An Ode to Waterfalls, or “Why I’m Never Moving to Delaware”
Nooksack Falls, Whatcom County, Washington
Composite of three images, 18mm, 4 sec, ISO 200, f/20, two-stop neutral density filter
The last week and a half has been rather pleasant here in the northwest. Most noticeably, the Sun has been out. The trees are finishing the process of filling out their summer foliage. Snowpack in the Cascades is melting rapidly. So in other words, hillsides that are normally green have gotten a little brighter-green. Rivers that are normally filled with water now have more water. People that are normally pasty white are now a little less pasty white. And finally, waterfalls that are normally impressive have gotten more impressive, as is evident by the above photo which I took at Nooksack Falls, about an hour’s drive east of Bellingham, last weekend. I’ve realized recently that I’m sort of a sucker for waterfalls. I won’t go into all the reasons but I tend to be a sucker for most things that are ruthlessly effective at converting potential energy into kinetic energy. It turns me on. If I’m driving and see a sign for a waterfall, I’m probably stopping, even if accessing it requires a 15-mile round-trip hike and my passenger has to be at the airport in an hour. You just have to admire water’s blatant disregard for personal safety as it routinely plunges tens, hundreds, or even thousands of feet before slamming into some poor boulder at its base that has sat absorbing a ruthless pounding for what must, at least to the boulder, seem like an eternity.
I love photographing waterfalls almost as much as I like the falls themselves. The day I discovered that, by simply stopping down the lens on my camera far enough, I could render almost any flowing mass of water smooth, silky, translucent, and white was probably one of the most crucial days in fueling my severe photography addiction. Waterfalls were my gateway drug you might say. I’ve accepted this addition and am no longer in denial but thankfully I don’t see a recovery in my immediate future, although my wallet may beg to differ.
Grand Falls, Little Colorado River, Arizona
I love waterfalls in part because they exhibit so much diversity and character. Waterfalls in Arizona might only run a few days out of the year, their water looking more like molten chocolate straight out of Willie Wonka’s chocolate factory when they do, the result of enormous quantities of suspended silt, sand, and debris pried loose from stream channels that may go many months without tasting a drop of water. Waterfalls in Washington are, for the most part, year-round affairs, impressive primarily in their persistence. (Except for on Mt. St. Helens where volcanic heat accelerates snowmelt leaving most streams, and backpackers who depend on them, high and dry. Ask me about that one sometime…). Even in the fall, the waterfalls seem to run as if they are tapping into some mysterious underground source of water (hint: they are) that keeps them replenished even after the rainy season has passed. The mighty waterfalls of Yosemite and the Sierra Nevada are the bullies of the waterfall world, tall, stocky, aggressive, and so powerful in their flow that they dare you to approach them without eight layers of waterproof clothing, a rowboat, and a bilge pump. They hit you in the face (literally), knock you down, and leave you lying bloodied on the cold granite, that is until summer when they shrivel to merely a trickle or disappear altogether.
Geologically speaking (hopefully I didn’t lose anyone there…), waterfalls are generally indicative of youth. This is because any waterfall worth its salt and pepper will eventually destroy itself; the constant force of the water flowing over the abrupt edge will eat away at the rock forming the brink of the falls, no matter how resistant it might be, moving it farther and farther back until eventually only a flat reach of stream remains. Locations where geologic conditions are causing, or have recently caused uplift of the land are more conducive to waterfall generation. In fact, the states of North Dakota and Delaware, both in relatively quiescent portions of the continent, are the ONLY two states in the U.S. that lack a single USGS mapped waterfall. Now let’s remember that a lot of waterfalls don’t show up on official USGS quads, and naturally both North Dakota and Delaware CLAIM to have waterfalls, so as to not lose out on the lucrative waterfall tourism market. However I have to say that while North Dakota appears to have a solid case, Delaware’s evidence is unconvincing. It’s really sort of embarrassing if you think about it. Heck, even Florida has a few pretty nice looking waterfalls and we all know that Florida is about as flat as a pan-fried fritter.
I’ve posted lots of waterfall pictures on this site in the past (like here, here, here, here, and here) but last week’s outing inspired me to reach back into my archives and pull out some of my favorite unpublished waterfall photos from the past few years:
Havasu Falls, Grand Canyon, Arizona
Upper Calf Creek Falls, Grand Staircase-Escalante National Monument, Utah
Stirling Falls (tour boat for scale), Milford Sound, New Zealand
The Golden Gate (Bridge)
San Francisco.
I’ve always thought that it would be one of the few large cities where I could actually stand to live. Never mind the fact that my current and projected foreseeable future income levels will not permit me to live in any of the parts of the city to which the above statement applies. Or the fact that the next major rupture of the San Andreas or Hayward faults is going to make things look…shall we say…”less attractive”. Ignore those minor details for now. All I mean to say is that it seems like a nice place to live, which is a thought that perplexes me, given that in general, the idea of living in the same metropolitan area as several million other human beings makes me want to look up job listings for “hermit” and run away into the hills screaming. San Francisco though seems to have a charm and a combination of positive attributes though that most other cities do not.
For starters it is located in one of the most scenic environs of any city in the country. Rolling grassy hills, redwood groves, long stretches of sandy and rocky beaches, rugged coastline, appealing architecture, fortified islands, all within an hours drive of the city center. Hard to match that. Seattle comes close (the view of Mt. Rainier on a clear day? ahhhhhhh) but it gets marked down because it gets, on average, 14 more inches of rain each year. Salt Lake City has gorgeous mountains but it is covered in snow for part of the year and tends to get smothered by thick layers of pollution that get rammed up against the western flanks of the Wasatch. And all cities east of the Rockies are automatically disqualified because they’re east of the Rockies. To some Phoenix might seem sort of scenic, what with the 50 foot high cacti and mountains and all, until you realize that in reality it is a sizzling hell hole with literally no sustainable water source and is totally unfit for large quantities of human habitation. At least San Francisco has Yosemite just a few hundred miles away that it can poach water from. Also, it sort of seems like everything in San Francisco is painted either white or a nice bright pastel color. Painting everything white does wonders for a city; it makes it feel larger, cleaner, less claustrophobic, and lends a nice airy, ethereal quality to everything.
San Francisco also has what in my opinion is one of the few man-made creations that actually contributes to the beauty of a place rather than besmirching it: the Golden Gate Bridge. In case you’re not familiar with the bridge, it is one of the few things in San Francisco not painted white or pastel, but rather a bright burnt orange (actually “international orange” for those of you who want to go out to your local Home Depot and pick up a gallon). The “Golden Gate” for which the bridge is named (and not vice-versa) is a narrow strait that connects the Pacific Ocean to San Francisco Bay. In a somewhat eery coincidence, U.S. Army Captain and explorer extraordinaire John C. Fremont bestowed the now famous name upon the strait in 1846, two years BEFORE the strait was used as the point of arrival for millions of millionaire wannabees seeking riches in the newly discovered gold fields east of Sacramento. Fremont had given it the name Golden Gate because he recognized the area’s potential importance in opening up trade with the Orient, completely unaware (obviously) that the discovery of real gold in California is what would cause the population of the city just to the south of the strait, San Francisco, to multiply by 18,000% in just six years, and make the Golden Gate known worldwide. In the 1920s, fed up with the 20 minute ferry ride across the strait, some folks decided it would be a bright idea to build a bridge across it, apparently thinking that sitting in traffic for more than 20 minutes waiting to cross the strait while constantly having to yell at the driver in front of you to stop futzing with their iPhone and drive would somehow be more pleasant than the leisurely ferry crossing.
Yang Ming container ship is greeted by the Golden Gate Bridge
An unique perspective on the 1.7 mile-long suspension bridge can be obtained by going beneath it. If you don’t have a boat, fear not, in another stunning coincidence, the U.S. Army conveniently constructed a masonry fortification, Fort Point, on the point right beneath the south end of the bridge in 1853*:
Under the Bridge: the remains of Fort Point, built in 1853 to secure San Francisco Bay from enemy attack.
*Actually the Army did no such thing. You know, seeming as how the technology to build a massive metal suspension bridge across a deep, windy, 1.3 kilometer wide strait didn’t exactly exist in 1853. The engineers in charge of building the bridge eighty-odd years later did however build the bridge directly above the fort (they wanted to remove the Fort entirely but cooler heads prevailed), and so the Fort, being the rather inanimate object that it is, remains there to this day, providing a nice spot to stand and look out over the bay while holding on to your hat and listening to rush-hour traffic crawl past on the bridge high over your head.
Arguably the best, although not most unique, views of the bridge can be found north of town, just off of Highway 101 in the Marin Headlands where a number of overlooks along Conzelman Road provide spectacular vantage points from which to observe or photograph the bridge. These overlooks aren’t a secret though, the ones closest to Highway 101 are predictably packed with people and it can be impossible to find a parking spot. However, the bridge is also partially obscured here, head further and higher up the road for more expansive views that, while still busy, become less so the further from the highway you get. and. The number of tripods also increases steadily as you get further and further from the interstate which I interpreted as a good sign since one of my goals was to get some photos of the bridge at sunset. As you can see in the picture at the top of the page, these overlooks are often slightly above the fog that socks in the coast from time to time.
Most people seem to stop and turn around at the one-way-road/18% grade sign that appears along Conzelman Road just before it begins to wind its way back down through the headlands to the coast. If you proceed onwards though, you will be rewarded by getting to shift your car into low gear, and also by a plethora of quieter and more secluded, albeit more distant, views of the bridge. The road ultimately deposits one at the trail leading to the Point Bonita Lighthouse, located at the northern entrance to the Golden Gate. The lighthouse was built in 1853, and yet several hundred ships still managed to wreck themselves in this area during the influx associated with the California Gold Rush, a testament to the ability of the area’s trademark thick fog to obscure any sign of the coast until its too late.
Point Bonita Lighthouse, Marin County, California
More pictures of the local flora and fauna hopefully coming soon, including the biggest group o’ Grebes you’ve ever seen in one photograph.
A (Belated) Top 12 from 2012
Yes, I know its 2013. Better late then never I always say. Actually, I don’t really say that often, I just made that up. 2012 was kind of a hectic year for me and as a result my posting frequency has been somewhat erratic over the course of the last year forever. While I may not have had as much free time as I would have liked, the fact that I lived in three different places over the last 12 months has afforded me the opportunity to photograph an incredibly diverse set of landscapes, from alpine meadows and glaciers, to rainforests and tide pools, to sand dunes and deserts, and even some rare astronomical phenomenon.
Since everyone loves a good “Top 10” list, I’ve decided to take the excitement to the next level and compose a “Top 12” list of my favorite photos from 2012. I’ll note that “favorite” is most definitely not synonymous with “best”. Some of these photos definitely won’t be winning any awards anytime soon (well, none of them will I suppose…) but nevertheless have a special place in my aortic pump for some reason or another, which I’ve tried to capture in the caption where applicable. Coming up with the list was challenging. Imagine separating wheat from chaff if what you have is mostly chaff. At one point I almost just included three pictures of chubby squirrels to round things out. I also briefly considered posting a dozen paparazzi shots of sunbathing celebrities and seeing if anyone would actually notice. As you can see, I ended up doing neither of these things but if you disagree with my final assessment, feel free to start a flame war in the comments. Or just tell me which ones you like the best…
I should note that many of the photos may look familiar if you follow this blog. If that’s the case, rather that whine about repeats, I suggest you savor them just like you might a re-run of a favorite episode of Friends, Seinfeld, or Cheers. However several of the photos on the list never made it onto the site, sometimes because I didn’t have enough photos to justify a full post, but often simply due to the fact that I am a graduate student and “free time” is a pretty foreign concept to my kind.
Ranking the photos from 1-12 seemed like a waste of time. I’ll let you form your own opinions and so I present them to you here in chronological order:
1. Sunset from Desert View Overlook, Grand Canyon National Park. (I’ll come clean: I actually took this one in the waning days of 2011 but since I didn’t do a Top 11 list from 2011, I decided to include it here. Sue me.) Sadly, particulate matter and smog from major population centers in the southwest (cough cough Las cough Vegas cough cough) is obscuring the view of the canyon on an ever increasing number of days. Perhaps the only positive is that it can make for some spectacular and surreal looking scenes when the smog is backlit by the setting sun.
2. Pond Reflection, Whitman Mission National Historic Site, Walla Walla, WA. Water doesn’t get much smoother than this. Amazing how a picture of a gray and stormy sky is that much more interesting when it’s reflected in a pond. Also amazing that those leaves still have any color left in them considering they would have fallen about 4 months ago…
3. Zeus Visits Walla Walla. There’s nothing quite as thrilling as getting lucky enough to take pictures of a severe thunderstorm from the comfort and (relative) safety of your own front door. I even got the added bonus of having the neighboring hotel/meth lab in the foreground! This is actually a composite of several images that I took over a period of several minutes. Lightning photography is tricky; theoretically the longer an exposure you take, the better change you have of catching a lightning strike. However, a super long exposure would have completely blown out the already extravagantly lit motel so the only way for me to capture multiple lightning strikes in this particular case was to take a time series of shorter images, and then combine them into one using Photoshop.
4. Palouse Falls State Park, Washington. This photo is probably my favorite panorama from this year. You almost need a panorama to truly capture everything there is to see at Palouse Falls. The powerful waterfall, swelled by snowmelt, combined with the green terraces in between the basalt colonnades (GEOLOGIC TERM ALERT!!!) is unique to spring, since by autumn the waterfall has shriveled to a trickle and all that was once green becomes brown.
5. Transit of Venus, June 6th 2012. A picture of something that won’t happen again for 115 years makes the list by default, even if it’s not of particularly high quality. The red orb is the Sun, as seen through a telescope fitted with a hydrogen-alpha solar filter. The black circle is the silhouette of the planet Venus as it passes directly in-between the Earth and the Sun, something that it only does in pairs about every 120 years. The things that look like dust spots are actually sunspots and the little flame-like wisps around the edge of the Sun are some small solar prominences (small=several times larger than Earth), ginormous eruptions of hot plasma that briefly travel along the Sun’s magnetic field lines before being pulled back in by the Sun’s intense gravitational field.
6. Ripples in the sand sea, Great Sand Dunes National Park, Colorado. Sand dunes come alive at sunset. A surface that burns your feet and looks flat and featureless at noon is revealed to be complex and majestic as the Sun nears the horizon. The geologist in me can’t take my eyes off of the thin layer of saltating sand grains catching the last rays of sunlight as they bounce their way across the dunes.
7. Delicate Arch at Sunset, Arches National Park, Utah. There’s sort of a lot going on in this picture. I like how 99% of the crowd is seemingly oblivious to the gorgeous rainbow rising up from the desert behind them. Delicate Arch is one of those places that pretty much every landscape photographer visits at some point in their life, and for good reason. But I think think photo captures a really interesting aspect of the place, namely the fact that in reality it doesn’t even remotely approach the wild, untrodden wilderness that it is normally made out to be when you see it on glossy magazine covers. Pretty much any evening at sunset, regardless of season, you’ll find a scene more or less the same as this one (well maybe minus the rainbow..), with dozens of people staking out their spot over an hour before sunset.
8. Sunset from Bonito Park, Coconino National Forest, Arizona. Looking west towards the San Francisco Peaks in the late afternoon. A few late-season wildflowers hanging on to dear life. Not a whole lot I can add to this one. This is home for me. It’s quite pretty.
9. Self-portrait with Anemones, Larrabee State Park, Washington. Is it weird to choose a picture of yourself for a list like this? I’m gonna go with “no” because I chose this one not because I’m particularly photogenic, but because the multi-colored anemones really steal the show and distract the viewers from my unsightly visage. Plus they shrivel up when you poke them which is kind of cool.
10. Late-summer sunset along Samish Bay, Larrabee State Park, Washington. This photo was a perfect example of an occasion where a little planning went a long ways. I had previously scouted out locations along the coast near Bellingham that would be ideally suited for catching the last rays of sunlight prior to sunset. This seems like one of the best spots so I stood here for about an hour before sundown waiting for the best lighting conditions. I would like to think that I got them. An exposure time of 15 seconds helped smooth out the incoming waves, giving the water its silky, silvery sheen.
11. Aurora Borealis display from Ferndale, Washington. While this photo may not pack the punch of the aurora shots you see coming out of Alaska, the Yukon, or Scandinavia, for me it was just as satisfying. As an avid amateur astronomy who grew up in the Southwest, I had a hard time restraining my excitement when I got to see my first ever auroral show this October. An impressive showing for the lower-48, these pillars cutting through the bowl of the Big Dipper danced around the sky for over an hour and were just a small part of a show that lasted into the wee hours of the morning. The grayish-purple light along the horizon is light pollution from Vancouver, B.C. And my classmates wondered why I was falling asleep in my 8am class the next morning. Also, you should ignore the power lines…
12. Sleeping Sea Lions, Coast Guard Pier, Monterey, CA. If you want to see a lot of sea lions, forget Pier 39 and San Francisco, go to the Coast Guard Pier in Monterey, CA and you’ll find piles and piles of them, just feet away on the other side of a metal fence. Compared to their San Francisco brethren, they’re a bunch of lazy bums though. I wish I could sleep all day long like that…then again I have a bed of my own and don’t have to sleep beneath multiple rear ends so I guess I don’t get to complain.
Be sure to stay tuned for a 2013 version in just a little more than 10 months!
Zach Schierl Photography 