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Thursday, 23 June 2022

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Great Keuka Lake photo.

Nice photo, Mike. I like "big sky" landscapes. Cool bumper sticker (cue-ka?).

Our large biennial family gathering will be on Cayuga lake this summer, rather than Keuka, which is totally sold out. I'll file a trip report afterwards, to contrast and compare.

This is the bad side of a rare environmental success story, the reforestation of the rural Northeast. Perhaps someday you'll be in a similar position to us in the Rocky Mountain states, surrounded by too many trees in continuous tightly packed forests. When the weather dries up and a fire breaks out, it burns wherever the wind takes it, with few roads or firebreaks to mount a defense.

So who regulates your lakeshore and overlooks? Is there a state park or forest involved? If neither, maybe you could speak up and get something done locally. Or not. Likely it's nobody's responsibility, and everyone's waiting for someone else to do it. And you can't underestimate most people's ability to ignore real life, with all these gorgeous phone and TV and EVF screens everywhere...

It’s overgrown trees and shrubs that prompt people to do stupid things. I saw a guy in a National Park, climb over a guardrail to get a clean shot of a beautiful canyon. He was standing on the edge of the precipice, took a photo and luckily, turned around and got back to safety. I used my short telephoto lens to get in between the trees. Just watching him made me nervous. As I am sure that he was not the only person to do that, I think that the National Park Service would do well to keep some trees trimmed rather than having to rescue people (or retrieve bodies).

Mike worte, "Supposedly there's one tiny section of primeval forest left in America, and its location is a closely guarded secret ... "

The secret's out.

The lush forests in the Quinault, Queets, Hoh, and Bogachiel valleys are some of the most spectacular examples of primeval temperate rain forest in the lower 48 states. These rain forests once stretched from southern Oregon to southeast Alaska, but little remains outside of protected areas.
...
The west-facing Quinault, Queets, Hoh and Bogachiel river valleys all host rain forest. Trails and access roads offer visitors a way to explore of this verdant ecosystem.

https://bit.ly/3OEDUQn
National Park Service

Back in the mid 1970s I was a student at RIT. Almost every weekend I used to drive the roads north and south on both sides of the Finger Lakes. When I came across a stream, I'd park my VW Beetle on the side of the road and hike up the stream. More than often the gentle stream passing under the road turned into a stream that eroded out a gorge over the past thousands of years. In the early winter and spring, falling through the iced over streams was a common happening. Thank God for high L L Bean's leather waterproof boots and multiple pairs of wool socks. Went back up to RIT in the 1990s to lecture. Spent one day trying to revisit those gorges... Alas, I wasn't able to find one of them.

By the 1790s, New England was exporting 36 million feet of pine boards and 300 ship masts annually, with over 75 percent coming from Massachusetts (which included Maine) and another 20 percent coming from New Hampshire.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/History_of_the_lumber_industry_in_the_United_States

Trees and ice were biggies back in the old good old days.

There are so many planning decisions photographers should be consulted on, because if it looks good, it's good. Great views are psychologically important.

"I saw an article once that gave examples of all the features that photographers think are "natural" that are actually the remains of manmade features in the land."

Thanks Mike, very interesting! Can you link us to that article?

[No, sorry. I do recall one of the pictures, but that's about all. --Mike]

This one's no secret. I've been there.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Joyce_Kilmer_Memorial_Forest

Joyce Kilmer Memorial Forest is an approximately 3,800-acre tract of publicly owned virgin forest in Graham County, North Carolina, named in memory of poet Joyce Kilmer (1886–1918), best known for his poem "Trees". One of the largest contiguous tracts of old growth forest in the Eastern United States, the area is administered by the U. S. Forest Service.

Scientists say that ‘nature,’ untouched by humans, is now almost entirely gone

There's basically no landscape on earth that hasn't been altered by humans scientists say.

https://wapo.st/3ngtHhm
Washington Post

While searching the 'net for more on natural vs. not-natural nature I found this ...

Photography in the Age of Falsification

The wildlife photography we see in films, books, and periodicals is often stunning in its design, import, and aesthetics. It may also be fake, enhanced, or manufactured by emerging digital technologies that have transformed—some say contaminated—the photography landscape.

https://www.theatlantic.com/magazine/archive/1998/05/photography-in-the-age-of-falsification/377107/

It's worth looking at if only to see the word prestidigitation used in a sentence.

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