Rain rain come again, come and stay every day.

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Location Taken: Savage Park, Savage, Maryland
Time Taken: August 2010

I love walking in the rain.

I know, most people would consider walking in a downpour to be a bad idea, second only to walking in a blizzard. The streets get empty of people and even cars when it pours. But there I will be, stepping out of the house, umbrella in hand.

I love the sound of rain. I love how it looks, how it smells, and how it flows. I lived on the 17th floor of a building in Chicago for a few months, and I couldn’t hear the rain there. I suspect that was one of the reasons I went a wee bit crazy at the end of my months in Chicago (more on this later). Just the sound of rain refreshes me, even in video games (though since I can’t smell it through a screen, the effect is lessened).

I tend to open my windows when it rains and close them when it stops raining.

I actually lost a plant because of that tendency, once. In college, I kept small suculent plants right next to my window, since that was the only place in the room to get decent light (I put sheets over my windows to block out light). And I’d opened the window before I headed to class because there was a nice storm wind and the taste of rain in the air. And the storm that was blowing in when I returned from class was indeed magnificent, with clouds moving low and quick. I barely made it back to the dorm before the heavens opened up. And then, I was directed to the basement because we were under a tornado warning. I didn’t even think of the fact that my window was open. And there was a tornado with this storm, only 10 miles or so north of us. When I got back to my dorm room, well, thanks to the high winds and rain, some water had gotten in, and my aloe plant was tipped over and had lost half its dirt. The water was easy to clean up, but the aloe never recovered from its ordeal. Well, that and it wasn’t too long after that that spring break happened, and I couldn’t water it for two weeks.

We occasionally get strong storms here in Maryland. And long lasting ones, too. The fronts come over the Appalachians, hit the moisture from the Atlantic, and go nuts. What was a quick (if heavy) storm in Ohio becomes an all day downpour in Maryland. A lot of front lines miss us, though, heading further north or south and leaving us dry. And we’ll also get a lot of all day drizzles instead of downpours. But when the heavens open, they open. We actually get more inches of rain than Seattle per year. They may have more days of rain, but the clouds just spit on them. Here, you get waterfalls from the sky every so often. Which are the best storms to go walking in.

  

Fleeting Fields Flowing Freely – bah, alliteration is a bit silly.

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Location Taken: Somewhere in western Manitoba, Canada
Time Taken: June 2010

This photo’s a prime example of why I decided to post photos that almost turned out. I love the composition of this photo, I love the colors, and I love the subject. I love them too much to just give up on the photo entirely. But the focus is off, there’s blur lines because I took this while sitting in a car going 70 mph (well, 110 km/h, this was Canada), the horizon’s not quite level, and you can see the reflection of my arm in the window between the camera and the trees. At least I tend to wear dark clothes, so it’s only my pasty pale skin that reflects. And I couldn’t exactly stop and retake the photo, since we were traveling for a reason other than photography opportunities.

If I remember right, this area was getting a lot of rain. We’d been driving through rain for days, so it wasn’t too surprising to come across flooded fields once we hit the flat farmlands of Manitoba. Some of the impromptu ponds were on the impressive side, though, like this one.

For whatever reason, I’ve always liked seeing flooded fields. It’s not exactly good for the field, much less the crop planted there, so I’m sure it’s a hassle to the farmer, but they’re oddly pretty. Some of it’s just the prettiness of any pond, but seeing the plants through the water is also pretty. And it also has the appeal of the temporary, that extra bit of specialness from knowing that very few people will see exactly what you’re seeing. Clouds have a similar effect, and the ones this day were also showing beautifully.

At least clouds are too far away to really get affected by motion blur or focal range issues (if the focus is on anything further away than 6 feet or so, the clouds will be at least somewhat clear).

I actually took a lot of cloud photos while sitting in the car watching the scenery go by. I couldn’t exactly stop the car every time I saw a fantastic cloud formation. This was the prairie, after all, we’d be stopping every 10 feet.

  

Lady’s Slipper In the Rain, Won’t you Come Inside? No, You Say, Outside I’ll Stay.

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Location Taken: Rainbow Falls Provincial Park, Ontario, Canada
Time Taken: June 2010

I’ve got a special place in my heart for Lady’s Slipper flowers. There’s some that grow in my grandmother’s woods in Michigan, where they are rather rare, so I was always told not to pick them, and to be careful around them. I haven’t seen any there for a bit, though, so hopefully they’re still growing there…

This photo wasn’t taken in Michigan, though it was taken near the Great Lakes, in the provincial park I mentioned two days ago right on the top of Lake Superior. This particular one’s a Pink Lady’s Slipper. I know, quite the original name. You can call it a Moccasin Flower if you prefer, though it doesn’t flow quite as elegantly as Lady’s Slipper. I’ve also got some pictures of some yellow Lady’s Slippers from the same park. Unlike in Michigan, the area’s largely undisturbed (there’s a highway, some small coastal towns and, um, nature), so these somewhat delicate flowers can thrive just fine there.

As for why they’re called that, it’s pretty obvious, really. It looks like a delicate slipper. It’s even more obvious with other species of Lady’s Slipper. The Pink Lady’s Slipper is lacking the round opening that most Lady’s Slippers have, instead having a simple split where the petal curves around. With the round opening and the egg-shaped flower, it really does look like a simple shoe.

You know, you usually think of orchids as hot-weather plants, but Lady’s Slippers are orchids too, and they grow rather far north. One species, the Sparrow’s Egg Lady’s Slipper, even grows in the far northern reaches of Canada and Alaska. Its southernmost extent barely touches the US, in Montana. There’s another, the rather lovely Spotted Lady’s Slipper that’s only found in Alaska, Yukon, and the Northwest Territories, not even coming as far south as, say, Saskatchewan. Somehow I doubt these flowers would be comfortable in standard hothouses. But it does mean that part of the world is far more colorful than most people realize.

  

Can we Import Prairie Clouds? They’re Awesome

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Location Taken: Indian Head, Saskatchewan, Canada
Time Taken: June 2010

I’ve been sorting through more of my photos today, and hit the Great Plains of Canada photos.

So. Many. Awesome. Clouds.

The landscape on the plains tends not to be the most spectacular, being, well, flat. There’s farms here, small batch of trees there, maybe a building or stream. The sky, on the other hand, is fabulous.

In areas like the East Coast, the suburbs, forests, and mountains I spend most of my time in, the sky isn’t too impressive. Mostly, it’s due to the humidity. When the humidity’s high, it blurs distant sight. Mainly, you think of humidity as see-through. I mean, it’s clear water in clear air, right. Well, get enough of it, and the photons just can’t make it all the way to you through it from those distant places. You can think of it as very thin fog, because that’s essentially what it is. Add in the air pollution you find in this area (it’s not too bad, but we’ve got millions living within 100 miles of here, it adds up) and it just degrades the vision some more. There’s a perpetual haze blurring the horizon and the edges of the clouds. Plus there’s enough stuff around that you can’t truly see the horizon. Usually, you can’t even see anywhere close to the horizon, thanks to that building, or those trees. You can see some of that in this picture, how the grain elevator blocks half the sky.

In the plains, though, the air is clear. First, the reason that the plains are, well, plains is that they don’t get enough moisture to support large stands of trees. What trees there are cluster around the rivers, lakes, and ponds, and almost none of those are anything to write home about. Why doesn’t it get moisture? Well, blame the Rockies. (and yes, there are Rocky Mountains in Canada, too. The mountain chain doesn’t stop at the border). I’d say it was the rain shadow effect, where air going over mountains gets compressed and drops all its moisture on one side of the mountain and has nothing left for the other, but its not. At least, not fully. You see, the weather systems coming over the Rockies have already been squeezed dry before they even reached the Rockies. There’s another chain of mountains between the Rockies and the Pacific ocean, after all. And in the Cascade mountains, you can see a clear rain shadow effect. In fact, it’s so strong of an effect that there’s a full out rainforest on one side, in the Vancouver area, and a full-out desert on the other, in the Kamloops area. Those towns are on either side of the mountains, just four hours drive apart. And it’s not a straight drive, either, since there are, you know, mountains in the way. That’s about as far as New York City and Boston are, and those have very similar climates.

So, why aren’t the plains a desert as well? Where’s the moisture coming from, since it’s not really coming over the mountains? The answer, at least for most of the Great Plains, is the Gulf of Mexico. The wet hot air from there actually gets pulled in by the drier air of the plains, dragging it up pretty far north, all the way to the Canada prairie. And the mixing of the two airs causes storms. Violent storms, even. It’s why you get so many tornadoes in the great plains, not to mention thunderstorms.

And it’s why you get fantastic clouds.

Now, I’m not sure if moisture come in from elsewhere for the Canadian prairie. Most of the material on this sort of thing focuses heavily on the lower Great Plains, especially the Tornado Alley section. Canada is, sadly, largely forgotten by the meteorology books I’ve found here, deep within the US. It might pull some moisture from further north as well, or the air might be cool enough that it’s already pretty dense by the time it hits the mountains, and it doesn’t drop as much moisture. Banff, on the eastern edge of the Canadian Rockies, wasn’t exactly the driest place. There’s also a bend in the mountains in Canada, starting a few hundred kilometers north of Kamloops, which may let the moisture get through without hitting so many mountains. The weather patterns actually parallel the mountains in that area some, rather than go perpendicular like you find further south in the US. Either way, the Great Plains actually don’t extend too deeply into Canada, switching over to taiga after half a province. It’s still the breadbasket of the country, just like it is in the US, and it is covered in farms and, in the drier western section, pastures. In Saskatchewan, it’s farms, which is why the tiny town of Indian Head, located on the rail lines, needs a grain elevator.

  

Rainbows don’t Show in the Rain

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Location Taken: Rainbow Falls Provincial Park, Ontario, Canada
Time Taken: June 2010

I love visiting state parks. Or, in this Canadian instance, provincial parks.

This is Rainbow Falls Provincial Park, right on the top of Lake Superior. It’s got a few lakes, some camping, some trails, and the falls.

It’s a long chain of falls, cascading for quite a distance. This photo shows just a little of it. There’s a boardwalk trail going along the falls, so it’s quite easy to get in to see them. It was raining the day we visited, so the photos mostly didn’t quite come out. There are a few, though, where the gray sky and light only amplifies the joy of water in the photo.

Given the fog coming off that waterfall, there probably are some lovely rainbows when the sun is out. I think I rather preferred the walk in the rain, though. I’ve never done well walking in sunlight (I get headaches if I’m out in it too long – which on some days is as short as 10 minutes), and love the rain.

State parks might not be as spectacular as the National parks, but they’re quite enjoyable in their own right. National parks are usually a bit crowded (well, at least the popular ones are. Some of them are a bit out of the way), and there are lots of signs and guides all over. You also usually know what the main feature of those parks is long before you visit them, so you’re not too impressed when you get there. State parks are smaller, and don’t have much information out there about them. You can actually discover things there, and discovery is half the joy of visiting such places. I requested that we stop at Rainbow Falls purely because I saw the name on the map. It’s right off the Trans-Canada highway, so it was not out of the way in the least. I had no clue what type of waterfall it would be. We’d already stopped at some rather impressive waterfalls (both Mom and I love waterfalls, so when we see a sign saying “XYZ Waterfall, Next Right”, we’re likely to turn off), but this one was really nice. Especially since I could take a lot of photos and then pick out the three or so that actually worked out the way I wanted.