Farewell 2012

You brought North America climactic disaster in so many corners.  Nearly the entire map except portions of tropical Mexico and the Pacific northwest suffered from intense heat and prolonged drought.  You brought devastating extra-tropical hurricanes and tornadoes in the least likely months of January and December.  You  gave us a parting gift of much needed rain for California and a normal looking winter near the end of the month for much of the Midwest and Great Lakes, but aside from that we have seen extremes that seem to be getting worse.  Let's hope 2013 is a bit more gentle on us.

That said, life on this rugged continent has always been a bit more tenacious than even its rugged weather.

Christmas Spruce

Just in case I don't find time to post tomorrow, Merry Christmas from American Voyages!  In keeping with our exploration of natural North America, have a living Christmas tree, one that even comes with its own decorative Canadian Shield stand.  

Cedar Lake, Ontario.

That's one fine White Spruce (Picea Glauca).  Next year I will try for a solitary Black Spruce, hopefully from somewhere exotic and southern near the bottom of their range in the Appalachians.  

Christmas is Coming

So why not show a picture from some church somewhere, right?

Part of the courtyard at the mission of San Juan de Capistrano, in the city of the same name in California.  The missions are a great way to see some of old California, and like so many religious foundations around the world are one of the best ways to see into the heart of a people, or at least a people's past.

Saguaros!

This picture, a lovely gift from a friend in Utah, was too good to not pass along here.

No clue where this is from, other than somewhere near Phoenix, Arizona.

Here we have a nice northwestern Sonoran Desert scene, complete with Saguaro cacti (Carnegiea Gigantea) and Green Paloverdes (Parkinsonia Microphylla), along with some blurry other cacti and shrubs.  Saguaros tend to be found in the wetter portions of the Sonoran Desert, where they can establish easily in the double feature winter and summer rains.  They are also a bit cold sensitive, being killed if freezing temperatures persist more than 30 hours or so.  This largely accounts for their distribution in Arizona and Sonora.  Paloverdes are also interesting species, having bark which can act as leaves do and photosynthesize for the plant.  They actually lose their leaves (which are not really big anyway) in summer and grow them back in the wetter winter and spring.

Though the scene above does not look very alive at the moment, in a few months it will be rejuvenated by winter rains and wonderful sunny spring days.  The ground will be green with grasses, flowers will carpet the land as far as the eye can see, and the place will look like an exotic paradise.  Perhaps the best feature of a place like this is the smell, especially right after a rain.  It's so indescribable that you really have to go there and experience it to understand how this might be one of the best smelling places on the planet.

Oh, and nothing is cooler than Saguaros.  They just look awesome.

Humid Subtropical

In my last post I made a half-joke about Lake Erie being the center of a new northern extension of the humid subtropical climate found in the southeastern United States.  So what exactly is "humid subtropical", or even just subtropical for that matter?  In general, a subtropical region is at least one where daytime highs are usually above freezing, even in the coldest months.  More properly, a true subtropical region would not experience even nighttime freezing temperatures, but climactic areas tend to blend with their neighbors in transitional areas.

In the United States, subtropical climates are pretty much kept south of the Ohio river, outside of the higher Appalachian mountains, and curve off in the ends southward into Oklahoma and northward into coastal Connecticut.  That's right, technically speaking, New York City is subtropical.  Yeah, it can snow and get pretty icy there, but I have noticed that even in the coldest years, the snow does not last nearly as long it does back upstate and in the southern Great Lakes (back when it did, anyway) and points north and west.  If you manage to find some of the more natural spaces of New Jersey and Long Island, it will most likely be some pine barrens that will feature an odd conversation piece like a magnolia or two.  Until you hit South Carolina, where palmettos will start to poke up in the underbrush, this scenery will change little along the drier parts of the coastal plain.

Magnolias, Baldcypress, Pines, and company at Jamestown National Historic Site.

How about a bit further inland, past the Appalachians?  Well, the changes will be a bit more subtle.  Evergreen Rhododendrons and Azaleas will start showing up in the more rugged parts, and some of the coniferous trees will disappear until they are replaced by southern species in Tennessee.  As would be the case with developed land on the east coast, though, one would be more likely to notice things like magnolias being planted in increasing frequency the further south one travels.  To my knowledge, the first Southern Magnolia (Magnolia Grandiflora) one can encounter along the main travel routes is in Bowling Green, Kentucky at some hotel parking lot.  Back a few years ago, it stuck out like a sore thumb in a cold March landscape.  Apparently people in Cincinnati have started growing palms in their yards, so the transition zone could be noticeable even further north.

Naturally speaking, a fine indicator of the edge of subtropical land would be the presence of Baldcypress stands along the major rivers.  The furthest northern ones can be found in Indiana and Delaware.  In Arkansas and Virginia they start getting draped with Spanish Moss.  This is probably where the tropical part of subtropical starts making more sense, but again, same-elevation climate transitions are not usually as plain as a line drawn on the map.  In North America, this is especially true.

You see, we have no major east-west mountain ranges here that can block Arctic winter cold fronts.  The fact that warmer weather can even persist so far north at all is largely due to the Gulf of Mexico, which is a sauna that keeps sending heat and humidity north.  In contrast, we also have Hudson Bay, which not only can fight back against the Gulf rather well, but is responsible for maintaining the world's southernmost tundra on our northern half of the planet, right along the coast in Ontario.  About ten thousand years ago and earlier, it was also responsible for maintaining the continental ice sheet across much of Canada and the northern United States.  These days, the Gulf seems to be winning the tug of war, but now and then even during our recent mild years, the frigid north can send hard freezes as far south as Miami and Tampico.  In fact, chilly nights in the lower forties have even been reported in Cuba and Veracruz, places that are definitely well within the limits of true tropical.

Perhaps the northern edge of the subtropical world gets noticed a bit more by someone from northern Ontario.  Heck, I was shocked when I moved to Detroit and first ran into "southern" trees like Tulip trees and hot and steamy Ash tree swamps.  In any event, the next time you take a car trip, you might notice the same subtle changes as you head toward Dixie.

No White Christmas?

This past summer in southern Michigan felt more like a summer somewhere in the mid-elevation southwestern United States.  We had weeks of highs in the upper 90's, along with five day stretches here and there of 100+ temperatures.  What's more, our nights dropped down more than twenty-five degrees lower on many occasions.  The soil caked or looked more like sand, saplings fried in the hot sun, lawns looked dreadful even when watered, and the cacti I planted positively thrived.  About a month ago, I walked along the southern shores of Lake Huron... several hundred feet off shore, on dry land.  Much of the country has experienced intense heat and drought this summer.

Along came the fall, and with it a return to some rain and moderate temperatures, along with an exceptionally early freeze back in the second week of September.  Things started to level out, but then began looking like the previous winter, with days well above normal and nights not really budging that far from the highs.  Last winter featured January days in the 50's with exceptionally high humidity.  This winter has so far followed suit, with December days regularly seeing 60.  Last winter I felt that I could get away with planting a Needle Palm (Rhapidophyllum Hystrix), but wishful thinking aside, I noticed a few things this fine December 17th when I took a walk outside.  Among my botanical bursts of enthusiasm this year has been a voyage of exploration into the flora of the American southeast.  I took a gamble on growing a Sweetbay Magnolia (Magnolia Virginiana), unprotected and exposed, in the yard.  While there were a few initial hiccups with soil acidity to begin with, and the leaves have fallen off due to overnight freezes, I did notice something curious.

The air temperature near the ground usually tends to be higher than that of the air even a foot above the ground, but not so high as to, say, keep things from freezing in winter.  Winds can still blow and chill even close down to the ground, and one will notice that one's lawn does indeed stop growing this late into the season.  Well, it really has not this year, nor did it last year.  What's more, while the rest of the Magnolia went through its deciduous process (further south, say in Georgia down, they can tend towards being evergreen), new growth has been popping up here in mid-December!  Last year the lilacs did the same thing, stopping only in January and starting back up again in late February.  The Rhododendron looks amazing, and only recently did my last hosta bite the dust.  These past two winters have been experiencing climactic conditions closer to what would be normal for Kentucky or Maryland than Michigan, more humid subtropical than humid continental.

There is, of course, a down side to all of this.  Our water reserves might suffer for it, particularly where the Great Lakes are concerned.  Snow and an intense spring melt usually gives water bodies a chance to recuperate, as if all the moisture is kept safely on the ground until it can be released before getting a chance to evaporate again.  Out west, our Rockies have seen less and less snowfall, and rivers such as the Colorado and Rio Grande have suffered for it.

I-70 eastbound, about 9,000 feet up.  Near Georgetown, Colorado.

Time will tell whether this is a permanent change or not.  For now, those of wanting snow need to head north of the 44 parallel or so.

Beavers...

...don't always build a dam, you know.  Sometimes they prefer lakefront property.

Cedar Lake, Algonquin.

They also seem to have a thing for granite patios.

Ocean Beach, California

Your typical southern California beach scene, with a layer of pollution faintly visible on the horizon, overpriced condominiums, expensive parking, and for some reason an agave in full bloom growing wild on the sand.

It seemed like a pleasant picture, so I thought I would use it.  The title is the location of the beach.  Like many coastal towns, everything is densely packed in and almost no one has a private stretch of ocean front.  Most of the small yards get paved over, and those that do not get planted with palm trees, mostly the tall-growing, salt-tolerant Mexican Fan Palm (Washingtonia Robusta).

The neighboring community of Sunset Cliffs features slightly larger yards, some houses even having pools.  For the most part, however, things are packed as tight as sardines in a can.  Ironically, things here in the seaside high rent district are just as packed here as they are across the border in the slums of Tijuana.  In contrast, densely populated seaside Miami and Fort Lauderdale feature your average size yards and free parking lots, despite space also being a premium in a southern Florida that is otherwise largely too wet and spongy to support much in the way of a city.

The median house price in Fort Lauderdale and Miami closer to the ocean and intercoastal waterway is around $250,000 U.S. currency.  The median house price in San Diego and affiliated towns such as Ocean Beach is $520,000 and more.  Florida, it seems, is the place to get a vacation home, whereas California is the place to live.  Both places have pleasant climates, southern Florida being largely tropical and coastal southern California being what can best be described as "eternal spring", never much deviating from 60-70 year round.  Both places get tons of sunshine.  Florida can present hurricanes, which used to be dealt with by having homes constructed of concrete (it worked).  Coastal southern California can present earthquakes and tsunamis.  Things in general are far more expensive in California than they are in Florida, and yet still the demand for real estate is so much higher in the land of the easy going sunset.  Maybe it is something in the name... people have been attracted to her so strongly for nearly 250 years now.  Southern Florida?  Maybe for the past 70 years or so, once they started cutting down the mangroves.

I happen to like mangroves.  And coconut palms.  And fun Caribbean sea shells.  Still, that crisp Pacific water does feel pretty amazing, and it has a lack of dangerous jellyfish near the beaches in Cali, along with fun things like kelp and sea lions.  To each their own!

Dreaming of Blissful Surroundings

A bit tired to post about much today, but I thought I would keep the momentum going by showing something nice.

An oak savanna in Island Lake State Recreation Area, near Brighton, Michigan.  Oak savannas once covered significant portions of southern Michigan, southern Wisconsin, Indiana, northwest Ohio, and southwestern Ontario.  They are in many ways the meeting of worlds between the eastern mixed forests and the interior grasslands.  In Michigan and Ontario they tend to be inter-mixed with forests, whereas in much of the rest of their area they form more open landscapes.  Early settlers who saw them commented on how beautiful and park-like they looked, even as they were plowing them over into farms and settlements.  These days very few of them remain, but they are often targeted as special conservation areas and have even started to get attention as possible landscape choices for larger properties.  

Classic Mississippi River Crossing

From St. Louis southward the Mississippi looks pretty much like people would imagine it, all wide, muddy, surrounded by flat forested land and big cities and crossed by a number of truss bridges.

So it is here looking south from the I-70 crossing in St. Louis.  This shot even includes an advertisement for a casino riverboat in it (there was a classic one with crowned smokestacks moored to the north but a clear shot would be difficult in heavy traffic).  Of course, north of here, there are many places where the Mississippi looks entirely different, complete with sheer cliffs framing her banks and dark, tannin-stained waters coursing through Canadian Shield granite near her source in Minnesota.  She is a remarkable river which runs through a great cross section of both climates and cultures in the middle of the continent.  She has served as the first great drain for the most recent continental glaciers, has served explorers and settlers as a doorway to the western lands, and ran red with blood in the 1860's.  She is no simple river.  I count every crossing.  To date I am up to 16.

Taking the Road to the End

You know, even if I did gripe about the cultural and environmental damage interstates can cause, they can be pretty fun to travel from end to end.  There is nothing like seeing a mighty multi-lane highway that has passed through many states come to a rather humble end at some traffic lights.  Take a look at Interstate 8 only a few miles from its western terminus:

And then when this huge conduit of southern California traffic is forced to stop, not only by a traffic light, but by the Pacific Ocean:

I-8 is a bit different to begin with.  In a few places it actually serves as part of the US-Mexico border (though the concrete traffic barriers have since been augmented with a rather tall fence) and part of its course runs beneath sea level out in the Imperial Desert.  I-70 ends in a rest stop in Maryland.  I-94 turns into a fork that can take one into a traffic light in Port Huron or out of the United States across the Blue Water Bridge.  I-95 gets swallowed up its predecessor, US 1, and turns into a Miami city street.  Rather ignoble ends for ribbons of concrete that otherwise are given a path by engineering that blasts mountains to bits and drains swamps to keep the path straight.  Then again, one would hardly build a monument for a road without character...

Sugar Pine

Far be it from me to dismiss the western pines when speaking of stately beauty and gracefulness supported by a sturdy frame.  While it is no Eastern White Pine, the Sugar Pine (Pinus Lambertiana) is definitely worthy of such remarks.  In fact, it actually is a "white pine", bearing needles in clusters of five and sadly being a victim of white pine blister rust.

Rim of the World Drive, San Bernardino County, California.

The Sugar Pine has the added distinction of prominently bearing cones which "drip" from its branches.  Its many picturesque qualities have made it the subject of many paintings and photographs, just as the Eastern White Pine was a favorite subject for artists such as the Group of Seven.  An Ansel Adams photograph of a Sugar Pine is prominently featured in the first floor gallery of the Department of the Interior building in Washington, D.C.

Like most trees of the Pacific range forests, the Sugar Pine is huge.  The tallest specimens are over 250 feet tall.  With the possible exception of pre-colonial Eastern White Pines, such specimens mean that this is the most massive pine in the world.  If you want to see one up close and personal, you need to head to southern Oregon, California, or Baja California, where they can be found in abundance when one climbs higher than a mile above sea level.

Taking the Alternate Route

"Thanks to the Interstate Highway System, one can now travel across the country from coast to coast without actually seeing anything."  -Charles Kuralt

How right this man was.  Express highways have transformed not only our travel experiences, but an entire culture.  I had been meaning to write about the concept for some time, especially after I had an experience this summer of seeing the Toronto-North Bay corridor in Ontario pretty much reduced to a rapid transit pathway.  Where before there had been delightful little towns with great roadside restaurants and maple sugar candy shops, 2012 had shown itself to be the year of excessively mowed down forests (to make room for hundreds of yards of clearance on either side of the glorious new double-landed divided highway) and signs that point off an exit toward towns that now exist to travelers only in name.  This, of course, is old news back in the United States, where the transition from interesting federal highways to streamlined interstate took place more than half a century ago.  There, little towns faded out of existence in some cases, along with grand urban cores that diminished as people could now more easily live in distant suburbs and commute further away from, in less time (the brake lights say otherwise), downtown areas.

Fortunately, nostalgia and tourism can often combine in an effective marriage.

In Springfield, Illinois.

US Highway 66, now largely supplanted by I-55, 44, 40, and 15, is one such child of this nuptial blessing, and rightly so the most famous of buried highways.  When the interstates replaced her long, glorious road from Lake Michigan to the Pacific Ocean, many roadside attractions, businesses, and entire communities suffered greatly.  Still, many have survived, enough so that taking the business loop on the modern freeways is definitely a worthwhile experience, if for no other reason than to see the namesake of song lyrics.

Yes, you really can stand on the corner in Winslow, Arizona, but you have to exit I-40 in order to do so.

Tourist traps and affordable hotels aside, heading down the older highways is often the only way to get to travel some of the former great travel paths of the continent.  Much of the emigrant trails of the 19th century have not been replaced by modern interstates, where technological advances in engineering allowed for more direct routes to be carved and blasted through formerly difficult terrain.  Those wishing to get to California or Oregon the more traditional way need to say goodbye to I-80 at Ogallala, Nebraska.  Sure, you don't get to speed along in your car at 80mph or more, but a solid 60 is not horrible, and you can pass by things like, well, this:

Chimney Rock, at Bayard, Nebraska.  US 26 can take you there!

You know, just as people used to, because it was an easier, more pleasant route, and because you could actually see a thing or two on your way out there.  Sometimes the first part does not always hold true, as is the case with US-6 going over, rather than tunneling under, the continental divide, but the second part usually benefits from this.  I doubt I will ever want to drive I-15 in Utah again, not after the fun and dangerous route I got to drive on Utah 2.  The views alone were worth the extra gas.  That said, I actually think I used less gas, because I was not driving like a rabid dog barreling down the interstate.  Something can be said for the old 55mph limit.

California Refilling

Even as much of the country is still recovering from a brutal 2012 of heat and drought, much of non-desert California is experiencing record rainfall, some parts receiving 800% of their normal amounts in mere hours.  Instead of the devastating floods that come with such intense bursts of precipitation, the rain is going to the right areas and recharging aquifers and lakes.  This has been needed for a very long time.

Lake Kaweah, near Visalia, California, Sierra Nevada foothills.  Though the lake is often drained to a lower level for flood control, the sad truth is that many lakes in California have looked like this for a long time.  

If this continues to some degree through the winter, the deserts, which get winter rainfall anyway, will experience a bloom worthy of taking the most skeptical person's breath away.  2013 will be a year of plenty of water for California, hopefully along with a renewed appetite for better water management practices there.

The Ever Landscape-able Eastern White Pine

Among my strong dislikes of artificial landscape elements would be the ever-present use of exotic trees in orderly plantings.  I drove past countless yards today which had proper little rows of Blue Spruce (Picea Pungens) and Lombardy Poplar (Populus Nigra v. Italica) and had to wonder whatever became of the great eastern North American tree rush that conquered the hearts of so many landscapers back in the 17th and 18th centuries.  That said, I passed by just as many Eastern White Pine (Pinus Strobus), and to be fair, such trees are often landscaped to death in their native range, and often well outside of it as well, deep into the Great Plains.  They do make excellent stand-alone specimens for landscaping, though.

Somewhere near Kalkaska, Michigan.  

It's hard not to share a picture like this, or not to make a post about it, even if I have done something similar before.  I mean come on, its so strong, yet graceful...

Oddly enough, very few of them get planted out west, and despite their natural occurrence in Mexico, they are also quite absent there.  As noted, they made appearances into quite a few landscaped European estates in former centuries, and were long celebrated by the British navy as excellent mast trees.  These days I have only really noticed them around in England here and there, but apparently they have made such inroads into parts of eastern Europe that they have naturalized, especially in the Carpathian mountains.  Fitting revenge, I would say, for the sheer number of Norwegian Spruce (Picea All-too-common-a) that we became afflicted with here.

Expanding the Horizon

The very first post on American Voyages defined North America as everything consisting of continental Canada, the United States, and Mexico, but technically speaking, such limits are not really being fair to what North America really encompasses.  In truth, our continental plate extends as far east as half of Iceland and as far west as parts of Russia and Japan.  Now of course, a blog about North American geography, history, etc. would be rather silly if I took some time to cover Hokkaido or Siberia, but my recent reading into everything botanical regarding Florida got me thinking about some of our outlying nearby continental islands, namely Cuba and the Bahamas.

Both places have been historically linked to the rest of North America, in some cases in far stronger ways than with the rest of their Caribbean neighbors.   Cuba was the departure point of choice of Spanish explorers and colonizers for expeditions into Mexico and Florida, and the island was lusted after for years by the United States during the late nineteenth century.  Though the current embargo keeps Cuba at arm's length from the United States, she has decent diplomatic relations with both Canada and Mexico.  The Bahamas pretty much experience economic vitality because of trade and tourism links with the United States.  Both nations feature a climate and biodiversity remarkably similar to that of southern Florida.  I have been fortunate enough to see this up close and personal in the Bahamas, but my only experience thus far of Cuba has been of a few distant glimpses of a mountainous coast from the Straits of Florida.  There are no reasons why we can't occasionally talk about her though, especially since I have some rather controversial posts about language coming up this week.  You know, posts about, gasp, that dreaded Spanish language everyone here seems to be afraid of.

Oh, and for those of us wondering, this would be where North America technically ends down south:

Thanks USGS!  This map and all sorts of fun stuff can be found here.

The Potomac Above Natural Navigation Limits

While searching for some topic photos for the blog tonight I came across this picture, which I think I took at Chain Bridge, which connects Washington with Virginia.

In an earlier post, we got to take a look at the Great Falls of the Potomac, another rocky, somewhat dramatic area for a river that is otherwise usually depicted as serene, flat, and just a nice scenic portion of a larger capital scene.  Like many east coast rivers, the Potomac is indeed a nice, flat, boat-worthy river until it hits the toes of the Appalachian rise.  Like the Nile pinching at its "cataracts", these rivers then narrow into rather rocky affairs that feature little rapids.

Yes, I know this is not the Potomac.  What we see here is the Susquehanna river just north of Harrisburg, Pennsylvania. This was taken from US 22 northbound, looking west.  

As seen above, in places where the navigation head is closer to the first great ridges of the Appalachians, the whole affair gets pinched into this sort of scene framed by enclosing mountains.  These features are known as "water gaps".  For the Potomac, this occurs much further upstream than this scene in Washington at Harper's Ferry, where Virginia, Maryland, and West Virginia converge.  Here we have a double gap, where the Shenandoah joins the Potomac.

US 340 looking north upstream the Shenandoah to its confluence, between the mountains, with the Potomac.  The white steeple rising from the left shore is the only sign of Harper's Ferry, WV, that can be seen through the rather dense riparian forests of cottonwoods, ashes, and willows.  

The water gaps and river-worn sections of the Appalachians are excellent places to see the exposed underbelly of eastern North America.  While our vegetated and softened landscape here has nothing on the "naked geology" of the western lands and Mexico, it is far from boring as far as geologists and rockhounds are concerned.  Yeah, we have the classic riverboat scenes, but we also have rougher and swifter patches like this right around the corner.  In some places, they have allowed for dams and mills to be constructed that were responsible for powering and watering the foundations of American industrialization.

Distant Cousins

While the corners of North America can often seem worlds apart in terms of climate and landscape, our continent is notable for having more similarities than differences between its distant ends.  White-tailed Deer (Odocoileus Virginianus) can be found both in Veracruz and central Quebec, various spruces and firs range from Alaska to the Appalachians, and even the rocks beneath us can remind the lonely traveler of a distant home.  Take a look at the scenes below:

Nope, that's not actually Canadian Shield!

While these might seem to have been taken in, say, Maine or Ontario, they were actually snapped (poorly, I know, I had yet to master the art of windshield photography) in central Utah.  The mountains of Utah and neighboring Colorado pull off Boreal artistry rather nicely despite being 1,000 miles south of the true Boreal forest.  Rather than Balsam Fir (Abies Balsamea) and White Spruce (Picea Glauca) we see spires of Subalpine Fir (Abies Lasiocarpa) and Engelmann Spruce (Picea Engelmannii), and the granites, schists, and gabbros of these relatively young mountains are old, but only recently exposed and not nearly as old as the ancient outcrops of the Canadian Shield rocks of the same names.

The western mountains, you see, are youngsters that rose less than 80 million years ago.  The life which thrives on their slopes, however, probably shares common ancestry with lower elevation life in similar climactic areas much further north.  During the last major glaciation, when the Boreal forests were much further south, these forests interacted with the northern versions at much closer proximity.  These days they are a bit more isolated, but serve as a unique southern extension of the northern forests well into central Mexico.  We are blessed and cursed, in a way, to have such a unique continent that features north-south mountain ranges and winters and summers both that can move uncontested far beyond where they can in other parts of the world.  The two worlds of alpine and true Boreal meet in the Canadian Rockies in a strikingly subtle mingling of separately evolved worlds.  Though I have never been to this grand meeting place of north and west, I can imagine that the sensations would be nothing short of incredible and perhaps even something reminiscent of a more unified continent that had to face much colder conditions as a tighter biological entity.  Again though, the differences are not too far apart from one another.  Take a look at a similar stretch of forest:

Taken off of Michigan 35 halfway between Menominee and Escanaba, MI.  

The casual viewer might not even notice a difference, even though the Utah and Michigan scenes are 1,300 miles apart.  With the exception of some aspens, none of the trees are of the same species between the two scenes, and the air in both places has rather different qualities to it.  Still, there is a little bit of Utah in Michigan and a little bit of Michigan in Utah, relations which have common roots in a more severe past.

Blue Water

Nature has long inspired humankind to imitate her beauty.  Though we have managed to produce wonderful gemstones, furs, sounds, and smells synthetically, we tend to long for those things which are naturally produced.  In particular, we have a fondness for color, whether it be the deep reds of a lovely sunset or the brilliance found in gemstones and precious metals.  In some places, natural colors lend their name to entire regions.  In Michigan and Ontario, we have what is known as the "Blue Water" region, your typical eastern Great Lakes industrialized port area so named because of its brilliant blue waters flowing out of Lake Huron into the St. Clair river.

Standing on the easternmost point of Michigan, looking south into Ontario at what the locals call "chemical valley".

While the scale of the ocean going vessels and industrial landscape manages to attract the attention of both locals and visitors alike, few such viewers never give a second look to the dazzling waters which run through the middle of the hustle and bustle in Port Huron and Sarnia.  Dazzling, of course, hardly can express the intensity of the blue which is the water here.

Pictures do not do it justice, but I thought I would try.  All of these can were taken in Port Huron.  In the shot directly above is downtown Sarnia, Ontario.

The Great Lakes are notable for producing blues in their waters normally reserved for the ocean.  Sediments and bedrocks have been partially responsible for giving us inland seas which can rival the picturesque waters of the Caribbean and South Pacific.  Some locations are better than others for observing the azure majesty, such as the dolomite-floored Bruce Peninsula side of Georgian Bay, or the lovely sandy bottomed shores off of the Leelanau Peninsula in northwestern lower Michigan.  None of these, however, can hold a candle to the gem-quality brilliance of the St. Clair river.  Though they often never give a second thought about their lovely river, the locals were right in calling their home Blue Water country.

A Dry Topic

When I first made my way into the North American west back in the summer of 2008, what impressed me most about the journey was not the impressive vistas or dramatic landscapes.  I was captivated by the desert.  While I had been looking forward to getting through miles of cornfields and surrounding myself in the grandeur of the Rockies, I knew that more flat and dry landscapes were in store for me after all too brief of a taste of the mountains.  However, that trip forever changed many of my perspectives on landscapes and the so-called backwater areas of the continent.

While I did find that the portion of the journey passed far too quickly through the high-altitude spruce-fir forests of the mountains, the High Plains and the deserts of the Colorado Plateau, the two arid frames which bind the mountains, had a charm all their own.  While people such as myself are derided as hopelessly naive of the truth of the matter (you know, us types who love looking at the desert from an air-conditioned home or car), I would have to comment that my fascination of the western dry lands stems not from an appreciation of the exposed geology or blue skies.  Rather, I was taken in by how much life manages to find a way to not only exist, but positively thrive in such a hostile environment.

I-70, Mojave National Preserve.  

To many, a place such as the Mojave is a collection of sand, rocks, strange plants, and insanely high temperatures.  To me it is a wonderful world of those things blended together in something of a divine masterpiece.  To this day, much of the west remains open and free, not yet covered in strip malls or even farms.  While I do not necessarily decry most of what civilization has managed to achieve and build, there is nothing like seeing our world as it has been shaped through years of work without our "improvements".  The desert is still a great frontier where we can encounter a little bit of nature that presents us with enough challenges to not have paved it over.  Tomorrow we will return east and take a look at something where this is still the case among the industrialized and settled eastern part of North America.