Category: Adventuring

  • Appalachian Trail – Punchbowl Mountain to Spy Rock

    Spring Buds, Pedlar Lake 30 Miles over three days. 6,000 Foot Ascent on the second day. There’s a magnificience in the changing leaves that comes with the fall, but there’s also a sublime beauty in the sprinkles of green with the spring buds. Check out the complete flickr set here.

  • National Air and Space Museum Steven F. Udvar-Hazy Center

    Taxonomy of Flight Walking around this fantastic collection of aircraft, I was immersed in thoughts of the Technium, the idea that technology is the seventh kingdom of life. The technodiversity surrounding me in the main hangar display was overwhelming. The technological adaptations for vertical flight, human-powered flight, jet propulsion, and numerous others are designed by…

  • National Air and Space Museum Steven F. Udvar-Hazy Center: James S. McDonnell Space Hangar

    James S. McDonnell Space Hangar It’s a happy coincidence that I had a space-themed flickr set to upload just the day before the 40th anniversary of humans stepping foot on the Moon with the James S. McDonnell Space Hangar. Displays of toys and science fiction models really convey the cultural impact space exploration has had…

  • Virginia Living Museum: Costal Plain Aviary

    Yellow-Crowned Night-Heron Check out the complete flickr set here.

  • Virginia Living Museum Mammals Outdoors

    There were a lot of neat miscellanous exhibits at the VLM, including an indoor bee hive, fossilized dinosaur tracks, and this nifty display of a snake’s fangs opening and closing: Fangs I finally managed to get some photos of a river otter. These are the most playful animals of the all, always hamming it up…

  • Virginia’s Mountains and World of Darkness

    Eastern Newt The Virginia Living Museum, like zoos and other natural history museums, recreates many different ecological niches indoors, where visitors can get up close and admire the biology in detail. There’s a sense of wonder in admiring the uniqueness of life without it being able to run away and hide. Hermit Crab As nice…

  • Virginia Living Museum: Cypress Swamp Exhibit

    Eastern Snapping Turtle Swamps, like deserts, are a metaphor for awful things in life. We get bogged down in swamps, monsters come out of swamps, to “swamp” a person is to capture them in a quagmire of responsibilities. But this derision of swamps is very anthropocentric, and I like the old German proverb, “Where there…

  • Virginia Living Museum: Chesapeake Bay Discovery Center and Virginia’s Coastal Plain

    Striped Burrfish The Virginia Living Museum reminds me very much of the North Carolina Museum of Natural Sciences, where the focus is on the natural world specific to the state. Like NCMNS, the VLM divides its exhibits into ecosystems found in Virginia, from the coast all the way up into the Appalachian Mountains, and the…

  • The Great Dismal Swamp

    Devil’s Walkingstick The Great Dismal swamp sits on the Virginia-North Carolina border, surrounded by miles and miles of farmland on all sides. There is some sense of wonder as to how this 111,000 acres of swampland didn’t suffer the same fate as its surroundings. It wasn’t for lack of trying, as developers, like George Washington,…

  • Smithsonian National Zoological: Bird House

    When Vicky was searching through children’s variations on the Google logo for her Google Doodle Trees post, one logo caught my eye. It was a wish to “Bring back the dinosaurs.” I know the kid was talking about bringing back the dinosaurs in the sense of Jurassic Park, but I doubt the child realized that…

  • Hortus Botanicus Amsterdam: Desert Plants

    “Sunshine all the time makes a desert.” – Arab Proverb Cacti Deserts are the metaphor of choice to describe anything bleak, barren, and devoid of life. The word is synonymous with wasteland. It’s a place where prophets go to spend 40 days and nights in fasting and isolation. Life might be sparser in the desert,…

  • Hortus Botanicus Amsterdam: Tropicals and Subtropicals

    Greta oto aka. Glasswing Butterfly As climate change raises the average temperature of the Earth, the subtropical environments will become tropical, as plant hardiness zones move toward the poles. Tropical zones, like the Amazon Rainforest, unfortunately, have nowhere to go. Check out the complete flickr set here.