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.

hnl ✈️ pdx, may 2023

Here's another batch of window seat photos, this time from earlier this week. Most of these show the north shore of Molokai, which is home to the world's tallest sea cliffs, although the very tallest ones are off in the distance and were covered in clouds when I took these photos. If the weather had cooperated I might have gotten a waterfall post (or several) out of this flight, since that area is home to Oloʻupena Falls (which the World Waterfall Database rates as 4th tallest on the planet at 900m / 2953'), along with several others that are nearly as tall. They're basically inaccessible from land, so seeing them from a plane is your best bet for catching a glimpse of them, short of renting a helicopter or approaching the base of the falls by boat.

In some of these you can also see Maui, Lanaʻi, and the Big Island. Kahoʻolawe is somewhere in that direction too but it might be behind one of the other islands or obscured by foreground clouds in these photos.

pdx ✈️ mco, august 2018

So I was rummaging around in old photos recently and found another set of window seat photos, this time from August 2018 when I flew into Orlando on my way to watch a large rocket send a small robot to the sun. The photos are in reverse order because I thought some of the ones just before landing were kind of striking. It was a stormy summer afternoon, with dark clouds and beams of sunlight glinting off the many lakes in the area.

Because I was in sort of a space nerd frame of mind at the time, the scene reminded me of the lakes on Saturn's moon Titan, though honestly that's quite a stretch. For one thing, the lakes on Titan are filled with liquid methane, ethane, propane, and other very cold hydrocarbons instead of swamp water, pesticides, and golf balls. And if you happened to land in a lake on Titan, you'd freeze solid almost immediately, instead of being eaten by backyard tigers or bath salts zombies, or randomly whacked by the cartels. And that's if you aren't shot out of the sky first for violating HOA airspace. The only probe to land on Titan so far (as of 2023) managed to land successfully and then sent data for another half hour without being tasered or eaten, which seems to rule out the presence of HOAs and tigers, so there's that. Exo-cartels are still a possibility, though, especially if they had a someone on the inside at NASA or ESA and knew exactly when to lie low. We should have a better idea about this after 2034 when the next robot gets there.

hnl ✈️ maui, september 2019

maui ✈️ hnl, september 2019

pdx ✈️ hnl, december 2019

pdx ✈️ hnl, may 2017

washington cascades from 10000 feet

From a recent flight out of Portland. Above: Mt. St. Helens & Mt. Rainier. Below: Mt. Adams.