Tag:US
The statue of Our Lady of Loreto watches over visitors to the chapel, dedicated in Her name, in Goliad, Texas. The chapel dates back to the late 1760s and has been in continuous use since. Lincoln Borglum sculpted the statue of Our Lady of Loreto. She stands in a niche above the chapel entrance. Among Borglum’s other works, albeit on a slightly larger scale, is the Mount Rushmore National Memorial. The Spanish established the Presidio Nuestra Señora de Loreto de […]
This image, taken from Beatty Road, is from my very first visit to Death Valley. Visiting in the fall of 1995, I recall going to a Houston Aeros ice hockey game and scoring some free nights at the Imperial Palace, Las Vegas. While that was also my first visit to Vegas, I found the desert more alluring. That day, clouds had moved in during the overnight hours. As the sun rose the sky was a symphony of color. Had I […]
When I visited the White Sands National Park it was still the White Sands National Monument. What’s the difference? I had to look this up and found the answer from one of my favorite publications, Outside. National Parks have scenic, inspirational, educational, and recreational value. National monuments have objects of historical, cultural, and/or scientific interest. So why the change? By redesignating from White Sands National Monument to White Sands National Park, the people of New Mexico are able to protect […]
When you look at Google Maps, Agathla Peak first appears as El Capitan. El Capitan is the Spanish name, Agathla Peak the anglicized version of the Navajo name. According to the fine folks at Wikipedia, this means ‘much wool’. This is a reference to the fur of antelope and deer caught on the rocks. To the Navajo, the peak, thrusting some 1500 feet above the surrounding plain, is a sacred place. That doesn’t seem to stop lots of people from […]
I was wondering what to title this image. It’s a view east along Northshore Road in the Lake Mead Recreational Area. As I was looking at the road that winds its way through the desert hills I got to thinking this is no Roman road, with all its twists and turns. And then I got to thinking of the Thomas Hardy poem. Forty years on I can still recite the opening lines, “The Roman Road runs straight and bare as […]
Here’s another photo I took with the iPhone 11 Pro Max on my flight back from Calgary the other week. The landscape feature at the bottom of the image is Pine Mountain which lies just to the west of Casper, Wyoming. The first part of the flight had crisp, clear blue skies allowing for great visibility. I spent virtually the entire flight just gazing out the window watching the magnificent landscape pass below. The angle of the sun that afternoon […]
