I really like this panorama! Especially because it sat in 9 pieces for 25 years in my "someday I'll sort these" box, awaiting advancements in technology. But I have to add here that creating this panorama wasn't quite as easy as just selecting all the images in the file, and then dumping them into Image Composite Editor and getting the results. Here's what I mean....
There's a lot of artifacts - little spots, and little aging effects - in each one of these component images, and that all came though faithfully along with everything else in the finished scene. So I had to spend about four hours with the finished pano, in an editing program where I can use its tools to clean up the end result, so it doesn't look like it barely survived after the tornado struck.
And that, Dear Reader, is another reason I really like this picture - I worked on it for half the night before I included it here.
For the past few days, until yesterday, I was into (and out of) Facebook, because my long-lost cousins in Atlanta, Georgia - yes, that same 'Gone With The Wind' Atlanta - had been saying 'lots of your relatives on are on it, and you could meet them and get acquainted after all these years!' Yes, I could. But only if both they and I seemed interested, and interesting. I've been a 'loner' most of my life, certainly all of the past 34 years, and I have never had a vibrant and active social life among the literati and glitterati. I've had my own amusements,
like fast motorcycles, and downhill skiing, and exploring the back country. And what did the 'back country' look like? A lot like this:-
This is along the Elaho River, in what then was a Tree Farm License (38) operated by Interfor. This is located north and west of Squamish, B.C., and it is now Provincial Park. The picture looks north-northwest, and is about halfway
through the length of the Tree Farm. Please see the next->
This is overlooking what then was the upper end of operations of Interfor's logging activity. The end of the road lies in the distant parts of this picture,
taken from about mile 58 or 59. The road ended in a big clearcut behind that little round hump of hill lower right, next to the first big tree in the foreground.
Along those gravel 'sandbars' lower left foreground, a pair of swans nested every year. In the center lower area, that bare gravel shore is very close to the junction of the Elaho River (shown lower left) and Clendinning Creek, which enters this valley from its own, mid-center-left. It flows for miles, from its own Mount Clendinning's glacier and Lake of the same name. Since the logging operations ended, this area has become a Provincial Park and outdoor recreation area, popular among kayakers and white-water rafters. But when I took these pictures, it was over 20 years ago, and still an active logging area. It was the logging company that built these roads.
Closer to town, at about Mile 33 on the logging road, is "The Witches Castle",
real name alternatively shown as Mount Cayley or Mount Pyroclastic. It's an old volcano, where they actually logged inside its crater, and this is looking down into that from the southwestern rim, where the logging road entered, after a very steep climb up the outside of it. I camped in here for three days once.
I call it "The Witches Castle" because one of the higher spires atop that highest peak, upper-center-leftish, looks very much like a witch in a hooded full-length cape, with a diagonal sash and hemline bands of another color of rock. I couldn't get a close-up of it, because these were taken on a Fuji throwaway, so I can't show you the 'Witch' but she's definitely there, looking down into the pit.
This was taken just to the right of the one immediately above here, and shows the fractured rock of the volcano rim where the logging road entered it. Striking that rock wall with a prospector's hammer loosened about three shovelfuls of the rock, so it isn't all that stable. Further along the road, down inside, it is almost hanging directly overhead. This was a fascinating place to camp.
No comments:
Post a Comment