittiwake in Prince William Sound in 2014.

Saturday reflections birthday do-over

Okay, this is much better.

This is Wonder Lake in Denali National Park in Alaska in 2014, with the namesake mountain there on the right. Alaska is the next stop on the flashback and it's been a lot of fun to go through those pictures. I've been able to visit so many beautiful places in my life, and I am grateful for every one of them.

Saturday reflections

Today is my birthday and I wanted to post a really cool reflection shot to celebrate, but this is the best I can find: buildings in lower Manhattan.

Urban poetry

A chain-link barrier hanging off one of the piers in the Hudson. I love the colors.

More black and white Badlands

Badlands in black and white

I posted this picture before but I think it works really well in black and white.