phx ✈️ pdx, september 2025

Next up is the latest set of aerial photos (so far, at least), from another flight from Phoenix back to Portland a few days ago. It was cloudier than the previous installment, so no Vegas photos this time but instead featuring lots of big puffy thunderheads at sunset. It was rather nice, although I did get the "City in the Clouds" theme (from Empire Strikes Back) stuck in my head for a bit.

pdx ✈️ phx, august 2025 (II)

Next up, some photos from a second early-afternoon flight from Portland down to Phoenix. This photoset is smaller than the first one, mostly because I fell asleep for a bit, and everything was just kind of beige and hazy and uninspiring all the way down.

One of the photos right after takeoff is looking across the agricultural part of Sauvie Island, and I think you can see Bell View Point toward the top of the photo. It's a bit of river bank directly across from Kelly Point Park, making it the official mouth of the Willamette River as it joins the Columbia. It's another of those Metro properties that used to be a Multnomah County park until the 1990s, and the reason you haven't seen a blog post about it is that the only way to get to it is by a narrow gravel road marked by large "Private" and "No Trespassing" signs. So I don't think the place has been (legally) accessible by land for several decades on end. Maybe you can get there by kayak or small boat, which might involve cutting across the main shipping channel of the Willamette River without being run over by a ship full of outbound wheat or inbound cars. That hardly seems worth doing, just to visit what seems to be an otherwise-generic bit of riverbank, especially since I don't own a kayak, and the only person I knew who owned a boat ended up selling it for the usual financial reasons, despite all the glamor and attention and whatnot that comes with being that one friend who owns a boat.

phx ✈️ pdx, august 2025

Next set of aerial photos was taken flying from Phoenix back to Portland, leaving around 6pm and getting home late. So there are some photos taken around sunset, and a few taken while flying over Las Vegas. You can instantly tell it's Las Vegas and not some other random city in the desert because The Sphere is easily visible from 40,000 feet or so in the air. Thing is, if you get any semi-decent photos of it and show them to an elderly relative who hasn't heard of The Sphere, they'll ask you what it is and what it's for, and follow up with "But why, though?", and probably your best bet is to just read off what Wikipedia says about it and agree that it doesn't make any sense to you either.

All of that said, the 319 megapixel, 120fps Big Sky camera that was designed to film content for the Sphere looks rather interesting and if they gave me one I would be willing to give it a spin. I'm usually not that interested in fixed-lens video hardware, but I would be willing to make an exception in this particular case.

pdx ✈️ phx, august 2025 (I)

Welp, here's the first in a series of at least four posts tagged 'flying', thanks to a bit of ongoing family medical drama down in Arizona. This isn't the sort of blog where I go into lots of personal details, but as a piece of general advice for everyone, but especially those of the elderly persuasion: If you've been prescribed something for a chronic condition (say, blood thinners, to pick a random example), and it's a bit expensive, and you run into a temporary financial dry spot for a few months, but you have people (say, your successful middle-aged adult children, to pick another random example) who would be more than happy to help you out if only they knew, the correct course of action is not to skip filling that prescription for a while and not tell us, I mean, anybody, and just sort of cross your fingers that it'll probably work out ok in the end. This is not doing anybody any favors, to put it mildly. And after all that, saying how weird it is that your kids are starting to have grey hair, right after causing more of it.

Anyway, this set of aerial photos includes some semi-snowy Cascades, then lots of empty desert, then the rocky hills around Phoenix on a hazy smoggy 115ºF afternoon, which vaguely of remind me of the photos returned by Soviet Venus probes back in the 1980s. Except with endless subdivisions stretching off to the horizon, many of them built around artificial lakes (which you can't swim in, or fish in, or go boating on), I guess just to own the libs or something. I can't explain that or much of anything else about Phoenix, really, including a.) why it exists in the first place, and b.) why nearly 5 million people live there. Ok, people keep telling me it's only incredibly hot for three months of the year and is nice otherwise. But I've only ever experienced it at summer temperatures and have come to suspect it's actually like this year-round and the idea that it's vaguely tolerable sometime in the winter was dreamed up by a few creative real estate speculators preying on people who buy propery sight unseen, and it sort of snowballed from there, so to speak.

Black Canyon, Colorado River

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Here are a couple of old photos from the Colorado River's Black Canyon, downstream of Hoover Dam and a short drive from Las Vegas. I was on a group tour bus at the time and we had stopped at the Willow Beach marina (on the Arizona side of the river), where we rented motorboats and headed up the river toward the dam. In the photos of the canyon walls, I was actually trying to photograph some bighorn sheep high up in the canyon, despite only having a cheap point-n-shoot camera at my disposal. At one point I thought I could pick them out as tiny specks in the photos, but now I'm not so sure.

Grand Canyon (IV)

Grand Canyon (I)

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I assume the Grand Canyon needs no introduction. I think I'm going to spread the photos across several posts like I did with Yosemite, since a single post with 20+ photos gets to be a bit much. Enjoy!

Grand Canyon (III)

Grand Canyon (II)

Little Colorado River Gorge

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Some photos of the Little Colorado River Gorge, which the Little Colorado River flows through on its way to the Grand Canyon. As you've probably gathered already from the photos, "little" is a relative term in this part of Arizona.

Sunset Crater

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A few photos of Sunset Crater National Monument, between Flagstaff, Arizona and the Grand Canyon. I stopped here sort of briefly after visiting the Wupatki ruins; I can see how it would be fascinating to visitors from a less volcanic part of the country, who may have never seen a cinder cone before. I took a few photos of it, and a few of the snowy San Francisco Peaks in the distance, before moving on to the next adventure.

Cochise Stronghold

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Here are some old scanned photos from the Cochise Stronghold area of southern Arizona's Coronado National Forest. Spent an afternoon here back in summer 1993, scrambling around on rocks and trying, unsuccessfully, to take photos of the local fast-moving lizards. So here are some photos of the area's rugged hills instead; they aren't cute like lizards are, but at least they generally hold still for the camera.

Hoover Dam

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Photos of Hoover Dam, taken several years ago before the new bridge opened. I took these earlier on the same day I went to Red Rock Canyon, over on the other side of Vegas, and failed to take any photos of the city itself. In any case, the dam looks kind of cool in an Art Deco sort of way, and the hydropower keeps the lights on in Vegas, although the dam's turned out to be not so fabulous from an environmental standpoint.

As with Red Rocks, I'm pretty sure I need to go back and take some photos with a Real Camera, and in this case I also need photos of the bridge. And by "need", I mean it would be a logical extension of this weird ongoing photoblog hobby I've ended up with.

Wupatki

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A few old photos from Wupatki National Monument, which protects a number of pueblo ruins just south of the Grand Canyon. When I visited, I was amazed by how well-preserved the ruins were; only later did I find out that some parts really were intact, and others had been reconstructed in the early 20th century. So I'm not entirely sure what we're looking at here.

There weren't a lot of other visitors while I was there; at one point, it was just myself and an older lady of a New Agey sort of persuasion. We chatted briefly, but it was obvious we were each getting something entirely different from being here. She said the ruins were a "power center", or something along those lines. I recall saying something inarticulate about the incredible age of the buildings and how well they were constructed. Which is pretty much what I'd say now, come to think of it. I mean, most of these ruins were houses, and a 700 year old house is exactly as mystical (or non-mystical) as a year old house is. Pretty sure that building here didn't require any help from crystal aliens or psychic dolphins or anything.

The archaeology of the desert Southwest is not really my forte, so rather than trying to explain the history of the place, let me just pass along a few links if you'd like to learn more about it. Several of these pages are hosted at Northern Arizona University, which is just down the road in Flagstaff.

• Land Use History of North America - Colorado Plateau
• Anthropology Laboratories of Northern Arizona University
• American Southwest Virtual Museum
• A blog post from a University of Maryland undergrad geology trip to Arizona