Inspired by Cicero’s Relics thread here, this thread asks what natural wonders you are glad you’ve seen.
For me, one thing would be the sunrise I saw one morning back in about 1991. I was driving an 18-wheeler eastbound on Highway 33 in Prince Edward County, Ontario; headed for Wellington. I left our depot in eastern Toronto at about 0500, and at about 0700 as I made the south-from-Trenton-to-eastbound-to-Wellington turn, the sun peeped over the horizon and lit up the world. The grass in the fields glowed with the sunlight on the dew, the dew on the tree leaves did the same thing, and there was nobody else on the highway. I knew it was only for a moment and I had a schedule to keep, but I’ve never forgotten the way the countryside looked that morning.
I’ve seen an iceberg off Newfoundland, the Northern Lights from my front porch, and the Southern Cross on visits to Australia, as well as many other of nature’s wonders in my life, but that morning on the way to Wellington sticks with me. What about you?
A total solar eclipse
Haleakala crater on Maui
The Milky Way from Haleakala crater
Kilauea lava flow on the Big Island of Hawaii
Waipio Valley on the Big Island
Flying over the Matterhorn
Niagara Falls
The Grand Canyon
Route 12 in Utah, between Capital Reef and Bryce
Bryce Canyon National Park
Arches National Park
Horseshoe Canyon
Meteor Crater in Arizona
La Soufriere volcano on the island of Guadeloupe
There have been many, but the three best:
Watching wild flamingos fly across an everglades sunset. This was with my grandpa, just a few months before he died.
Riding out a major hurricane in a small, rock house. The sound of 100+ mile winds tearing across coral rock was beyond description.
Sitting on the edge of the Grand Canyon and just looking.
Crater Lake
The Swiss Alps
Having lunch in the crater of Mt St Helens with some geology nerds
The moon through a friend’s really awesome telescope
The Pacific Ocean, as the morning fog lifted at the Oregon Dunes state park
I’ve seen many cool things. Flying low over Puerto Rico in a little island hopper seeing everything from the reefs off Fajardo and Vieques to the Jungles on the mainland to the urban metropolis of San Juan all in a short little hop.
Niagara Falls, the Grand Canyon, The Jemez Mountains in New Mexico, The weird magnetic pillars in Sedona Arizona, the clouds from above in the Appalachians of North Carolina.
But one of the most spectacular was the evidence of man’s impact on the Earth after spending two weeks at Burning Man in the Black Rock Desert. I got there a week early when there were probably about 500 people there. The ground was parched with the thick alkaline clay, that crunched ever so satisfyingly under your feet. Everywhere you went was this clay. You could see tiretracks through it breaking apart the little concave flakes of it down into a fine powder. Two weeks and 45000 people later, flying back from San Francisco to New York, we flew right over the Black Rock Desert, or at least due south. We could see the site of Burning Man which we knew of from the dust clouds that went miles into the air. What was hard packed clay sun parched clay flakes two weeks before was a dust cloud a mile high and several miles in diameter. That and the desert beatles that survive in the Black Rock desert.
I was driving along a country road and saw a rather large flock of birds. They moved as a large mass. I pulled off the road, rolled down my window and shut the engine off. The birds swirled around in almost perfect unison and the sound of thousands of wings beating and the flow of motion was the most spectacular display of nature I’ve ever seen.
Probably the next most memorizing view was of a double rainbow (one inside the other). I’m not sure what causes this but the space underneath the lower rainbow is lighter creating a band shell effect.
I took some pictures of a rainbow after sunset in Bend, OR.
Once, I saw a layer of fog about three inches thick, almost completely opaque, and right at eye level as my cousin and I drove through a valley in Central Texas.
-Uluru and the Kata Jutas
-The Milky Way from the Australian Outback
-The Northern Lights
-Haleakala on Maui
-Sequoias in the Sequoia National Park
-Rocky Mountains in the Rocky Mountain National Park
-Humpback whales, feeding and playing in the Atlantic and Pacific oceans
Nesting albatrosses and their chicks in Espanola, an uninhabited island in the Galapagos
Glaciers on top of Mt. Kilimanjaro (I mentioned that in the other thread)
A cheetah take down a young gazelle in the Serengeti
The High Sierras in a winter snowstorm
Death Valley after a spring rain
An eruption of ash from Sakurajima the early morning sun from the summit of Kitadake. Iceburgs off the nothern coast of Hokkaido. Sakuracherry trees in bloom in Japan.
But maybe it was the sun, after a day of hiking up a mountain in the rain. Yup, that was probably it.
Lightning storm in Kansas; the electrical mayhem was so continuous you (seriously!) didn’t need headlights. Rather toward the blue end of the spectrum, though.
Fog west of Delta, Utah. You know how dry ice in water makes that bubbly dense vapor thing? It was like that, but MUCH thicker, and upside down.
-A meteorite crashing.
-Sunrise…through the clouds, out an airliner window (one of the best ways to wake up, IMHO).
-Moonrise, over a ridge of redwoods, one warm summer evening about…eight years ago, I’d say. My eyes were probably better then, too.
-Aftermath of heavy snowfall, Dec. 31, 2004, Reno, Nevada. Not that I had to shovel it, though…but for a born-and-raised Northern Californian, a pretty novel experience. The night before was pretty beautiful, too.
-The distant approach of fog on the horizon in an otherwise clear late afternoon—a fairly common sight in my neck of California, but it always impresses.
-Low fog billowing over and down the hills just north of the Golden Gate Bridge. (ibid)
-Odd, unusually dim sunlight in a cloudless sky…and finding out, a few minutes later, that there had been a partial solar eclipse. More than a bit subtly alien.
The memories are far too numerous to count. I will, however, mention one since I’m fairly certain no one here’s ever been there before.
It’s a small but utterly amazing canyon buried deep, deep in the Pacific Northwest, miles from any road and in a pristine forest. It has a name but I hope you’ll understand if I don’t share it. At the head of the canyon is an absolutely beautiful waterfall. Coming off a ledge, it’s possible to walk behind the flow and view the curtain of water in front of you from a shallow but tall cave. As the water and mist come down, they pass and coat a large fallen tree which is now covered with a verdent growth of ferns.
The canyon’s probably sixty or seventy feet deep and maybe a hundred feet across with very steep sides. Everything has something growing on it. The green is ubiquitous, save for the sheer rock face of the walls. Years ago, into the narrow canyon a huge tree fell and lies lengthwise, parallel with the river’s cut. Probably seven or eight feet thick, it’s an effort to climb on top but once there all the limbs have been broken off and you can walk it’s length, hundreds of feet and it ever so gradually begins to narrow.
What’s of pleasant notice as you’re there is that there’s no evidence of anyone ever having been there before… no soda can, wrapper, no trail or sign of man at all. Making the arduous climb out, almost as harrowing as the steep one in, is all through virgin brush and sure to leave a few scrapes and bruises. Once a few feet from the edge though, all evidence of the canyon and falls disappears… the sight, the sound, everything, and you leave it just as it was before; a pristine, beautiful memory.
