While Scotland’s Isle of Skye is, for good reason, a very popular place to visit, you can also find great views of the Isle and its mountains from along Scotland’s less-populated western coast. After our visit to Skye we headed north to Ullapool, and from there drove a long loop out to the village of Applecross. Before turning south toward that spot the route hugged the coastline, offering continuous views across the water to islands including Skye.
Continue reading Looking Toward Skye
After six weeks of travel, almost two weeks of it in beautiful Scotland, some location memories begin to blur together. I cannot say precisely where I made this photograph. It was on the day we left Skye and made our way north to Ullapool. My recollection is that we had perhaps passed through some rain at a high point on the route, and we came to this peak and its foreground hill as the weather was beginning to clear, allowing a bit of sunlight into the scene. (It is hard to identify these Scottish peaks after returning back to the US, but this one may be Spidean Coire nan Clach.)
Continue reading Snow-dusted Highlands Peak
Death Valley National Park is a huge landscape, in more ways that one. The park is huge. It is the largest park in the contiguous states. (Alaska, where everything is on a larger scale, has four larger parks.) Within the park we often are able to view huge distances — in fact, Death Valley’s visual scale reminds me of places I’ve seen in Alaska. Here we look down Rainbow Canyon and across the entire Panamint Valley (one valley west of Death Valley itself) toward more desert mountains.
Continue reading Panamint Valley
Although it might see counter-intuitive for a place like Death Valley National Park, these mountains typically are snow-capped in the winter. The highest point in the Panamint Range is Telescope Peak, at an elevation of just above 11,000′. That puts it in the alpine zone, and although moisture is usually scarce here, when it does come it can produce snow at that elevation. A cold storm had recently passed, and the snow level in the photo is lower than usual.
Continue reading Snow-Capped Telescope Peak