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.