Eclipse at White Sands / Alamogordo, NM

Summer is coming to southern New Mexico.  It was 94­° at 5:30 P.M. when I headed to the desert to for the annular solar eclipse late this afternoon.  I can only imagine what August will be like.

After lathering on the sun screen and stuffing a couple of 94° bottles of water in my backpack, I trudged off across the dunes to find a good place for a shot.  I staked out a place that I felt would have a good foreground to go with the eclipse and waited.......for 1½ hours.  Around 7:30, it began to show itself.

 

I really needed a little more equipment, a lot more skill and about 100 miles more distance to the north to have gotten this right but here are my efforts on the show this afternoon.  The Alamogordo version was only about a 90% eclipse so the moon, so from my vantage point, it did not go completely through the center of the sun.

 

And what self respecting desert would be without a camel to celebrate the event?

The Desert

Leaving the San Francisco east bay, I landed in El Paso, Texas and headed north.   As I drove north into the New Mexico desert, I could hear strains of Eagles music drifting into my thoughts.

It's been several years since I'd been in the area and looked forward to working in Alamogordo, New Mexico.  The springtime still left some greenery in the plants and made you wonder how far you could wander out there in the desert before you stepped on a rattlesnake as big as your leg.

One particular place I was excited about was visiting White Sands National Monument.  Having walked the dunes back in 2004, I knew what to expect, so naturally my first Saturday gave me the opportunity.

Late in the afternoon, I took part in a "Sunset Stroll" hosted by a park ranger who pointed out some of the curiosities of the sands.

It's not the typical quartz beach sand but instead, it's gypsum and the same thing you find in drywall inside your home.  When it's wet, it crystallizes and when winds reach 16 miles an hour, the flakes move along breaking into smaller flakes and collects in the Tularosa Basin.  White Sands is the largest collection of this kind of sand in the world and encompasses 575 square miles of it.

Hopefully, I'll be able to get some very spectacular shots out there if I'm assigned here long enough.
 

 

Nice sunsets too.

The Kingdom of Cornflakes

(click pictures to enlarge)
Since I was a kid, I've always seen names like Battle Creek, Michigan on cereal boxes and so the image of Michigan being the corflake kingdom of the world was pretty much set in my mind, just like Detroit makes you think of the auto industry.

Since leaving Ada, Michigan back in February, I had not given much thought about ever coming back up here. Fortunately, this time, I arrived in the fall instead of mid-blizzard like the last time.

Ray, the other guy I'm working with, and I took a drive over on the shores of Lake Michigan to the village of Saugatuck Saturday. Really a nice day driving through the colors of red, yellow and orange. He's from west Florida so we both agreed it was really nice seeing real fall colors. Usually, at home, the leaves go from green to the ground before much change.

Worth noting, is the fact that Lake Michigan is like being near the ocean when the wind whips up the waves and somehow your mind keeps telling you it's the Pacific. It even includes sand dunes much like you'd find in places like the Oregon coast.

Looks like I'll be here past Thanksgiving so I started scrambling today for some tickets home. Usually I don't get them this early but knowing what it's been like in the past, I thought it best that I put my name in the hat already.

So, I'll be hanging out in the cornflake kingdom for a while when I get back.