Busy week pursuing good things
Recap of this week's activities - mostly
featuring me as citizen activist and ghost writer. Lots of things coming up and
I'm gearing myself for the Fall season here - lots of dark days and lots of
anticipated moisture. At the tail end are more catch-up images form the North
American reunion trip. Also, if you haven't been to the mutlimedia site, you
might check it out periodically <http://homepage.mac.com/credmond/multimedia.html>
as I've been and will continue to upload some fairly hefty products. Apple
recently upgraded all of us and I've got a gigabyte of online storage available
now. That means that some of my more ambitious products (such as VR scenes and
better-quality movies) now will fit. The downside is some of these things are
in the dozen-to-score megabyte category and practically demand broadband or
almost inordinate patience if you don't have broadband. I've uploaded a huge
file, 40 megabytes, which is a 12-VR embedded scene - which means you can jump
around inside of the embedded 12 VRs - basically taking a tour around the
Elliott Bay area of Seattle - home of some of the best view points in town.
Yes, it takes a while to load, but check it out if you have broadband, use this
link or the multimedia link above - Seattle Scene.
I've been running around town a lot lately,
almost feel like I've got a day-job again. Monday was prep work for the Bike
Charette I've volunteered for. A charette describes a small group of
individuals working in-near-real time to resolve an issue or advance a concept.
It comes from an old French practice where the sous-architects of the cathedrals
were expected to get instructions from the main architect and work on the
drawings in realtime as they pushed their carts toward the construction site. A
charette is a small cart. Anyway, we'd been working in my little subgroup (the
southwest Seattle sector - the city had been broken into six areas by quadrant
(sextrant?) roughly corresponding to the major neighborhood areas) to finalize
our recommendations and get our images into the document and putting the
finishing touches on our section.
The meeting held on Tuesday to present these recommendations was superb. There were three city councilmembers there, they are the council members who constitute the transportation committee. As it turns out it includes Richard Conlin, the councilmember who started this, Tom Rasmussen, the at-large (they're all at-large) councilmember who actually comes from West Seattle, and Jean Godden. Rasmussen and Godden are first-term councilmembers. The original charette meeting had included upwards of sixty volunteers from all six neighborhood areas as well as significant staffing from the Seattle Department of Transportation, bike unit included, and members of the city planning office, and nearly the entire board of directors for the city's Bicycle Alliance - an uber-group representing a lot of bicycle clubs, businesses, interested hangers-on, et al. This presentation meeting consisted of the three council members, the city attorney - Tom Carr (also from West Seattle), and the top officials of the Bicycle Alliance, and only about two dozen volunteers.
I can't tell you how much different this place is than the District. I had many opportunities, and took them, to talk individually and directly to the council members about bicycling, about the Monorail (the same committee is overseeing that process as well). It was somewhat bizarre and rewarding at the same time to have all three council members recognize me and two of them actually know my name. How illustrative of the differences between this city council and the DC city council, where staff persons routinely kept us citizens on hold or forwarded our concerns to bureaucrats in the myriad city departments - nearly always to no avail.
Anyway, the groups' presentations ran from 5:00 pm through 9:00 pm, with everyone, save one council member who had a previous engagement, staying and participating. The next step is a redaction of all six different documents into a unified document with the collected recommendations and presentations in the same format. That document will then be presented to the council as a whole and used by the city's Department of Transportation as a baseline document.
We recommended a lot of appropriate things including bike lanes on certain through streets and the improvement of maintenance on existing lanes. Overall, though, there was a sense that the city needs to raise the level of cycling awareness one or two notches. One individual from the northwest sector group suggested a set of bike "routes" and "loops" identified by color and (in this case gem) name. That idea struck an amazingly broad chord in everyone and I volunteered to help get that effort off the ground. If completed, there would be color-name identified bike routes and paths throughout the city which would provide local and long-distance point-to-point connections and which would intersect with shorter loop trails. The naming scheme was taken from the city's nickname of "Emerald" city and are named after gemstones. One point-to-point trail which I actually use a lot and which runs about 20 miles end-to-end would be called the "Emerald" trail and connects the northern end, especially the coastline, of Ballard with downtown and the southern end, along the coastline, of West Seattle. It also, unsurprisingly, mirrors the naming scheme of the Monorail line which would follow the same general path - the Green Line. We also stressed, much to Council's satisfaction, the intermodal nature of bicycles and how much the trails and loops needed to be part of and integrated with the Monorail and Light Rail lines.
Obviously that activity will continue as will my participation. On other fronts, I was a participant in a press conference held by the Friends of Monorail downtown. This was in response to the corporate- and big-money-backed end run to derail the Monorail - the Initiative-83 folks, also known as the Monorail Recall group - even though it wouldn't technically "recall" the Monorail, merely make it illegal to use city right of way.
The press conference was well attended, all three local network affiliates (I don't really consider Fox a network as much as a bullypit for the right wing and they weren't there as they probably support the I-83 folks anyway). Three of the four papers (Times, P-I, Weekly) were there. The absence of The Stranger was acceptible since they are super-pro Monorail and their most recent issue was a complete debunking, six articles, of the I-83 activities.
I had a speaking part and gave what I thought were compelling reasons why rapid transit is needed. Basically I reiterated my experience living in DC first without the subway and then with the subway. In the first two years of living in our old DC house I bike commuted. That took me nearly an hour down and an hour back owing to all the traffic and the fact that I couldn't use the trails since they led away from where I worked. After losing two bikes through theft in those two years, I ultimately decided to give the 30 bus (Wisconsin-Pennsylvania Avenue line) a go and spent the next two years bus commuting. That took at least an hour going and sometimes 90 minutes coming. Mind you, I lived six miles as-the-crow-flies from where I worked. DC is just THAT congested. When the Red Line opened two stations, each slightly more than half-a-mile away, near my house, I jumped on that train every day for the next 19 years. It was a 20-minute morning commute and maybe a 25-minute afternoon commute. In those 19 years, I reclaimed a total of 198 days (DAYS, 198 times 24 hours). That was how rapid public transit affected my life in the District and I wanted the folks here to know that it's not just a "convenience," it can profoundly improve one's personal existance. There were five other "stories" from big business owners, non-profit group representatives, small business owners and other individual tax-payers which were presented by individuals to the media. We had a great turnout, Adam came downtown with me and was in the "audience" behind the presenters.
The TV's presented what amounted to both sides of the story since the I-83 folks had unveiled some new television ads on the same day. The print papers have already come out in favor of defeating the initiative and building the Monorail. I think one of the important aspects of the press conference was a showing to the media themselves of the level of support for this project and the range of that support. The anti-monorail group, though they did gather the required 17,000 signatures to get on the ballot, have yet to actually show a wide-spread citizen support for the recall. Mostly, it's a big-business - Not In My (Corporate) Backyard - kind of thing.
I've also been penning letters to the editor and recently had one published in the West Seattle Herald. I've been doing this for Friends of the Monorail - penning generic letters from a variety of perspectives, kids, business owners, ordinary tax-paying citizens, the elderly, and so on. Some of those letters have been wending their way with other people's signatures on them to the same set of media. It turns out, as with so much else about life, that a lot of people will "say" they'll do something but either don't have the time or the inclination to actually do it. By ghost-writing these letters-to-the-editor, I and others have tried to make their commitment a bit easier for them to carry out. Plus, it's a breeze for me having written so much along the same lines for NASA over the past several decades. Position papers, we called them.
All of these activities are having a real positive affect on me as a citizen of this city. I actually feel like I'm positively contributing to the present and future welfare of my fellow citizens and helping to build a better city. That's what so frustrated me about being an activist citizen in the District - for every positive action I put forth there were two or more negative counter-actions from either council or the Congressional oversight committee for the District. Folks who live in the District try their darnedest to make it a better place but are constantly being second-guessed and over-ridden by the conservatives who constitute most of the oversight committee. It's a shame, but I think the reality of the District is it will never be a city like the rest of the cities in America simply because the will of the local citizens will never be allowed to be accomplished. Call it the District's Achilles' Heel or - perhaps more to the point - the District's rendition of the Myth of Sisyphus.
It looks like our contractor house party will finally occur. It's taken a while but looks like Saturday, October 23, will be a good day for everyone. We've invited what will amount to about 25 or so folks (spouses/partners and kids included) and will prepare a salmon feast with a couple of salads, bread, wine, beer, coffee and tea and juices, and a bunch of chocolate-crust key lime pies for the finale. Hopefully the weather will be cooperative and everyone will get a chance to celebrate the awesome accomplishment they've been part of. I am still receiving compliments and am now known in a somewhat wider neighborhood area as the "guy" who lives in the castle. I guess it could be seen as a castle with the tower as a turret. Also, everyone will hopefully get a chance to see the horizon-to-horizon views we have. We've planned this for afternoon to include the sunset as part of the day. It'll be good to see these folks on a social basis since for four months they were pretty much an integral element of our daily lives. They're all really good people and we're the beneficiaries of their skills and commitment.
I've posted more of the "catch-up" images from the North American reunion trip below. Eventually, I'll be caught up and get on with my Seattle explorations. It's getting to be "dark" time around here again. Sun rises after 7:30 am and is setting earlier and earlier - now about 6:20 pm and soon much earlier. That's cool, though, as I had a great time last Fall traipsing around the city in the mist with everyone else indoors. This year I'll continue that thread and benefit from my knowledge of the streets, buses, and other elements which I've discovered in the past year. I now feel like I could get anywhere and back in a relatively short time using the bus system and so will begin to fill in the smaller squares on my exploration-of-Seattle map.
Chas
Before we get to the NA trip pictures, though, here's some local shots captured this week.
This is one of my neighbors. He likes these black walnut
fruits, which he gnaws the outer skin off of and then spends
his time sharpening his teeth on the walnut inside - which
is what he's gnawing on here. I opened the window,
spoke to him, causing him to give me a glance, and then
he returned to his job of getting the nutmeat. The squirrels
actually seem to relish these nuts, good for them this is
a truly prolific black walnut which has produced hundreds
of these.
The Cascades and Mt. Rainier are backlit by the rising sun in this shot taken at about 7:20 am on Monday. The sun
will eventually work its way down toward Rainier later in the Fall (actually, the Earth's tilt will make it happen, why
do we insist on saying it's the Sun which moves when it's actually us - the Earthlings?)
A bit hazy, but every once in a while these cumulus clouds form right over the summit of Mt. Rainier and
everywhere else the sky is totally clear. This was taken late in the afternoon with the long rays of the Sun
casting pink light on Rainier's western front.
A different day with the late sun illuminating the Sound and a tanker captured moving up the Sound from Tacoma.
This stretch of the Sound is the main passage for ship traffic down to the Port of Tacoma, which is nearly as busy as
the Port of Seattle. Just so you're sure, it's not a picture of two tankers - the bottom image is an enlargement of the
top image to better show the tanker. Still have only 2X optical zoom so can't get any closer with my present Canon.
Now, photos from the North American trip, this time featuring the Great Lakes and other lakes west of Superior.
Panorama of the main street on Mackinac Island. This is right in front of the visitor center (pavilion in right area of image). The town
is geared toward the thousands of visitors who trek here daily taking one of three ferry lines to make the short hop from either
St. Ignace on the northern side of the Mackinac Straits or Mackinaw City on the south side.
At the other end of the main street, about four blocks from the visitor center. This street and an adjacent, parallel, street run along the
southwest coast of the island for about a third of the island's coastline. The waterfront in this area is filled with marinas and ferry
docks. The three ferry lines each run trips about every 15 minutes in peak season and every hour in off-season, which starts in
October and runs through May.
Beneath the fort on the south end of the island. This fort was abandonned at the turn of the century and the island turned
over to the State of Michigan. The state parks department now operates the fort, much like Colonial Williamsburg, and has
daily recreations of fort life. The fort is a fee area so I didn't get inside on this trip, mostly because we had about half-a-day
here before we needed to move further north and the fort activities themselves take about half-a-day to appreciate. The
waters of Lake Huron are visible on the right and the waters of Lake Michigan are visible on the left. The island is just east
of the Straits which separate Lakes Michigan and Huron.
Panorama along the beach trail which follows the Lake Huron side around the island and back to the Lake Michigan side.
It's a multi-use trail for walkers, hikers, cyclists and folks with kid carriages. It comes right up to the sandy beach in most
stretches and weaves in and out of the lakeside marshes and reeds which grow wild here. The island is both a historic
preserve, a working town (to support the tourist trades and the fort activities) and a nature preserve. The State of Michigan
has done a really excellent job of integrating these activities and preserving the turn-of-the-century look and feel of
Mackinac Island. It's one of the state's major parks facilities and they treat it like it is. Plus, it's a real economic engine
for the northern neck of Michigan's hand (yeah, bad set of mixed metaphors, I know...).
This is along the other side of the trail, facing Lake Michigan. Hardly visible but in the center of the water area is the Mackinac Straits
bridge, one of the world's longest and prettiest suspension bridges. On this stretch, the beach trail goes over these boardwalk
planks to protect the delicate marshlands at the water's edge. On the right are the grounds for the island's one-building, all-grades
schoolhouse. There are about a thousand people who permanently live here and the island has all the facilities for
a village of that size including this school, a firehouse, a municipal facility, and water and sewage facilities (they pipe the sewage
back to the mainland for treatment). See below for a better view of the bridge taken from the same VR-panorama.
Mackinac Straits suspension bridge. It opened first to traffic in November 1957. The suspended portion is 8,614 feet long and the
total bridge length is 26,372 feet (five miles give or take). Presently it's the third-longest suspension (suspended portion) bridge
in the world. Second place goes to the Great Belt Bridge, Halsskov-Sprogoe, Denmark, with 8,921 feet of suspended area, and
first place goes to the Akashi Kaikyo Bridge, Japan, with 12,826 feet of suspended area. Interstate-75 crosses this bridge and
US Highways 31 and 23 quit at the south abutment and US Highway 2 quits at the north abutment. On the left is the northern
end of Michigan's hand and on the right is the southern, central, tip of Michigan's Upper Peninsula. This is looking west. St. Ignace
is the town on the right at the abutment end and is a fishing village and tourist town and Mackinaw City is on the left underneath
the southern abutment and is a tourist and historic town with a beachfront area on both lakes.
Wide angle view of the beach facing Lake Huron with the two lighthouses which identify the Mackinac Straits passage visible on
the left and right of this ancillary island just off the coast of Mackinac Island. That's a ship at the end of a pier on the right.
Much further north and west of Mackinac Island, this is an overlook on the Lake Superior northern rim highway west of Sault St. Marie.
Lake Superior is on either side and the highway can be seen wending around the hill in the left-center area of the image. Adam and
I found wild blueberries growing all around the rocks in the middle of this image and spent some twenty minutes picking and eating
them. They're the smaller, sharper-tasting, Canadian wild blueberries and are probably the best blueberry I've ever eaten.
Crossing one of the many lakes between St. Francis and the area north of the Minnesota-Ontario-Manitoba border. This is glaciated
land and is part of the Canadian Shield and is just gorgeous. Just another of the hundreds of different scenes which the Great Lakes
area provides.
Nestor Falls is on the right. This was yet another of the hundreds of little lakes which dot the land west of Lake Superior and on the
border between Minnesota, Ontario and Manitoba. The two dots in the water on the left are two fisherboats with two fishermen
each in them. This is simply outstanding backpack and hiking country - in fact any area in the northern Great Lakes area is equally
wonderful - Lake Huron, Lake Michigan (the upper stretches, the lower stretches are too urbanized), and Lake Superior and
the hundreds - perhaps thousands - of little lakes which dot the land around these Great Lakes throughout Western Ontario,
Southern Manitoba and Northern Minnesota.
Sunglint off one of the lakes which lie between western Lake Superior and Winnipeg in Eastern Manitoba. This lake, along with most
of the ones we encountered, had sections of shoreline dedicated to camping and fishing and other sections where there were
single family lake houses.
Next photos will be of Winnipeg, followed by Saskatoon, and then Edmonton, and finally the Rocky Mountains.
Have a great weekend.
The meeting held on Tuesday to present these recommendations was superb. There were three city councilmembers there, they are the council members who constitute the transportation committee. As it turns out it includes Richard Conlin, the councilmember who started this, Tom Rasmussen, the at-large (they're all at-large) councilmember who actually comes from West Seattle, and Jean Godden. Rasmussen and Godden are first-term councilmembers. The original charette meeting had included upwards of sixty volunteers from all six neighborhood areas as well as significant staffing from the Seattle Department of Transportation, bike unit included, and members of the city planning office, and nearly the entire board of directors for the city's Bicycle Alliance - an uber-group representing a lot of bicycle clubs, businesses, interested hangers-on, et al. This presentation meeting consisted of the three council members, the city attorney - Tom Carr (also from West Seattle), and the top officials of the Bicycle Alliance, and only about two dozen volunteers.
I can't tell you how much different this place is than the District. I had many opportunities, and took them, to talk individually and directly to the council members about bicycling, about the Monorail (the same committee is overseeing that process as well). It was somewhat bizarre and rewarding at the same time to have all three council members recognize me and two of them actually know my name. How illustrative of the differences between this city council and the DC city council, where staff persons routinely kept us citizens on hold or forwarded our concerns to bureaucrats in the myriad city departments - nearly always to no avail.
Anyway, the groups' presentations ran from 5:00 pm through 9:00 pm, with everyone, save one council member who had a previous engagement, staying and participating. The next step is a redaction of all six different documents into a unified document with the collected recommendations and presentations in the same format. That document will then be presented to the council as a whole and used by the city's Department of Transportation as a baseline document.
We recommended a lot of appropriate things including bike lanes on certain through streets and the improvement of maintenance on existing lanes. Overall, though, there was a sense that the city needs to raise the level of cycling awareness one or two notches. One individual from the northwest sector group suggested a set of bike "routes" and "loops" identified by color and (in this case gem) name. That idea struck an amazingly broad chord in everyone and I volunteered to help get that effort off the ground. If completed, there would be color-name identified bike routes and paths throughout the city which would provide local and long-distance point-to-point connections and which would intersect with shorter loop trails. The naming scheme was taken from the city's nickname of "Emerald" city and are named after gemstones. One point-to-point trail which I actually use a lot and which runs about 20 miles end-to-end would be called the "Emerald" trail and connects the northern end, especially the coastline, of Ballard with downtown and the southern end, along the coastline, of West Seattle. It also, unsurprisingly, mirrors the naming scheme of the Monorail line which would follow the same general path - the Green Line. We also stressed, much to Council's satisfaction, the intermodal nature of bicycles and how much the trails and loops needed to be part of and integrated with the Monorail and Light Rail lines.
Obviously that activity will continue as will my participation. On other fronts, I was a participant in a press conference held by the Friends of Monorail downtown. This was in response to the corporate- and big-money-backed end run to derail the Monorail - the Initiative-83 folks, also known as the Monorail Recall group - even though it wouldn't technically "recall" the Monorail, merely make it illegal to use city right of way.
The press conference was well attended, all three local network affiliates (I don't really consider Fox a network as much as a bullypit for the right wing and they weren't there as they probably support the I-83 folks anyway). Three of the four papers (Times, P-I, Weekly) were there. The absence of The Stranger was acceptible since they are super-pro Monorail and their most recent issue was a complete debunking, six articles, of the I-83 activities.
I had a speaking part and gave what I thought were compelling reasons why rapid transit is needed. Basically I reiterated my experience living in DC first without the subway and then with the subway. In the first two years of living in our old DC house I bike commuted. That took me nearly an hour down and an hour back owing to all the traffic and the fact that I couldn't use the trails since they led away from where I worked. After losing two bikes through theft in those two years, I ultimately decided to give the 30 bus (Wisconsin-Pennsylvania Avenue line) a go and spent the next two years bus commuting. That took at least an hour going and sometimes 90 minutes coming. Mind you, I lived six miles as-the-crow-flies from where I worked. DC is just THAT congested. When the Red Line opened two stations, each slightly more than half-a-mile away, near my house, I jumped on that train every day for the next 19 years. It was a 20-minute morning commute and maybe a 25-minute afternoon commute. In those 19 years, I reclaimed a total of 198 days (DAYS, 198 times 24 hours). That was how rapid public transit affected my life in the District and I wanted the folks here to know that it's not just a "convenience," it can profoundly improve one's personal existance. There were five other "stories" from big business owners, non-profit group representatives, small business owners and other individual tax-payers which were presented by individuals to the media. We had a great turnout, Adam came downtown with me and was in the "audience" behind the presenters.
The TV's presented what amounted to both sides of the story since the I-83 folks had unveiled some new television ads on the same day. The print papers have already come out in favor of defeating the initiative and building the Monorail. I think one of the important aspects of the press conference was a showing to the media themselves of the level of support for this project and the range of that support. The anti-monorail group, though they did gather the required 17,000 signatures to get on the ballot, have yet to actually show a wide-spread citizen support for the recall. Mostly, it's a big-business - Not In My (Corporate) Backyard - kind of thing.
I've also been penning letters to the editor and recently had one published in the West Seattle Herald. I've been doing this for Friends of the Monorail - penning generic letters from a variety of perspectives, kids, business owners, ordinary tax-paying citizens, the elderly, and so on. Some of those letters have been wending their way with other people's signatures on them to the same set of media. It turns out, as with so much else about life, that a lot of people will "say" they'll do something but either don't have the time or the inclination to actually do it. By ghost-writing these letters-to-the-editor, I and others have tried to make their commitment a bit easier for them to carry out. Plus, it's a breeze for me having written so much along the same lines for NASA over the past several decades. Position papers, we called them.
All of these activities are having a real positive affect on me as a citizen of this city. I actually feel like I'm positively contributing to the present and future welfare of my fellow citizens and helping to build a better city. That's what so frustrated me about being an activist citizen in the District - for every positive action I put forth there were two or more negative counter-actions from either council or the Congressional oversight committee for the District. Folks who live in the District try their darnedest to make it a better place but are constantly being second-guessed and over-ridden by the conservatives who constitute most of the oversight committee. It's a shame, but I think the reality of the District is it will never be a city like the rest of the cities in America simply because the will of the local citizens will never be allowed to be accomplished. Call it the District's Achilles' Heel or - perhaps more to the point - the District's rendition of the Myth of Sisyphus.
It looks like our contractor house party will finally occur. It's taken a while but looks like Saturday, October 23, will be a good day for everyone. We've invited what will amount to about 25 or so folks (spouses/partners and kids included) and will prepare a salmon feast with a couple of salads, bread, wine, beer, coffee and tea and juices, and a bunch of chocolate-crust key lime pies for the finale. Hopefully the weather will be cooperative and everyone will get a chance to celebrate the awesome accomplishment they've been part of. I am still receiving compliments and am now known in a somewhat wider neighborhood area as the "guy" who lives in the castle. I guess it could be seen as a castle with the tower as a turret. Also, everyone will hopefully get a chance to see the horizon-to-horizon views we have. We've planned this for afternoon to include the sunset as part of the day. It'll be good to see these folks on a social basis since for four months they were pretty much an integral element of our daily lives. They're all really good people and we're the beneficiaries of their skills and commitment.
I've posted more of the "catch-up" images from the North American reunion trip below. Eventually, I'll be caught up and get on with my Seattle explorations. It's getting to be "dark" time around here again. Sun rises after 7:30 am and is setting earlier and earlier - now about 6:20 pm and soon much earlier. That's cool, though, as I had a great time last Fall traipsing around the city in the mist with everyone else indoors. This year I'll continue that thread and benefit from my knowledge of the streets, buses, and other elements which I've discovered in the past year. I now feel like I could get anywhere and back in a relatively short time using the bus system and so will begin to fill in the smaller squares on my exploration-of-Seattle map.
Chas
Before we get to the NA trip pictures, though, here's some local shots captured this week.
This is one of my neighbors. He likes these black walnut
fruits, which he gnaws the outer skin off of and then spends
his time sharpening his teeth on the walnut inside - which
is what he's gnawing on here. I opened the window,
spoke to him, causing him to give me a glance, and then
he returned to his job of getting the nutmeat. The squirrels
actually seem to relish these nuts, good for them this is
a truly prolific black walnut which has produced hundreds
of these.
The Cascades and Mt. Rainier are backlit by the rising sun in this shot taken at about 7:20 am on Monday. The sun
will eventually work its way down toward Rainier later in the Fall (actually, the Earth's tilt will make it happen, why
do we insist on saying it's the Sun which moves when it's actually us - the Earthlings?)
A bit hazy, but every once in a while these cumulus clouds form right over the summit of Mt. Rainier and
everywhere else the sky is totally clear. This was taken late in the afternoon with the long rays of the Sun
casting pink light on Rainier's western front.
A different day with the late sun illuminating the Sound and a tanker captured moving up the Sound from Tacoma.
This stretch of the Sound is the main passage for ship traffic down to the Port of Tacoma, which is nearly as busy as
the Port of Seattle. Just so you're sure, it's not a picture of two tankers - the bottom image is an enlargement of the
top image to better show the tanker. Still have only 2X optical zoom so can't get any closer with my present Canon.
Now, photos from the North American trip, this time featuring the Great Lakes and other lakes west of Superior.
Panorama of the main street on Mackinac Island. This is right in front of the visitor center (pavilion in right area of image). The town
is geared toward the thousands of visitors who trek here daily taking one of three ferry lines to make the short hop from either
St. Ignace on the northern side of the Mackinac Straits or Mackinaw City on the south side.
At the other end of the main street, about four blocks from the visitor center. This street and an adjacent, parallel, street run along the
southwest coast of the island for about a third of the island's coastline. The waterfront in this area is filled with marinas and ferry
docks. The three ferry lines each run trips about every 15 minutes in peak season and every hour in off-season, which starts in
October and runs through May.
Beneath the fort on the south end of the island. This fort was abandonned at the turn of the century and the island turned
over to the State of Michigan. The state parks department now operates the fort, much like Colonial Williamsburg, and has
daily recreations of fort life. The fort is a fee area so I didn't get inside on this trip, mostly because we had about half-a-day
here before we needed to move further north and the fort activities themselves take about half-a-day to appreciate. The
waters of Lake Huron are visible on the right and the waters of Lake Michigan are visible on the left. The island is just east
of the Straits which separate Lakes Michigan and Huron.
Panorama along the beach trail which follows the Lake Huron side around the island and back to the Lake Michigan side.
It's a multi-use trail for walkers, hikers, cyclists and folks with kid carriages. It comes right up to the sandy beach in most
stretches and weaves in and out of the lakeside marshes and reeds which grow wild here. The island is both a historic
preserve, a working town (to support the tourist trades and the fort activities) and a nature preserve. The State of Michigan
has done a really excellent job of integrating these activities and preserving the turn-of-the-century look and feel of
Mackinac Island. It's one of the state's major parks facilities and they treat it like it is. Plus, it's a real economic engine
for the northern neck of Michigan's hand (yeah, bad set of mixed metaphors, I know...).
This is along the other side of the trail, facing Lake Michigan. Hardly visible but in the center of the water area is the Mackinac Straits
bridge, one of the world's longest and prettiest suspension bridges. On this stretch, the beach trail goes over these boardwalk
planks to protect the delicate marshlands at the water's edge. On the right are the grounds for the island's one-building, all-grades
schoolhouse. There are about a thousand people who permanently live here and the island has all the facilities for
a village of that size including this school, a firehouse, a municipal facility, and water and sewage facilities (they pipe the sewage
back to the mainland for treatment). See below for a better view of the bridge taken from the same VR-panorama.
Mackinac Straits suspension bridge. It opened first to traffic in November 1957. The suspended portion is 8,614 feet long and the
total bridge length is 26,372 feet (five miles give or take). Presently it's the third-longest suspension (suspended portion) bridge
in the world. Second place goes to the Great Belt Bridge, Halsskov-Sprogoe, Denmark, with 8,921 feet of suspended area, and
first place goes to the Akashi Kaikyo Bridge, Japan, with 12,826 feet of suspended area. Interstate-75 crosses this bridge and
US Highways 31 and 23 quit at the south abutment and US Highway 2 quits at the north abutment. On the left is the northern
end of Michigan's hand and on the right is the southern, central, tip of Michigan's Upper Peninsula. This is looking west. St. Ignace
is the town on the right at the abutment end and is a fishing village and tourist town and Mackinaw City is on the left underneath
the southern abutment and is a tourist and historic town with a beachfront area on both lakes.
Wide angle view of the beach facing Lake Huron with the two lighthouses which identify the Mackinac Straits passage visible on
the left and right of this ancillary island just off the coast of Mackinac Island. That's a ship at the end of a pier on the right.
Much further north and west of Mackinac Island, this is an overlook on the Lake Superior northern rim highway west of Sault St. Marie.
Lake Superior is on either side and the highway can be seen wending around the hill in the left-center area of the image. Adam and
I found wild blueberries growing all around the rocks in the middle of this image and spent some twenty minutes picking and eating
them. They're the smaller, sharper-tasting, Canadian wild blueberries and are probably the best blueberry I've ever eaten.
Crossing one of the many lakes between St. Francis and the area north of the Minnesota-Ontario-Manitoba border. This is glaciated
land and is part of the Canadian Shield and is just gorgeous. Just another of the hundreds of different scenes which the Great Lakes
area provides.
Nestor Falls is on the right. This was yet another of the hundreds of little lakes which dot the land west of Lake Superior and on the
border between Minnesota, Ontario and Manitoba. The two dots in the water on the left are two fisherboats with two fishermen
each in them. This is simply outstanding backpack and hiking country - in fact any area in the northern Great Lakes area is equally
wonderful - Lake Huron, Lake Michigan (the upper stretches, the lower stretches are too urbanized), and Lake Superior and
the hundreds - perhaps thousands - of little lakes which dot the land around these Great Lakes throughout Western Ontario,
Southern Manitoba and Northern Minnesota.
Sunglint off one of the lakes which lie between western Lake Superior and Winnipeg in Eastern Manitoba. This lake, along with most
of the ones we encountered, had sections of shoreline dedicated to camping and fishing and other sections where there were
single family lake houses.
Next photos will be of Winnipeg, followed by Saskatoon, and then Edmonton, and finally the Rocky Mountains.
Have a great weekend.
Posted: Thu - October 14, 2004 at 01:09 PM
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Published On: Jul 04, 2005 05:41 PM
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Published On: Jul 04, 2005 05:41 PM