Station Fire August 2009
(Pictures not full resolution)
Millard Falls & Echo Mountain
Strawberry Peak
Devil's Gate Dam Area
Mt Lowe Hike
Mt Lowe From Eaton Saddle
Mt Lowe - the Rotarians
Strawberry Peak - not quite
Thank you for your interest in these photos. They are posted for your enjoyment. I'm neither a professional photographer nor an artist, but I like to think these pictures will give some pleasure.
I have always had a deep interest in nature and enjoyed photographing it. I live in Pasadena, California, USA, near Los Angeles and just a couple of miles from the base of the San Gabriel Mountains, one of the Transverse Ranges of Southern California. My degree is in geology, so you'll find pictures of rocks as well as birds, bugs, and anything else of the natural world. Some people too.
I've used JAlbum to organize the photos for the web. On the Mac (can't speak for Windows), JAlbum works really well. I recommend it.
The camera I've used for all of these photos (so far) is a Nikon D50 with a Tamron 18-200mm lens. It seems to work well but I haven't explored all of its capabilities yet. I chose it because it was a nice balance of flexibility, like the SLRs I had 30 years ago, and modern digital wonderment. So far, so good. Now if I could just get past relying on the auto-exposure features...
If you use these photos for non-commercial purposes, I'd appreciate credit, and maybe a note telling me how you're using them, and a pointer to any on-line use so I can see the results. But it's not essential. If you alter the photos in any substantical way, I ask that you say so in any captioning or credits associated with the photo; I do not wish to be accused of doctoring photos, nor will I be held responsible for doing so.
If by chance you want to use a photo for commercial purposes, you must contact me. We can probably work something out. Thanks.
Thank you Mary Freeman. Mary's a local birder of great experience who's willing to share. She's the current president of the Los Angeles Audubon Society - a great organization with lots of possible ways to get involved.
If you're a Google Earth fan, try the link marked simply "KML", or if that gives odd results, try the one marked "Zip". The latter works better if your browser doesn't know what to do with kml/kmz files.
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Millard Canyon and Echo Mountain Trails, San Gabriel Mountains, California, USA. Millard Falls, Echo Mountain Ruins, the Dawn Mine | |
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KML Zip | Strawberry Peak, San Gabriel Mountains, California, USA. So far, just the stretch of trail from the Angeles Crest Highway up Colby Canyon to Josephine Saddle. Next time, I'll start on time. |
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KML Zip | Devil's Gate Dam Area, Arroyo Seco, Pasadena, CA. A few pictures in and around the dam itself. |
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KML Zip | Mt Lowe Hike, from the top of Lake Ave in Altadena to Mt Lowe via the Sam Merrill, Castle Canyon, and East Mt Lowe Trails. I'd been to Echo Mountain several times, and always wanted to go higher. My reasons were partly curiosity about new areas, and partly for the challenge. A 4000 foot ascent used to be pretty easy for me, but now? Well I did it, and was pretty sore for a couple of days afterward, but it felt great to have made it. |
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KML Zip | Mt Lowe From Eaton Saddle, a relatively easy hike from Eaton Saddle, on the Red Box - Mt Wilson Road, to the summit of Mt Lowe. Form the parking lot at the saddle, you walk around the large stell gate onto the Mt Lowe Fire Road, hike about .52 miles to Markham Saddle, then another .77 miles along to the intersection with the East Mt Lowe Trail, then on up to the summit. I'll include a map here shortly. The total elevation gain is about 500 feet, evenly spread over the total 1.55 (or so) miles. And it's got spectacular views of the Eaton Canyon, the LA Basin, and on a clear day, all the way to Mt Baldy, San Jacinto, the Santa Ana mountains. And if there'd been no June gloom down below us, we would have seen Catalina Island very easily. And then there's the whole history of Mt Lowe and Thaddeus Lowe's railway. |
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KML Zip | Mt Lowe - the Rotarians, On 22 July, 2008, I accompanied a group of Rotary Club members up Mt Lowe from Eaton Saddle. They were fine company and so was the weather. We saw a number of interesting things, including a horned lizard, and ended with lunch at Newcomb's Ranch, followed by a ratchet ranch embedded in a tire on the way down the Angeles Crest. |
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KML Zip | Strawberry Peak - not quite, On 12 July I tried for Strawberry Peak again. No such luck. I allowed myself to be sidetracked by a sign at Josphine Saddle that said Strawberry Peak Trail 3.1 miles. Thinking that meant a way up the mountain, I took it. What it really meant was that someone arriving from the Big Tujunga Road area would have already been on that trail 3.1 miles. So I nearly walked the entire 3 miles around the mountain before deciding that the the trail was going to dump me out on the road. But the scenery was spectacular anyway, with views down to Big Tujunga Canyon and beyond, and a nice lunch break under Strawberry's great north wall. You'll see. And before that, the road and trail up the side of Josephine Peak is also very pretty early in the morning. |
A geologist, even an armchair non-professional geologist, can't help but be fascinated by earthquakes. Combine that with a love of maps and computers, and you get - earthquake animations! So here's a small assortment I made using the Advanced National Seismic System Composite Earthquake Catalog search facility. There's a huge amount of information there, plus more links to explore.
A little bit of technical detail: Each frame of the animation is a 2d energy histogram over a 90-day period, with the time window sliding by 30 days each frame. That is, a time window centered on Feb 15 1980 is a histogram of earthquakes from 1 January to 31 March, or thereabouts. The color is determined by the log of the total energy in a histogram cell, each cell being represented by a pixel. All earthquakes from the catalog over magnitude 1.0 are included. Different types of magnitude are reported in the catalog, but I didn't attempt to normalize to a single type before calculating energy. The map projection is Lambert Conformal.
A caveat - these animations are without academic merit! Don't use them for research! I've tried to make them accurate, based on the ANSS catalogs, but they are not validated or tested.
Anyway, without further ado: