Tehachapi Loop

Considered one of the railroad engineering wonders of the world, the Tehachapi Loop is a spiral of railroad track 0.73 miles long which passes over itself courtesy of a tunnel/bridge combination. The Loop allows trains to ascend "The Tehachapi", the mountain pass at the southern end of the Sierra Nevada Mountains, on an easy grade.

View of the Tehachapi Pass including Walong looking west toward the San Joaquin Valley. Some controversy exists over the naming of the Walong, the area inside the loop. Older sources indicate that it is a bastardization of some dialect of Chinese, with a meaning related to "dragon" - a name given to it by the Chinese workers who built the Loop. Wikipedia cites a different origin, specifically that it was named after Southern Pacific District Roadmaster W.A. Long. I rather prefer the first explanation...

A westbound freight train descends the pass, approaching the Loop.

The freight train passes beneath itself on the Loop.

The tail of the train passes over the body moving through the tunnel.

Palm Trees

When I moved to Southern California I had never seen palm trees, which were not native to the cold northeastern U.S. where I spent the first twenty years of my life. I arrived in the darkness around 4:00am, and was initially fascinated by the abundance of palms, which I began seeing a couple hours after that first sunrise. Now nearly four decades later, I'm no longer fascinated by them, but I still pay them a certain amount of attention.

The photographs in this post were made on the first day of summer in 2009, at Fairmount Park in Riverside, California.

Hot Air Balloons

I wasn’t sure what to expect from the balloon and wine festival held yearly in southern Riverside County. Over the decades I’d seen the balloons in the distance a handful of times while driving nearby, but had never gone to the festival. Three weeks before this year’s event, I rode down to the site at the Lake Skinner Recreation Area slightly north of the San Diego County border to scout it out.

Parking the bike beside the guard shack near the park entrance, I stood up and began removing my gloves. An attractive blonde woman in a green and tan Ranger uniform walked toward me from the open doorway.
“Thanks for delivering my bike.” She said, grinning. “I was wondering when it would get here.”
“Well, I hope I’m not too late.” I deadpanned. “I hit some traffic in Sun City.”
She giggled, and stopped on the left side of the bike, caressing its red-and-cream paint job with her eyes for a moment before raising them to me. “What can I do for you?”
“I need some information about the balloon festival.”

A few minutes later I had festival and recreation area brochures tucked away in my saddlebag and the event information I needed. The balloons would launch sometime after 6:00am from the area between the large dirt parking lot and Lake Skinner. I wouldn’t have to pay the $22 entrance fee, just $5 for parking, since I would be able to photograph the balloons from the parking lot.

I rode down to the parking lot and looked at the surrounding scenery. In all directions it would make a good backdrop for photographing the hot air balloons. There were no subdivisions or industrial areas in sight, just the nearby hills circled by the ridges of the Santa Rosa Mountains.

On the first morning of the two-and-a-half day festival, I left my driveway at 5:00am, rode fifty miles to the parking lot, then put the kickstand down a few minutes after 6:00. A slow wind was coming from the south-southwest under an overcast sky with scattered blue holes where sunlight poked through.

There were five balloons in what I thought would be the launch area between the parking lot and the lake. They were slowly taking shape as they filled with hot air. I wandered around the edges of the festival area with my camera, drinking coffee from my thermos, looking for a good vantage point for photographs, and killing time until the launchings would begin. A two-foot berm running along the edge of the parking area seemed promising. I would stand on it and shoot over the heads of the people wandering around the grounds when the balloons started taking off.

After forty minutes, it became obvious that the launches would not happen where I thought, since the three balloons were tethered to the ground. They periodically lifted to fifty feet or so with their baskets full of passengers, then slowly fell back to the ground. They were giving rides to the crowd, and no other balloons were making ready to fill and rise for longer flights.

I wondered if the web advertising was way off the mark. Though it had promised “up to fifty” balloons, three was technically in that category, and wouldn’t be false advertising. I walked over to the berm and stood on it, scanning the cloud formations to the south. I gazed at the clouds and the ridges below them on the horizon for a minute, wishing there were more breaks for sunlight, which would help make a good long-distance landscape photo, then noticed the thin edge of something round rising behind the nearest hill.

Due to the light wind coming up from the south, the majority of the balloons had launched from the area of the wineries outside of Temecula, and were now drifting slowly toward Lake Skinner. Over the next two and a half hours, approximately twenty-five balloons rose above the hills to the south. A handful landed near the festival and in the nearby fields. The remainder finally descended behind the hills to the south.

(Note: Some of these photos will show the larger version when you click on them. Some will not. This appears to be a random effect. I've tried to correct it multiple times, but have been unsuccessful.)

The festival area.

Short rides were given in the festival area near Lake Skinner.

This balloon flew in from the south and landed near the parking area.

Looking up at the interior of the balloon.

Keeping the hot air hot.

Airships appearing over the nearest ridge to the south.

Coming in for a landing.

Cutting it close above the trees in a camping area.

Collapsing the balloon.

Jacaranda

It’s a small visual pleasure.

Every year around the end of Spring the Jacaranda is in bloom in Southern California. In my home city of Riverside, there are many trees – many more than you would expect to find on the edge of a desert – and for a few weeks the purple Jacaranda flowers provide a visual contrast with the lush greens of the tree-rich city.

Having been a resident for nearly four decades, I took my enjoyment of the purple blooming a bit for granted this year until a couple weeks ago when my daughter Megan mentioned that there are no Jacaranda trees in Santa Cruz. Megan was in Riverside for the weekend for her 10th year high school reunion. She said that she missed the trees and expected to see them in bloom at the end of spring.

I guessed that the climate is too cold for Jacaranda to grow well in Northern California. But I didn’t really know, so I did some quick research.

Jacaranda is subtropical and grown as ornamental trees and bushes in the warm parts of the world. It is native to Central and South America and the Caribbean. Though it blooms somewhat later in Riverside, displaying its purple-blue flowers in late May and early June, in many parts of the world it is considered a sign of the arrival of spring.

Darkness

The photographs in this post are night landscapes. Click on a photograph to view a larger version.
View: Old Chinatown, Riverside, California.

View: East. From March Air Museum.

View: East toward Riverside and Box Springs Mountain.

View: East. Shamel Ash branches in my front yard.

View: West toward Corona from Mount Rubidoux.

View: Jupiter, Venus and Luna. From my front yard.

View: West. Joshua Tree, California.

View: West toward Corona from Mount Rubidoux.

View: Venus. South from my yard.

View: Landing lights on March Air Force Base.

View: East toward Moreno Valley, California.

View: West. Joshua Tree National Monument.

View: East from March Air Museum.

View: Thumbnail moon from Riverside, California.

View: East. Mojave Desert.

View: East from my front yard.

View: West from the San Bernardino Mountains.

View: East from Orangecrest area of Riverside, California.

Daylight

The images in this post are of landscape photographs made in daylight. Click on a photograph to view a larger version.

This cordillera, this chain of mountains is a view of the the San Bernardino Mountains from an overlook near Rim of the World.

This photo and the following one were taken from the Ghost Rocks scenic viewpoint on Interstate 70 in western Utah. I was riding my motorcycle, an '06 Road Star from Southern California to Long Island. I didn't take the time to stop and make many photos on that trip, but the desert landscape in that area was so appealing that I had to make an exception.

This photo was made on one of my morning hikes on Mount Rubidoux in Riverside, California. This western view is toward the cities of Corona and Norco.

This is a view toward the north in Kansas. I was riding back home from New York on a secondary road and took a break at the intersection of this dirt road. I liked the way that the dirt road dissappeared at the horizon under the layer of clouds that echoed the flatness of the land.

This is a view to the east on Lone Pine Canyon Road. The road winds up Lone Pine Canyon from Cajon in the east, and ends in the back streets of the mountain town of Wrightwood.

This is a view to the east from a rest stop on I-80 in Nebraska. The clouds foreshadowed a rainstorm that I rode into a half hour later. The rainstorm lasted the better part of three days, long enough for me to begin thinking that I would have been better equipped for travel with a canoe.

A group of clouds overflying the San Bernardino Mountains. In the center of the photo is a shadowy hint of Mount San Jacinto, approximately 40 miles away.

I made this photo "from the saddle" while riding around the "back" side of Mount Rushmore in South Dakota. There was a slow, tight left turn at this point in the road. With automobiles rounding the curve in front and behind me, I raised the camera, pointed it in the direction I thought might be right and pressed the shutter while keeping my eyes on the road (and automobile) ahead.

Note that George Washington's profile can be seen in the center of the photo.

This is another view to the west toward Corona from Mount Rubidoux. That's the Santa Ana River which snakes its way down to Orange County, and eventually, the Pacific Ocean.

Mist rises from the water in the Santa Ana River. Again, from Mount Rubidoux.

Dawn. View east from Riverside toward Mount San Gorgonio in the San Bernardino Mountains.

Shoulders of multiple ridges in the San Bernardinos plunge into a canyon.

"God light" in reverse. Light streams upward from a cloud bank. View from my front yard.

This is the Amboy Crater near Amboy, California. This volcanic cone is surrounded by black lava flows and is a roadside attraction. The tan areas on the lava are windblown sand. The volcano was last active approximately 10 million years ago.

Wyoming. From a secondary road. I was riding south toward Colorado, away from a rainstorm that was supposed to inundate northern Wyoming and South Dakota for several days. I like the way it looked with the windmill and the red aggregate of the asphalt road, so I stopped to get the photograph.