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.

Flashback: Simpsons Gap

Before I leave the outback—for real this time—here's one last rock formation, this one in Simpsons Gap, near Alice Springs. Never mind aliens--these rocks look like they're screaming.

Badland detail

That harsh geology looks better in black and white.

How about some of those bad Badlands

Since I posted pictures of the Painted Canyon badlands in North Dakota, here's another look at their southern cousins. Similar geology, very different landscape.

Painted Canyon

The badlands in North Dakota are greener and more appealing than their counterparts in the Badlands National Park in South Dakota. This overlook is in Theodore Roosevelt National Park.

The rock formations are similar, with the different types of rock stacked in colorful layers, but I'd actually like to ride a horse down through those trails, while in South Dakota I didn't want to get any closer to that harsh geography than I had to.

Chalk

I did know that, geologically, much of England sits on top of a bed of chalk, and I've seen the white cliffs of Dover, but I don't think I ever realized how close to the surface it can come, like a scar across the landscape.

I know just how they feel

The faces on Mount Rushmore seen through a zoom lens. Geology moves slowly, but the cracks are starting to show. Or maybe the South Dakota weather is drying out the Presidential complexions the way it did mine.

It was slightly cooler in Oxford today—quite pleasant when walking or sitting in the shade, less so almost anywhere indoors where the lack of air conditioning was obvious. My hotel room isn't as awful as it was yesterday after a few hours of running the fans with the door propped open, but I spent most of the evening sitting on the very pleasant deck instead.

Badlands redux

I'm a long way from South Dakota, but Oxford is having a heat wave and I'm sitting in a stifling hotel room with a huge fan blasting hot air at me, and remembering the insane winds in hundred-degree temperatures in eastern South Dakota that I described as being in a “full-body blow dryer.”

I took the all-day flight instead of the all-night flight, which means I don't lose a night's sleep and walk around like a zombie for two days. Instead I'm sitting in a hot hotel room when it's after midnight local time and my body insists it's hours until bedtime.

Some unexpected color

I loved these sandstone cliffs along the Belle Fourche river near Devil's Tower; the color was such a surprise in the middle of the greens and yellows and browns of the prairies.

It reminded me of the banks of the Zambezi river in Zambia.

More badlands

Between and beyond the buttes is just more flat prairie, with (if you look very closely) maybe one or two lonely trees to break up the horizontals and signal a possible source of water.

Landscape contrasts

When you stand on the edge of the canyon in the picture on the left and turn around, you see the prairie on the right.

I don’t give a damn for the same old played out scenes

Badlands, of course. And Badlands National Park in South Dakota yesterday.

It was brutally hot there but it is hard to imagine that this landscape would be welcoming on the mildest spring day. North Dakota and eastern Montana are flat, but the land around these badlands has no hills, no rises, not even a bump. It's almost perfectly two-dimensional. Then the prairie cracks open and falls away into canyons full of rock formations surrounding more empty plains stretching into forever.

Custer State Park

More of the odd and beautiful rock formations along the road in the park.

Cathedral Spires

These are the most famous—and spectacular—of the granite rock formations in the beautiful Custer State Park in western South Dakota.

Drakes Beach

I haven't taken many pictures in Berkeley, and haven't processed most of those I did take, but here are a few from our excursion to Point Reyes on Friday.

Drakes Beach is backed by steep sandstone cliffs, which the wind and water have sculpted into beautiful patterns. The winds were on display Friday, and I could only stand to walk on the beach for maybe twenty minutes, but it was worth being in the grindstone of the flung sand and water to be able to breathe in that fresh air.

Return to Petra

I don't have the time or energy to start on Ephesus, so here are a few pictures from the Siq at Petra instead.

I took so many pictures the first time I was there I didn't think I could possibly have found any more interesting stone formations, but I was wrong.

Monday flashback: Petra

These are some of the rock faces inside the city. Time, weather, and the laws of geology have turned them into their own architecture, so that sometimes you can't tell what's manmade and what isn't.

And this is the end of Petra, and of Jordan. India is up next.

More random things I saw in Newfoundland

Finishing up: a tepee on the beach at Point Riche, a fish flake (the frame for drying cod) in Bonavista, the church in Woody Point, and some fabulous geology near the Bonavista Lighthouse.

Weird plants

Some plants can take the alien environment and thrive. What's interesting is that these same plants are now used to clean soil that's been polluted with the toxic metals found in the Tablelands. They suck the pollutants right out of the ground.