Location Taken: Upstate New York
Time Taken: January 2011
Ahh, there’s nothing quite like a sunset photo for a filler post. Beautiful, elegant, and hey, it’s the sun dropping below the horizon, what can you say about that that hasn’t been said by fifty poets already?
This one has some really pretty crepuscular rays, though.
Location Taken: Buffalo Bill State Park, Wyoming
Time Taken: October 2012
Did you hear?
There was a major landslide at an utterly massive open pit copper mine in Utah. It’s so big that some articles are calling it “The Largest Landslide EVER”.
Except, well, it’s not. It IS the largest non-volcanic landslide in North America in historic times, but it’s by no means the largest. The eruption of Mount St. Helens triggered a landslide that was far larger, and that was a recent, relatively minor, eruption.
The largest landslide ever found on land was in North America, too. (The largest landslide ever was an underwater one off the coast of Norway, in case you’re wondering). It’s known as the Heart Mountain Landslide, after a lone peak in Wyoming, located just on the other side of the mountain range in my photo. Well, other side isn’t the most accurate term, since Heart Mountain is 10 miles away.
Except…
This was a landslide so massive that there’s a pretty good chance that these mountains were part of it too, if only as a obstacle. The landslide wasn’t down the flanks of Heart Mountain. It INCLUDED Heart Mountain. There was a large sheet of limestone that broke off of the Beartooth mountains, and when I say large I mean 400 square miles. And it slide a rock the size of a mountain some thirty or so miles. What’s more, it did it in half an hour. On land that looks largely flat.
The best guess for why this landslide was both so massive and so fast is a quirk of chemistry. The rock on the bottom of the slide was made of calcium-carbonate, which releases carbon dioxide gas when heated. Guess what the friction involved in moving a rock 400 square miles does? It seems that the landslide actually produced enough gas to literally float the rock over the ground. There’s a layer of rock structures usually only found in volcanic features at the bottom of Heart Mountain.
So if anyone ever scoffs at the power of nature, you can tell them that there was a time when a mountain moved at 100 miles per hour.
Location Taken: Kirkland, Washington
Time Taken: June 2010
I’m getting a feeling that I’m being watched… And that this tree is rolling its eyes at me.
Wait, trees don’t have eyes, but still, this is one sarcastic tree, if I say so myself.
It’s all a figment of my imagination, but it’s a normal type of craziness called pareidolia. That’s the tendency for the human brain to make shapes that look vaguely like a face into something with readable emotions and expressions. It’s the reason why two dots and a curved line look like a smiling face, you know. 
It’s a side effect of our having to read the facial expressions of other people in all sorts of lighting and other conditions. Sometimes it’s really handy to be able to tell if that person coming towards you with a knife looks angry (and is about to stab you) or happy (and just got a nifty knife as a present). We also see animal faces in this way, both because many of them are similar to human faces and because being able to spot the tiger hiding in the bush from just a brief glace may just come in handy some day.
So why does it cross over to the inanimate objects, not to mention the super-simplified forms like the smiley? Well, which would you rather have, you running away from a bunch of grass that looks like a hungry tiger or you calmly sitting down right next to a hungry tiger that looks like a bunch of grass?
Yeah, that’s what I thought, and what the brain thought too. In order to spot the hidden tigers, the ability bleeds over to a bunch of false positives. So, thanks, brain, for saving me from tigers but not from sarcastic trees.
Location Taken: Frankfort, Michigan
Time Taken: May 2008
I checked.
I have absolutely no photos of petunias.
I’ve got daisies, daffodils, lilacs, dogwoods, pansies, tulips, bleeding hearts, violets, roses, hydrangeas, fifty types of wildflowers, and a whole slew of others I haven’t a clue about, but not a single petunia.
Petunias are a common garden flower, too, and I’ve taken a lot of photos of gardens, and even a few of garden shops full of all sorts of plants, like this photo, and not a single petunia petal to be seen.
This, mind you, is in no way stopping my brain from repeating “Pe-tyuuu-ni-ya” over and over again.
Location Taken: Craters of the Moon National Monument, Idaho
Time Taken: June 2010
It’s odd to find a hill this monochromatic. Just a lump of brown-grey, with one pale stripe winding uphill.
Well, it’s odd unless you happen to visit a cinder cone, anyway. Though I suppose cinder cones are pretty rare, so it’s still odd.
The hill is a giant pile of volcanic cinders, spat out of the earth over the millennia. They’re one of the tamest of volcanic features, though this particular area also had occasional lava flows in the past.
Cinder cones are also one of the shortest-lived volcanic features. Little grows on the cinders, and they’re small enough to get moved by the wind, so they erode away after just a few millennia. A really short time span, really, if you’re working in geologic time.
The pale stripe is a path worn into the cinders, pounded down and polished by countless shoes tramping up the hill to see what the world looks like from a few dozen feet higher.
I didn’t bother to climb the cone. There were other things I wished to see, and the light was fading fast.
