Category Archives: Travel

Great Sand Dunes National Park

August 28, 2012 by Jeff C | Comments Off

Quick:  Where are the tallest Sand Dunes in North America?   Hint:  They’re not in a desert, or at a beach.  The Answer:  Southern Colorado — surrounded on all sides by the Rocky Mountains.    Somehow a combination of prevailing winds, mountain winds, and the sandy remnants of an extinct high-altitude lake have formed a 30 square mile sand dune field just west of the Sangre de Cristo Mountains east of Alamosa, Colorado.  The big dunes rise over 700 feet above the surrounding terrain — roughly the height of a 60-story building.  (Notice the tiny little people way up on the top).

I was en route from Leadville to Houston recently, and detoured a few miles to see the Great Sand Dunes National Park and Preserve.  I didn’t expect much, but it was actually more interesting-looking than I’d imagined.  Unfortunately, heavy cloud cover made the light flat and limited the photographic possibilities.  Then some approaching lightning convinced me that I’d picked the wrong day to climb up on the high, isolated dunes.

 

The National Park Service’s descriptions say the former gigantic Lake Alamosa disappeared due to “climate change,” but the change to which it refers is not one caused by my Chevy Tahoe or the plastic bottles from which I drink Diet Coke.  Apparently it happened a few hundred thousand years ago, so I have a pretty good alibi. 

Rocky Mountain Highest: Leadville, CO

August 15, 2012 by Jeff C | Comments Off

I’ve been without a WIFI connection for a couple of weeks!  Forgive the delayed posts.  If you want a follow-up about the burro racing, go here. 

 

If you’re looking for America’s highest post office, head for Leadville, Colorado —  America’s highest town.  Depending on just what and where you measure, it’s around 10,200 feet in elevation.  The town also boasts (literally) the country’s highest airport.  Mt. Elbert, the highest peak in Colorado (14,440 ft), looms over the south side of town; Mt. Massive (the second highest at just 14,428) is just west of town.  Around here, thin air and isolation are selling points and badges of honor.

There’s plenty of evidence in Leadville of a past that was both grander and rougher.  The town started in the 1800s as a mining “boom” town.  It’s just got 3,000 or so people now, but it allegedly had 10 times that population (and 100 saloons!?!) in the 1880s.  Back then Oscar Wilde lectured in the city’s Tabor Opera House (probably with Leadville residents (unsinkable) Molly Brown and maybe Doc Holiday in the audience).  At the same time, thousands of men braved sub-zero temperatures, using mule and muscle to drag tons of silver-laden ore out of the mines that surround the city.

 

 

130 years later, there’s still a lot going on in now-tiny Leadville.  The first weekend in August was “Boom Days,” celebrating Leadville’s past with gritty mining competitions (see the jackhammer and sledgehammer pictures) on one end of downtown and a lacy Victorian costume contest on the other.  These are two very different crowds.  Meanwhile, a 22-mile pack burro race shut down Highway 24 through the middle of town.  This being Colorado — there’s always a laid-back “hippie” crowd around town, too, and on most summer days there are a dozen or so leather-shrouded Harley riders cruising the streets.  Talk about diversity.

Yet another crowd (this one with spandex shorts, carbon fiber bikes, and Gatorade) swarms the town in the summer, gearing up for  arguably the biggest mountain bike race in the country – the Leadville MTB 100 “Race Across the Sky”.  Like the Leadville Marathon I did a couple of months back, it starts at 10,200 feet and generally just goes higher and higher from there.  That’s why I was in town, along with a half dozen or so good friends.  More news on the bike race in a day or so when the pictures get compiled.

Topping it all off, camped out west of town were none other than Joyce and J.B. Cotner (my mom and dad!).  One day when we were doing a practice ride of the toughest climb on the bike race course (climbing up to Columbine Pass at 12,400 ft), there sat Mom and Dad at the summit on a red ATV, waiting for us.  To say that my Mom and Dad are troopers would be a terrible understatement.  I’d convinced my Dad to come to Leadville by telling him we needed to come up with a strategy to win next year’s burro race (me as runner, him a burro trainer).   Crazier things do happen — especially in Leadville.

In the photo grid above:  The big green rock is part of the mining competition.  Yes, that’s an attractive young woman operating the 120 lb. jackhammer.  Do not mess with her.  The two-man sledgehammer (“double jack”) competition requires more trust in one’s teammate than I have for any of my friends — no offense guys.  The two men in the sledgehammer pictures apparently set an unofficial state record — chiseling a 27-inch hole in 10 minutes.  You don’t ride the burros in the burro race — you lead/push/drive/drag them 22 miles.  The winner makes it back to town in about four hours.  Apparently Leadville is the second leg of Colorado’s “Triple Crown” of pack burro racing.  That’s my Mom and Dad above (in red and blue) downtown watching the burro race and parade.  And that’s also them with me (bottom) behind their ATV at the top of Columbine; they’re showing off their preferred means of high-mountain transport and I’m showing mine.  If you pay attention to such things: I do have a fabulous bike (Specialized Epic S-Works 26; full suspension and weighs less than many road bikes) — because I need all the help I can get. 

I threw in some shots of the mountains around Leadville.  I didn’t really dedicate the time it takes to get really good mountain photos (scouting locations then waiting on perfect weather and light), so these do not do Leadville justice in the “majestic views” category.  Hopefully you can still get a sense of the landscape. 

(Bottom photo by Peter Thomsen, using whatever little camera he’d stuffed into his bike jersey).

 

 

 

 

Siena Sunflowers

July 25, 2012 by Jeff C | Comments Off

 

It’s a myth that big sunflowers like this turn to follow the sun all day.  They just face east.  Apparently when they’re tiny, they might turn (i.e., they’re “heliotropic”), but not when they’re mature.  So if you want to photograph them “head-on” and you want something else in the picture, that “something else” needs to be lined up precisely due west of the flower patch.  Thus, last week as I drove through a part of north-central Italy (near Siena) where they grow sunflowers, my goal was to spot some cool old building — a big church or something that made you think “Tuscany” — that looked good from the east, and that was situated exactly due west of a pretty sunflower field.  Hmmmm.

Even after finding a spot, I had to avoid an ugly fence — and an ugly sunflower farmer 100 yards up the road near the signs that said “proprieta privata.”   Thus I took all these pictures from a single spot in the middle of the road, with the Castillo del Cuatro Torres (“Castle of the Four Towers”) lined up on the hill due west of me.

These were the last shots I took before I packed the camera away for a while and headed toward the airport for my flight back to Houston.

 

 

 

 

A Small Slice of Pisa

July 25, 2012 by Jeff C | Comments Off

I spent one hour and forty-five minutes in Pisa.  I know this because that’s how much time I could buy on the parking meter with the Euro coins I had in my pocket.

I was unwilling to be the only person in 500 years to go through Pisa, Italy without touring the town’s tilted Tuscan Torre.  The strikingly slanted stone spire is the belltower of Pisa’s 900 year old major Duomo.   The cathedral’s conspicuously canted campanile has been plauged by that famous foundational flaw since its construction in the 11th through 13th centuries.  I had no city map, but assumed (correctly) that I could just follow the flow of tourists to the area’s awkwardly angled axis of attention.  (Okay, I’ll stop.)

These pictures are misleading — especially the first one, above.  When you use a wide angle lens and point the camera upward to take a picture of, e.g., a tower, everything looks like it’s leaning inward.  (Click here for another example).  In fact, the tower actually leans away from the adjacent (perfectly upright) cathedral, as you can sense in the pictures just above, and at bottom.

The line to go up in the tower was exceeded only by the line to buy a ticket to get you into that other line, so I decided to stay at ground level.  It’d be hard to see the tower from the tower anyway.  The goofiest part of the experience was the number of people (a hundred or so at any given moment) posing for pictures that would give the illusion that they were holding the tower up (Google “funny pictures leaning tower pisa”).

 

 

There’s a famous story that Galileo — the Renaissance-era physicist/astronomer who was born in Pisa and started his scientific work there — dropped two cannonballs of different weights off the Tower of Pisa (already tilting back then) to test his theory that they would fall at the same speed.  What’s interesting is the reason that story is probably not true:  Galileo “proved” his theory not by experiments, but by just thinking about it.  I love that.

(Here’s the thought process.  Imagine two same-size blocks being dropped – one ten pounds and the other two pounds — connected by a very short string.  If the heavy block was prone to fall faster, the tether to a slower-falling two-pound block would slow the fall of the heavy one, making the pair fall slower than the ten-pounder by itself.  But if that short string has effectively tied the two tightly together, they are a twelve-pound unit, and if heavier things fall faster, the now-twelve-pound unit should fall even faster than a ten-pound block by itself.  It can’t be that both these things are true, so the assumption – about heavy things falling faster – can’t be correct.) 

Galileo was a stud.  Maybe da Vinci was smarter, but Galileo changed the world.  When earlier scientists encountered evidence inconsistent with what the Roman Church taught them about an earth-centered universe, they just puzzled over why their evidence must have been in error.  Galileo changed all that — gathering and sharing the telescopic observations and thereby ushering in a Scientific Revolution.  He was darn-near burned at the stake by the Church for doing so.  One historian has suggested that the astounding scientific and technological progress of the last few hundred years — and thus the ensuing prosperity of the modern Western world — would have been greatly delayed without him.   (Two good books on these topics:  Galileo’s Daughter and The Birth of Plenty).

For a while, at least, Pisa was the center of Galileo’s universe.  So it was fun to imagine that Galileo himself had wandered around Pisa’s Tower Square just about like I did — only five-hundred years earlier, and with a lot “weightier” things on his mind.

 

Italy: Cinque Terre

July 24, 2012 by Jeff C | Comments Off

On Italy’s western Mediterranean coast — way up north on the front and top of the “boot” – is an area called the Cinque Terre (“five lands”).  It’s a series of five colorful little villages that have been hanging on the cliffs and hillsides just above the water for a thousand years.

A 2011 flood damaged a few of the towns and the trails and vineyards between them, so I explored only Riomaggiore and Manarola.  There aren’t really roads in the towns (they were built pre-automobile, of course; I parked a mile away and walked in).  The old passageways within the towns are narrow:  one writeup said they were purposely maze-like to thwart pirates who would try to land and pillage the towns.  Hopefully, the piracy rate has dropped in recent years.

Easily the nicest accessible view was a hillside overlooking Manarola and its tiny harbor.  The late afternoon light was okay, but I could tell it would get prettier and prettier as the sun set.  So I just hung out in Manarola:  had some lasagna, climbed up and down, watched the swimmers and window-shopped — taking another picture or 20 every hour or so til it got dark.  You can see from the series of pictures how the light (and thus the pictures) changed.

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I did take a few shots of other things in the towns.  The wide shot in the group below is Riomaggiore, which is just a mile or two away.

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A final note for photographers:  All these shots were with the Nikon D800 and the 24-120 f4 Nikkor lens.  The second- and third-to-last (after-sunset) pictures above were taken with ISO 1600, hand-held at 1/4 or 1/5 second.  The great color and noise-free images at 1600 are a tribute to the D800 sensor, but I was more shocked and impressed by the performance of the “VR” technology in the lens that allowed me to handhold 1/4 second and still get perfectly-sharp pictures (which was handy, because my tripod was approximately 5,000 miles away).  The final picture is at ISO 3200.   I did have a railing to stabilize my elbows.  As I often say, for those of us who attempted photography 30 years ago, modern cameras are indistinguishable from magic.