The White Mountains National Forest parking lots were jam packed on this hot Fourth of July, and dozens of the cars in those lots held people eager to hike the trail up to Champney Falls, high on the north slope of 3500-foot Mt. Chocorua. But nobody challenged us when we claimed swimming rights in the pool beneath this little cascade of the falls. The water was cold up there, the walk through the woods was shady and occasionally breezy, the sun was summery, we had cherries to eat, and there's really nothing else to say. Left to right: Susan Wiggin, Emily Wiggin, Joe Stein, Joshua Wiggin.
The water tank in Baldwin, Maine, has seen better days, but they still fly the flag on the Fourth of July.
This guy comes from Dutch photographer Richard Terborg's series of portraits of painfully dorky people. You have to like the pens in his pocket, and you also have to wonder what song he's singing.
During a week's vacation on an island in the Yucatan Strait near Cancun, Mexico, Carol Stack posed for a picture at sunset.
Somebody is sitting on top of the nuclear submarine Toledo while it's tied up in port. Allen recently spent a couple of weeks aboard the Toledo for a training cruise; he took this picture with his cell phone.
Some days, seems like nothing in the world will make life worth living other than a picture of cute babies or puppies. This one popped up when I asked the Flickr photo site to show a dozen photos chosen at random.
A man identified as "Canadian fishing guide" breaks for lunch on the shores of Lake of the Woods, Ontario, in 1952.
We have all seen pictures of the oil gusher in the Gulf of Mexico; this is the one that put a catch in my breath today.
Nicole Kesterson of Gulf Shores, Alabama, is snapping a picture at the public beach near Gulf Shores State Park, while blackened surf splashes down onto the sand. Used to be, Gulf Shores and nearby beaches were characterized by what people called "sugar sand"--fine, white, perfect, clean quartz crystalline sand. I've seen tarballs there before--Gulf oil platforms are visible from many parts of the beach--but black waves of crude are something else again.
Picture these gentle little waves roughed up and built into mountains by a hurricane--Atlantic and Gulf waters are warmer this summer than ever before in human history, and hurricanes are the earth's major mechanism for dealing with hot spots of subtropical water. The oil will come crashing inland, obviously, surging for miles to flood uncleanable marshes and swamps. And evidence is accumulating that thanks to BP's massive use of dispersants, oil will also likely be sucked up into the sky; oil vapor will gather in the clouds along with water vapor to rain poison down on us all.
For what it's worth, the good news is that mosquitoes don't do well in oily environments.
I have spent enough time among geologists to accept that all substantial reservoirs of oil on the planet will eventually be tapped for human use. But what I hear about energy policy in America these days seems completely backwards to me: why aren't we letting the Saudis and the Russians let their wells run dry before we tap into our own precious reserves? Countries with no other source of income or with desperate economic problems have no choice but to sell off all their oil as quickly as possible. We're rich enough to wait for a while, and as the rest of the world's oil disappears, ours becomes more and more valuable. Perhaps eventually it will be worth so much that oil companies will be cautious not to risk spilling a drop.
Or whatever.
The ninth annual Solar Decathlon International is under way in Madrid; teams from seventeen universities in Europe, Asia, and the Americas have built solar-powered houses for the competition.
Almost all the entries are box-shaped houses topped by complicated solar panels. This one is different; can you guess where it's from? The Institute of Advanced Architecture in Barcelona, where it was designed for a climate in which cooling as opposed to heating is a major challenge.
"The twentieth century was the architectural age of form follows function," notes the statement accompanying this entry. "The twenty-first century is the age of form follows energy."
The winning house will be named next week. I'll try to keep you posed.
This barn owl was out hunting in the low light of a long summer evening, in Warwickshire, England.
