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Quillayute Needles, Second Beach, Olympic Peninsula, Washington The Pacific Northwest coast is fringed by reefs, shoals, and small islands or rock columns that run parallel to its shores, from the tide line of its sandy beaches and promontories, to miles offshore. Known as "sea stacks," they are the remains of headlands formed by the continued uplift of the coastline due to the collision of the Pacific and North American tectonic plates. Following the last ice age, as sea levels rose faster than the land, tides and waves eroded the coast, pushing the shoreline east by several miles and leaving behind these remnants. A line of sea stacks, seen half a mile offshore from Second Beach on Washington’s mid-coast, rests on a marine terrace just below the high-tide level, which skirts and connects the bases of these stacks. On my first hike down to this beach 40 years ago, I looked out across a summertime sea, quiet in this season of calm waters. The gentle pulse of the waves reminded me that we’ve inherited the name of this body of water from explorer Ferdinand Magellan, whose ships entered Mar Pacifico (peaceful seas) in 1519 as they rounded the southern tip of South America, leaving behind the stormy Atlantic Ocean. Around these sea stacks, waves crash, and currents swirl sea foam into lacy tracery. Among their cliffs and atop their capstones, birds’ nest, drawn by their isolation and safety, where the stacks serve as a way station on their migrations. To the left in this photograph is a narrow, pointed column — a “needle” — from which these stacks derive their name. The Quileute people know the largest islet on the left as Dhuo-Yuat-Zach-Tah, meaning “Bird Rock.”

Quillayute Needles, Second Beach, Olympic Peninsula, Washington

#WashingtonState #seastack #PNW #PacificOcean #OlympicPeninsula #OlympicNationalPark #photography #landscape #seashore

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Yup. Just keep telling yourself that…

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Dust Storm, Lee's Ferry, Marble Canyon, Arizona April is the windiest month of the year in northern Arizona, where I took this photograph. As the saying goes, "March comes in like a lion and goes out like a lamb," but the climate patterns in this region keep March winds blowing and even intensify into the following month. During winter, rain and snow wet the desert canyons. Spring brings a higher angle of the sun that quickly dries the ground. When the wind gusts, as it often does in April, the loosened soil creates rolling dust storms that march across the open basins. Channeled by sandstone cliffs in places like Lee's Ferry, where southwest winds converge and are funneled by the high bluffs and plateaus on both sides of the nearby Colorado River. This photograph captures a striking scene as sand and dust lift off the ground, moving across the landscape and shaking the saltbush field beneath Cathedral Rock, gathering debris and gaining height until this blinding phantom finally collapses and dissolves over the rim of Marble Canyon behind me. Straight-line wind bursts follow every few minutes. This blustery time of year, with its frequent squalls, creates a natural drama that awakens both sky and ground. The terrain becomes a challenging place to hike in or drive through, where you can enjoy the beauty of wildflowers and sage blooming as the seasons shift, while also facing the difficulty of venturing out amid alternating storms and sunshine, with their chill, heat, and wind stirring this otherwise quiet landscape.

Dust Storm, Lee's Ferry, Marble Canyon, Arizona

#Arizona #duststorm #springweather #canyonlands #marblecanyon #leesferry #photography #landscape #desert #grandcanyonnationalpark

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Beached Fin Whale, Sunset Beach, Oregon Fin whales seldom beach, as they typically live and die far out at sea. On a rare occurrence, one washed ashore on Oregon’s north coast this winter. Coincidentally, and against the odds, another fin whale was grounded in nearly the same spot, and close to the same day two years earlier. Unlike that stranding, this young whale had been dead for a while before reaching its resting place. High seas and winds drove the carcass north to Sunset Beach, near the high-tide line, where it stretched out parallel to the waves that pushed it in. On the day I took this photograph, groups of visitors stood in wonder at being so close to a whale, even, or especially, a deceased one. Like me, most stayed for a while walking around its carcass, examining it closely, sometimes touching it. At the same time, some debated the reasons for its short life, and a few recalled similar encounters with grounded whales. Members of the nearby Grand Ronde Tribes were able to harvest parts of the whale, presumably using its bones for carving, and its baleen for weaving baskets, according to tribe traditions. Further up the beach were its entrails, likely removed during a necropsy performed on the whale, which also involved removing sections of its skin to determine the cause of death. With much of its skin removed, many injuries became apparent. Pieces of its body had been torn off, possibly from orcas that attack and occasionally feed on fin whales. Recently, tides and storm waves carried its carcass even further up the beach, where its desiccated remains sank into the sand, feeding flocks of seagulls.

Beached Fin Whale, Sunset Beach, Oregon

#Oregon #oregoncoast #beachedwhale #finwhale #photograph #PacificOcean #grandrondetribes

If you can imagine it, you can make happen (or, at least, in Trump’s case believe it already did happen).

And now they've fallen again, once investors understood that oil prices continue to rise, and there has been no progress, and probably not even a start on negotiations with Iran

I can't imagine owning anything more dreadful or boring.

Today's protest in Astoria, Oregon. Bubbles set a positive mood thanks to the Astoria Bubble Collective. Probably a thousand people total spread out over 20 blocks of downtown. Lots of honking, waving, and thumbs up, very few drive-by naysayers.

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Canyon del Muerto, near White House Ruins, Arizona In northeastern Arizona, an ancient system of red rock canyons is carved by streams originating in the nearby Chuska Mountains. For thousands of years, these stream basins have been inhabited by native peoples, from the hunter-gatherer Archaic period to the Basketmaker and ancestral Puebloan cultures that built settlements. Today, roughly forty families of the Navajo Nation live year-round in the sheltered tributaries of Chinle Wash to farm and raise livestock. The canyon's sandstone walls are tinged red by iron oxide, causing them to shimmer with varying hues depending on the angle and intensity of the light. The distinctive shearing of this rock, formed from ancient dunes compressed into stone, creates nearly vertical cliffs with their smooth, scalloped surfaces. Rainwater flowing off the plateaus stains the walls, nourishing lichens and bacteria that form tanned streaks, called desert varnish, that stripe the cliffs. Generations of canyon dwellers left their mark through carved and painted inscriptions. Everywhere I hiked through the canyons, I saw remains of ancestral structures along the base of the cliffs and on benches and ledges overlooking this fertile landscape. Rimming the creeks that flow through the pastures are the currently occupied farmhouses. The most unexpected encounter I had was walking through the ashened ground of a sheltered wood. Residents burn underbrush each spring to revitalize the soil and encourage new grass growth where they graze cattle, sheep, and goats. Many wildlife species also inhabit the canyon, including bears, mountain lions, deer, turkeys, coyotes, bobcats, and badgers. Birds—eagles, hawks, owls fill the sky, and the cliffs echo the beautiful, haunting song of the ever-present Canyon Wren.

Canyon del Muerto, near White House Ruins, Arizona

#Arizona #landscape #photography #canyonlands #navajonation #spring #navajofarm

When asked how he felt about the experience, he said, "There are so many possibilities with this tool that it is simply overwhelming." I doubt he ever tried using it again, but it was characteristic of their curiosity about artists and artistic processes that they wanted to understand it. 3/3

I remember Calvin and Dodie visiting Anderson Ranch Arts Center for a week in the mid-1990s to learn about Photoshop. They were both excellent students, along with several other remarkable (Jim Rosenquist, Mike and Doug Starn, Dennis Hopper, Susan Meiselas, Larry Bell and others). 2/3

He was an incredible influence on me and many others. Recently, I finally read his four-book collection "The Lives of Artists," which offered a fascinating and rewarding insight into the creative processes of the artists he interviewed. 1/3

Sea stacks along Oregon's south coast are vestiges of rocky headlands that were once located much farther west. Today, we admire their remains: islands, prominences, and pinnacles that dot the nearshore, as shown in this photograph. Along this coast, before being eroded into these stunning formations, they were created by a mixture of rock types from various locations, pushed together by the collision of tectonic plates floating on Earth's slippery mantle. As softer rocks around them eroded away, the harder blocks appeared to be stranded on this beach. Composed of schist, chert, greywacke, and greenstone, the scene features a variety of colorful, weathered columns. For this reason, Bandon Beach is well-known for its sea stacks. I've wandered through the maze of these rocks of various sizes—one 20-foot-high pillar shaped like a wizard's hat, another a 100-foot-tall monolith with arches and caves incorporated into its structure. At low tide, looking across the expansive flats and this diverse gallery of formations nearby and far away, I felt as if they had emerged from beneath the flat sandy beach. At high tide, when surrounded by waves, they sometimes resemble floating islands or wrecks adrift. According to the native Nasomah people, the most famous sea stack, Face Rock, was home to the young daughter of a former chief. Legend says that while night-swimming, she encountered an evil presence in the ocean and, to escape its deadly gaze, looked skyward as she still does today, with her face outlining the northern edge of the rock. #Oregon #landscape #photograph #bandon

Greenstone Sea Stack, Bandon, Oregon

So… where’s my two grand from the ‘tariff income’ our dear president promised us? Or did I spend it and totally forget? (I don’t think so!).

Seep, Grand Gulch, Cedar Mesa, Utah Once upon time, the ancestral Appalachian Mountains eroded into sand and mud, which rivers transported and gradually deposited in an ancient shallow sea that divided the North American continent. The wall in this photograph shows a vertical cross-section of the compressed sediment that, through the aid of moisture and minerals, bonded its grains into a form of concrete called sandstone. Horizontal lines of varying thickness mark the boundaries between these sedimentary layers of cemented sand. Bleeding from a fracture in the canyon wall, the dripping aquifer stains red sandstone black with mold, then, further down, feeds green and buff-hued lichens. Its source is 800 feet above this wall, where rainwater and snowmelt, dissolving salt embedded in the lithified sand left by that dried-up sea, descends through porous rock layers from the canyon rim to its floor. Once exposed to the desert air by the seep, the saline water crystallizes into a powdery gown of efflorescence. The surface of the wall, covered with lichens, fungi, salt, and desert varnish, creates a poetic abstraction. Along the bottom of lower Grand Gulch Canyon, before it joins southeastern Utah’s San Juan River, there are other seeps as well as a seasonally active stream channel. Spring runoff and summer flash floods from thunderstorms scrape canyon walls and fill streambed potholes, nourishing plants and wildlife. A fallen limb and its arching branch rest against this wall, a remnant of a cottonwood tree that once bordered this shaded, twisting watercourse. #Utah #RedRockCountry #landscape #photography #sandstone #SanJuanRiver #GrandGulch #Canyonlands

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Drift Lumber, Nauset Beach, Cape Cod, Massachusetts Cape Cod's 50-mile eastern shoreline is periodically strewn with debris left by storm waves, shifting sandbars, and currents. Over the past 400 years, three thousand ships have wrecked along America’s outermost beach. The first recorded wreck, the Sparrow Hawk, in 1626, was one of the earliest and smallest ships to sail to the New World. After being repaired twice, it eventually wrecked again along this same stretch of the outer Cape, which the pilgrims of 1620 named "Tucker's Terror." During the 19th century, storms (especially in winter) and dangerous sandbars caused the loss of two or more ships each month. The remains of their cargo, hulls, and often the dead were cast onto these beaches from the fierce Atlantic, which writer Annie Dillard described as "a monster with a lace hem." There has long been a history of 'wreckers' who made their living by reclaiming debris washed ashore. In 1855, Henry David Thoreau wrote, “After an easterly storm in the spring, this beach is sometimes strewn with Eastern wood from one end to the other, which, as it belongs to him who saves it, and the Cape is nearly destitute of wood, is a godsend to the inhabitants.” On this morning fifty years ago, the beach foam of a retreating wave wetting the sand flats during low tide reflected the brilliant sun, lending this torn and wet piece of timber a radiant glow. Erosion and wave action made it impossible to identify the origin of this driftage. It could have been discarded from shore, lost from a passing ship as 'jetsam', or the rare 'flotsam' from a historic shipwreck.

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Sunset, Point of Pintas, Arizona

I aimed my view camera eastward across a basin toward a ridge etching the horizon. Between lay the accumulated sediment of once-loftier mountains. A place of blessed solitude, these flat drylands felt like an inland sea.

#SonoranDesert #Arizona #photography

He needs to ‘freshen up’ his same old grift everyone now and then.

He creates problems so he can solve them.

We know exactly what he is going to say: lies.

Which begs the question what the word 'real' means these days. Such as "Was it really Donald Trump calling in as his alter ego John Barron, or was it a fake phone call?"

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