Beauty in Black and White

I hope folks will pause for a few minutes and view these photographs. Some people don’t appreciate Ansel Adams because they can’t get into black and white photography. That is really a shame as far as I am concerned, because when you look at his photography at say..1100-1800 resolution, its beauty is simply stunning. Many of the photographs on this government website were taken in the 1940’s when Adams began teaching at the Art Center School of Los Angeles, which included the training of military photographers. They are photographs of our natural treasures known as our National Park System that were taken when he contracted with the Department of the Interior in 1941. It’s a huge collection and you can see the photo’s in small or large (by large I mean huge) resolution. Below are some that I found breathtaking in their full size which we can’t post here but you can see at the link to the govt website.

First is of course the Grand Canyon. It is taken from the South Rim. The shadowing just mesmerized me when I saw it at its full size.

Next is one of my favorite spots in Arizona, Canyon De Chelly

The one below is Glacier National Park in Montana at dusk

The last is the Grand Canyon again.

If you made it this far, congratulations..you took the time to “smell the roses”, which people are doing in less and less numbers for the last twenty years when it comes to our National Parks. We need to do that occasionally or we lose sight of why we continue our quest to save the environment or keep the federal fuckwits honest and beholden to ‘we’ the people. Now, go check out more of the magnificent beauty on the government website linked above. You will be awed by the natural beauty of our once-great country, that will hopefully rise again from the ashes of Republican rule. 😉

Man-made flush of Grand Canyon..good or bad?

The Washington Post has a very short blurb up about this action which started this morning. It makes it sound like its a good thing. There are however, other writeups like these from the LAT and the Guardian that say it’s not a good thing, and in fact serve the interests of the hydroelectric power company. From the LAT article:

National park officials said that 10 years of research at a cost of $80 million had shown that the flooding as planned could irreparably harm the national park’s ecology and resources.

Grand Canyon National Park Supt. Steve Martin said he was given a day to formulate comments to a cursory environmental assessment of the project. In those comments, he wrote that statements by the Bureau of Reclamation used to justify the flows’ timing were “unsubstantiated.” Far from restoring crucial sand banks and other areas, the flows could destroy habitat, Martin said.

The WaPo writeup on the other hand says only this:

Federal agencies are gearing up to release a manmade flood aimed at refreshing the ecosystem of the Grand Canyon.

A three-day torrent of water will be released from Glen Canyon Dam on the Arizona-Utah state line beginning Wednesday morning.

The Colorado River in the Grand Canyon downstream from the dam used to be warm and muddy. But the dam now traps silt and the river runs cold and clear through the canyon. The shift has helped speed the extinction of four fish species.

The agencies including the Interior Department and Park Service hope the flooding will redistribute sediment in the canyon.

Makes you go HMMMM..doesn’t it?