More from the day Pam and I walked up the hill from our Malloryville Mill House.
The setting sun works its magic on a century plus maple tree on an esker bank. The glaciers deposited this esker, under the tree, when waters from the melting flowed under the ice to carve a tunnel later filled with glacier debris.
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The light brings out the beauty of two this pair of silos from the early 20th century abutting an abandoned barn and active cornfields.
Pam is using my first camera, a Sony Mavica. It writes to a 4.5″ disk that limits the number of exposures and I carried a number of the disks. It has a decent variable lens. We still have that camera. These photos are from my Sony dslr Apha700 with a variable lens.
At that time, our three apple trees gave a bountiful harvest. We spent two days making and canning apple sauce. For some batches we’d grind in blackberries or concord grapes. We enjoyed the work over the next year. Our grandchildren loved that stuff.
These apples hung from a tree of the farm house next to the abandoned barn. A young family lived there, their toddler daughter recognized us from other walks and came over for a “hello”.
Other postings this Harvest View evening. Click the link to go there.
Libe Slope is between the West Campus and Quadrangle / Libraries.
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Cornell University is on a west-facing hill above Cayuga lake.
Besides the exercise of walking the 18 degree incline several times each day, Cornell students and alumni remember The Slope for autumn color.
Wonderful Flow of Limbs among Gold
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Hickory
Seen from the north on a cloudy October day, this Pignut Hickory (Carya glabra) is the largest tree on the Cornell Campus, at 79 inches in diameter.
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Cornell University is on a west-facing hill above Cayuga lake.
Take another look at the previous image. Can you find the grey squirrel? This hickory grows south of the Johnson Museum and among the autumn glories, it is the largest and brightest yellow canopy on Libe Slope.
Contrast
An overcast day is the best to capture this spectacle. October 20, 2012 provided both bright sun and dark, rolling autumn clouds. I waited on the north side, sheltered from the glare of the sky, for these perfect moments.
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I remember this hickory for the contrast between the canopy and trunk, the way the clumps of yellow hang from dark boughs.
The pignut hickory is native to these Eastern United States. It is known to favor moist slopes and this specimen has thrived on The Slope. The ground beneath it is thick with nuts.
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One week later
Just one week later, late afternoon on a sunny Friday as hurricane Sandy approached the east coast the hickory has fewer, tawny golden leaves.
Copyright 2021 Michael Stephen Wills All Rights Reserved
After work on a 2008 Friday afternoon in October we sped over to Beebee Lake on the Cornell University Campus to catch the late afternoon glow.
Beebe Lake is formed by a dam on Fall Creek. It seems to be the flooded meadow it is, surrounded by hills formed by glaciers 10,000 years ago. Cornell maintains footpaths around the lake.
People say that if a couple walk the a mile around the lake and over a bridge at either end, they are destined to be married. This day we passed only joggers and families. Pam and I will celebrated our tenth anniversary March 2019, so the legend worked for us.
Here are four snapshots from that time, presented in chronological order. Each is a handheld shot taken on the fly using my Sony Alpha 700 I use for exploratory photography.
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A terraced stair descends to the east side meadow to south lake shore path
I walked down a path trod by Canadian geese to reach a clear view of the water.
View of Helen Newman Hall
Lily pads and iris fronds grow along the bank.
Evening sunlight reflected from smooth water crests driven by a steady light wind
Being on the west side of the lake, the dam is bathed in golden autumn light.
The Dam That Forms Beebee Lake
On top the hill, not visible behind the trees, above the opposite bank is Fuertes Observatory. We visited it this night, opened to the public as it is on all clear Friday nights while classes are running.
Copyright 2021 Michael Stephen Wills All Rights Reserved
From 2004 through 2011 I visited Arizona every Autumn, October or November. As a University of Arizona Alumni Board member for the College of Agriculture and Life Sciences we had a meeting during “homecoming” and a fund raising event. I’d come early or stay later for getting acquainted with Arizona, more than was possible as an undergraduate. In 2007 I camped for several days Chiricahua National Monument of the remote south eastern corner of the state.
The park empties out this time of year, for some reason. The weather is perfection with clear skies, moderate daytime temperatures, cool nights. This time of year the Arizona White Oak acorns ripen and fall. The campground has aluminum picnic tables, the falling acorns made a loud plunks throughout the night. This would annoy some people. Me, it is a great memory.
The following two images are great memories from my first morning.
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These formations hovered over the trail on my first morning. The rising full moon was an unplanned bonus.
I experimented this trip with a breakfast of granola with dried whole milk. It was delicious (for me) and got me out on the trail quickly. This first morning I clicked my hiking poles together to scare away bears as I walked in the pre-dawn dark. The preparation and extra effort paid off with this photograph.
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I met one hiker who was a harbor pilot from Hamburg, Germany. He came just to view a particular rock formation that was, literally, the rubber bath duck. It is several miles to the site, a moderate hike with significant elevation gain. He took his snapshot with a little camera and was on his way.
The following is my masterpiece from the trip. Imaging the effect of seeing this image on settlers. That same first day I turned a corner and there this was…it took a few minutes to comprehend what I saw, it was so incredible and, for me, unexpected. It first, the only perception is a huge rock dome of rough rock, then, slowly, the image of a native American profile forms in the mind. Cochise Dawn
During the session for Cochise Dawn I turned the camera for the view northwest and did a self portrait. In the distance are the Galiuro Mountains and Wilderness. Tucked alongside is the Aravaipa Canyon Wilderness, hosting one of the few perennial streams of Arizona.
Copyright 2017 Michael Stephen Wills All Rights Reserved
In my post Canyon of Music, Wind, Light I shared a different photograph of this beetle crawling on sandstone, naming it as a “dung beetle”. I had assumed it was one from once having seen a beetle in an Arizona desert pushing a ball of dung around. This morning, to confirm my assumption, I searched for images of “Arizona Dung Beetle” and was dismayed to find this beetle shares no characteristics with the photographs. Absent smoking gun evidence, sadly lacking in this photograph, I have to admit my “dung beetle” attribution is in error.
Supporting the beetle, the luminous surface of the red sandstone named “de Chelly,” sunlight reflects from durable remnants of the ancestral Rocky Mountains wore to these bits of rock, piled to mountainous dunes by the winds of tens of thousands years, polished to smoothness each against the others.
Mysterious abrasion and grooves in a de Chelly sandstone cliff, Canyon de Chelly.
The above photograph is a detail from the brightly lit cliff of the following photograph. The desert varnish and underlying rock was weathered over thousands of years, the sand grains falling to the canyon floor.
The soil of the canyon is composed of these bits of the ancestral Rocky Mountains. What appears to be a white road in the above photograph is not man-made, it is the dried bed of a stream. When a waterway is dry like this, only flowing with rains, it is called a wash. When water fills the wash of the Canyon Del Muerto, the polished sand granules become a dangerous morass, sucking down horses, people, anything unlucky enough to step into it. Every movement, struggling for freedom, pulls the victim deeper down until the wet sand closes over the head and suffocation and death ensues.
Stairs cut into the sandstone cliff of Canyon de Chelly
The waters Canyon De Chelly National Monument naturally form a vast Y into the Defiance Plateau, naturally because two major streams merge into one canyon a few miles above Chinle. On both our guided trips, heading east from Chinle there is a branch. On the right De Chelly canyon continues. On the left is Canyon Del Muerto. The photos in this post are all from “The Canyon of the Dead”, what the name means translated into English.
No, it is not named this because of the quicksand. Conditions for quicksand are present throughout canyons of the southwest. It is history of human occupation for which this canyon was named. I will cover it in a future posting. For now, I will say the above views are from the spot featured in “Family Trek.”
My first visit, in 2003, while my son Sean climbed the rocks with our guide, I was left to document the wondrous surroundings. The above shallow cave is reached by that stairway carved into the precipitous ledge. The access to the cave is via those naturally occurring ridges of the cross bedded sandstone. It is another example of De Chelly sandstone formed from the windblown edge of a monstrous ancient sand dune.
A solid block of De Chelly sandstone formed from the central bulk of a sand dune.
Here is another example of rock formed from the solid body of the sand dune, that unbroken and un-striated cliff. Below is the cross-bedded, windblown sand.
Autumn lights up the floor of Canyon De Chelly, the foliage rivals the cliffs for wonder at this time.
As we proceeded generally east from the climbing spot of “Family Trek”, driving by the golden cottonwood foliage I asked the guide to stop for these photographs.
Canyon walls
Soon the cliffs hid the sun.
Notice the modern water distribution system (pipe) at the foot of cliff on right. These vast tracks of shadow adjacent to bright sunlight are a fact of life for canyon dwellers, a source of joy and wonder.
The canyon here is rather like the Narrows of Zion, without the water.
Imagine walking across the ranch house ruin towards where I described the former pond. Looking to the east and north from the elevation you see this sight.
In the near distance a grass pasture slopes into Reavis Creek. The creek has flowing water in all but the longest dry seasons. By the way, the trail from Pine Creek is on the slopes of that conical feature in the distance, to the left.
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Looking from the former house site towards the Arizona Trail running beneath the distant red rock ridge. Not the fence rails on the left and apple trees in bloom.
From the ruin, walk down the Arizona Trail, south, for a few hundred feet and turn left into the fields to encounter the same apple tree, and a close up of pure white apple blossoms.
Portrait of a Blooming Apple Tree
At Rest and History
This tree is an outlier of a thick stand of several hundred trees to the north. The Searcher and I rode into the middle of the grove for a rest and chat. The horses were allowed to graze in the abundant new grass brought on by the winter rains.
The Searcher told me the story of the valley and that it was a man named Clemans who planted 600+ apple trees, trees in bloom all around us. The Reavis Valley was long a site of agriculture, starting in the 19th century with Elisha Reavis, who passed away in 1896 and is buried on the slopes of White Mountain, and continued with a series of ranchers and entrepreneurs in the 20th: John Fraser, William Clemans, who planted the trees, and John A. “Hoolie” Bacon, then Bacon’s son-in-law Floyd Stone who sold the land to the U.S. Department of Agriculture in 1967.
We talked about some earthwork I noticed, in the southern part of the valley. It was part of a water system that diverted Reavis creek flow at the head of the valley to the ranch house. We decided that strange hexogonal structure on the elevation above the house ruin was the site of water storage. At that location the structure would provide a pressure feed for the house and much else.
Abandoned Hay Rake
A mix of winter rains and fertile soil were exploited in the Reavis Valley for a handful of decades, the enterprise now is set aside. This abandoned hay rake and chassis, used to harvest grass in seasons past, is evidence of the work. The apple trees produce to this day without irrigation.
The Searcher touched upon the subject of the “Circlestone” ruin he mentioned on our morning ride. He had never been there, but mentioned some books on the subject. It is a wide circle of rough stone wall enclosing mysterious structures. At this point, I was hooked, and decided to check Circlestone on a later trip. Here are some photographs from one of those trips, in November 2006.
Reavis Ranch Apple Orchard Tree
Reavis Ranch Apples Yellow
Reavis Ranch Apples Red
In my next post The Searcher and I return to Pine Creek, Colorado gives me some trouble and we visit a stand of wild oats in the Reavis Gap.
We can roam the woods and gorges this time of year to find these wildflowers camouflaged in their young, green foliage. Here are two images from a June 3rd afternoon in Fillmore Glen with a waterfall. Enjoy!!
Brown dragon is an apt nickname for Jack-in-the-pulpit, captured here with Red Trillium on the forest floor of Fillmore Glen State Park. I was down in the mud for the closeup,
Michael Stephen Wills Photography 