Misty of Chincoteague Statue

When I visited Virginia last fall for the LADEE rocket launch, I stayed at a hotel on neighboring Chincoteague Island, and I managed a little bit of exploring while I was there. Chincoteague and nearby Assateague Island are famous for the herds of wild horses, and particulary for Misty, the star of a long-running series of children's books. Apparently the books are enough of a tourist draw that the city put up a statue of Misty in 2006. People who are bigger horse experts than I would need to weigh in on whether it's an accurate likeness, or whether it might be a statue of some entirely different horse, and whether horses typically chase ducks like this, and what they do when they catch them. In any case, it's just one of your tourist options here. You can look at the statue, or if you're feeling a bit morbid you could go to the island's Beebe Ranch and see the actual Misty, all taxidermied up and preserved for posterity.

I actually think this is a great idea, and more cities should do this with their most prominent citizens. Imagine if Memphis had a taxidermied Elvis to show off. It would really cut down on all those conspiracy theories about aliens and so forth. They could even continue making Elvis movies that way, since being taxidermied wouldn't really cut into Elvis's acting skills. Furthermore, I see that Southern Pines, NC is home to the one and only Taxidermy Hall of Fame (which exists, and doubles as a creationism museum). It seems only fitting that deceased famous taxidermists should be, you know, inducted there, so people from far and wide could come and pay their respects properly. I mean, I personally wouldn't pay to see that, but I'm pretty sure somebody out there would.

ocean waves, assateague island

Wallops Island Rocket Garden

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Outside the of NASA's Wallops Island visitor center are a few old rockets on display. It's nothing on the scale of the rocket garden at Kennedy Space Center, but the displays were kind of interesting so I took a few photos. And thanks to the magic of the interwebs, I can tell you a little more about some of them.

The (relatively) big rocket out front is a Little Joe, which was used in 1959-1960 to test the launch escape system for NASA's Mercury capsule. After some early hiccups, these test launches were conducted here at Wallops Island (including a couple with monkeys on board), before the Mercury program moved to Cape Canaveral for "real" launches. Apparently this is one of only two or three surviving examples of the rocket, since very few were built in the first place. The odd name for the rocket refers to a particular dice combination in craps, supposedly because the rocket engine arrangement reminded someone of it. I doubt you could get away with a name like that in 2013, but I imagine gambling references seemed quite applicable to rockets in 1959. Anyway, here's a documentary about the Little Joe program:

Little Joe: Mercury's First Steps from James Duffy on Vimeo.

The other rockets on the grounds are smaller sounding rockets, used for suborbital research into space or the upper atmosphere. There's an Aerobee 150, which was used from 1946 thru 1985. A vintage Air Force film details an Aerobee test flight at White Sands, NM, studying the effects of zero gravity on mice and monkeys:

Nearby is an Astrobee F, a solid-fueled successor to the Aerobee 150, which was used 1972-1983. Elsewhere on the grounds are a Nike-Cajun sounding rocket, and something the signs just call a "Four Stage Reentry Vehicle". Based on a little googling, this might be a Trailblazer II rocket, which was used to study the physics of objects reentering the atmosphere at high speed.

I think I may have missed a rocket or two on the grounds. A 1994 Usenet thread in rec.models.rocketry mentions a Scout D rocket here. The Scout was a solid-fueled rocket used to launch satellites from Wallops Island and elsewhere from 1960 thru 1994. I'm pretty sure they don't have one of those now; It's much taller than even the Little Joe rocket and I'm fairly sure I would have noticed it. In any event, here's a two-part documentary about the Scout program, made around the time the program was starting to wind down:

Assateague Island

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Since I've been on a vacation photo kick lately, here's another slideshow from coastal Virginia, this time from the south end of Assateague Island National Seashore and the Chincoteague National Wildlife Refuge next door. After I checked in to my Chincoteague Island hotel, I decided I wanted to at least dip my feet in the Atlantic a little, so off to the beach I went. Assateague Island is the ocean-facing barrier island due east of Chincoteague Island, and the two are separated by a channel of shallow water and salt marshes. So it's a bit of a drive, with a few sights here and there to stop and take photos of, which I of course did. At the beach itself, well, I'm not really keen to be That Guy who lugs a big camera around at the beach, taking photos of who knows what. That's right up there with White Van Metal Detector Guy in the rogues' gallery of suspicious-looking beach denizens. So I switched to phone photos, and didn't take a lot of those either, since I actually don't like having people in my photos and it was hard to avoid there.

Atlantic barrier island beaches like this are all variations on a simple theme: Long flat straight expanses of sand, a low rise behind the beach with some low shrubs (assuming developers haven't had their way with the place), and behind that a wide expanse of salt marsh between the barrier island and the mainland. So the beach here reminded me a lot of the Canaveral National Seashore down in Florida, which I already had photos of. I did the toes-in-the-nice-warm-Atlantic thing though, which was the main goal here. Ahead of photos, even, if you can believe that.

If the names "Assateague" and "Chincoteague" sound familiar, it's either from avidly reading my other blog posts here of late, or more likely from the famous series of young adult books about the islands' wild ponies. I never read any of the Misty books as a kid, but I seem to recall grade school classmates being obsessed with them. And then begging their parents for ponies of their own, probably. The books, while fictional, were based roughly on real people, horses, places, and events. If only I'd done a little more research ahead of time, I would've learned that two of the famous horses, "Misty" and "Stormy", were taxidermied and are now on display at the ranch where they once lived. This seems like a hilarious bit of macabre bad taste. If only I'd known, I would have carved out a bit of time to go visit the former children's book stars in their, um, retirement. I mean, where else can you see something like this? It's not like they've taxidermied the former stars of the Harry Potter movies, at least not so far. Not giggling would be the hard part. Or at least not giggling to a disruptive degree.

Every year, ponies from the island are herded and made to swim across the channel to Chincoteague Island (even though there's a perfectly decent bridge they could walk across) to be auctioned as a fundraiser for the local fire department. This has become the area's largest annual tourist event. I understand the need for some sort of herd management. As in the Western US, wild horses are an introduced species with no natural predators. Furthermore they're an introduced species that the public has become attached to, so removing them isn't a viable option. Thanks to the lack of predators, the unchecked population grows until it outstrips the local food supply, and the public won't stand for starving horses any more than it would accept the absence of horses. So they've taken to auctioning "excess" horses every year, to keep the herd size manageable. (Which is what the BLM does in Oregon and other western states, somewhat controversially.) The pony herd on the Maryland part of the island (kept separate from the Virginia ponies by a fence) is on birth control, believe it or not, which keeps the size of the herd down in a somewhat less picturesque way.

This business about ponies is not really a digression, because one of the books ("Stormy, Misty's Foal") centers around the real-life Ash Wednesday Storm of 1962, which also played a key role in the protection of the National Seashore. Much of the island had been platted for development, roads had been built, and some construction had begun when the storm swept through and flattened everything. Instead of rebuilding everything at taxpayer expense, which is what usually happens, the federal government acquired the island and handed it over to the National Park Service to run as a public beach park. Possibly this was due in part to sentimental attachment to the ponies. It's not clear what would have become of them if Assateague Island had been converted into vacation homes and trinket shops.

The adjacent wildlife refuge protects an extensive area of salt marshes, along with the historic 142' Assateague lighthouse (both of which I have photos of), and inland parts of the island where the local pony herd tends to hang out, which apparently are closed to the public. The lighthouse was closed for renovation when I was there; I didn't really mind since I've never really had a thing for lighthouses. I'm not going to make fun of people who do, though; I have wayyy too many posts here tagged 'bridge' for me to go around casting that particular stone.

Chincoteague Causeway

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A few photos of the long, winding Chincoteague Causeway , which connects Chincoteague Island with the mainland. My hotel was on the island, and the NASA center is on the mainland, and I lost track of how many times I drove back and forth along this route. It's kind of a fun drive, actually; there are a few elevated bridge portions, but much of the route is a very low causeway that feels more or less like you're driving along right at water level, as if you're zipping across the marsh in a hovercraft or something. It probably didn't hurt that my rental car was a fast little Fiat 500, and going anywhere with it made for a fun drive.

As the story goes, when the road to Chincoteague Island opened in 1922, the grand opening drew a large number of motorists to the island, who were then stranded there when bad weather damaged the road. The road was eventually repaired and reopened, but it still wasn't up to the job and was replaced with an improved bridge in 1940. Time and traffic and salt water eventually took their toll on their replacement, and it in turn was replaced in 2009.

The original bridge first crossed the much smaller (and aptly named) Marsh Island, which has just a handful of houses. From there a truss swing bridge connected to the main island. That bridge was an iconic image of the island for many years (although, let's be honest, it wasn't exactly the St. Johns Bridge or the Golden Gate or anything). The replacement project went ahead and ripped it out anyway, and lots of junky beach tourist knicknacks suddenly became valuable collector's items.

The new causeway now detours around Marsh Island (with a short spur bridge connecting it to the causeway) and it avoids the island's downtown, instead connecting to the road that continues out to the beaches of Assateague Island, further east. I never saw firsthand what traffic was like with the old bridge, but just looking at a map and comparing the two routes it stands to reason (I think) that the new bridge is a big improvement. Even if it never shows up on t-shirts and collector spoons and shot glasses like its predecessor.

Eastern Shore of Virginia NWR

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Here's a slideshow from the Eastern Shore of Virginia National Wildlife Refuge, near the southern tip of the Eastern Shore. I stopped here on my way from Norfolk, VA up to Wallops Island back in September. I'd taken a redeye flight from Portland, with an early morning layover in Charlotte, and I was a bit out of sorts. (Protip: Don't assume US Airways will give you a pillow and blanket just because JetBlue had them on your last redeye flight.) I'd stopped for breakfast at the little restaurant on the Chesapeake Bay Bridge-Tunnel (yes, on), but I decided I needed to stop and walk around a bit, so I turned at the wildlife refuge sign and had a look around.

It's primarily a migratory bird refuge, but early September isn't prime bird watching season (as far as I know), so most of my photos are of butterflies and a nearby abandoned artillery battery. The visitor center had a small butterfly garden behind the main building, and most of the photos come from there, but it seemed like there were butterflies everywhere, to a rather surreal degree. I noticed the butterflies all along the Eastern Shore, so I can't blame this entirely on jet lag. Maybe what I picked up on is actually the Northwest's relative lack of butterflies. I'm not sure, and the Questions & Answers page from the North American Butterfly Association is vague about what regions have larger or smaller butterfly populations. The Coastal Virginia Wildlife Observatory has been doing butterfly research here for several years, and several TripAdvisor reviews of the refuge mention the butterflies, so it's probably not just my imagination.

There are also a couple of photos of an enormous "cicada killer" wasp that was bumbling around on the visitor center lawn. I'd never seen one before, or any sort of bee this large for that matter. As a West Coast resident, I didn't realize the USA had bees this size. I figured (correctly, as it turns out) that I would've heard of these creatures before if they were as dangerous as they looked, so I stopped for some close up photos. A refuge volunteer wandered by to see what I was doing & was amused that I was so fascinated by a mere cicada killer. Every time an East Coast person says something like this, I always want to respond with "Oh yeah? We have wolves." Which is true, though I've never actually seen one in the wild.

The coastal battery in a few of the photos is Battery Winslow, part of the former Fort Custis. During World War II, it (along with Fort Story in Virginia Beach), defended the entrance to Chesapeake Bay from shipborne evildoers. This involved several concrete batteries sporting huge cannons, pointed seaward and able to put very large holes in anything that strayed too close to Hampton Roads. This is more or less the same role Fort Stevens played at the mouth of the Columbia River here in Oregon. Fort Custis morphed into an air force installation shortly after WWII, and was finally deactivated in 1980. The US Fish and Wildlife Service took it over a few years after that.

I'm not a military history fan by any means, but abandoned military bases can be a good source of mysterious concrete structures, slowly being reclaimed by nature. That tends to be photogenic, so I'm willing make a detour to see something like this. I"m not sure a warm sunny day was the right time to visit, though. The battery seems to call for a cold, gloomy, blustery day, and black and white photos, and maybe some angsty musicians or runway models posing unhappily in front of it. Maybe as an album cover, with an equally gloomy vinyl LP inside.

Chesapeake Bay Bridge-Tunnel

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On my recent trip to Wallops Island, VA, I flew in to the Norfolk airport and then crossed the Chesapeake Bay Bridge-Tunnel to get to the Eastern Shore side of the bay. After I planned this out, it took roughly a millisecond for me to go, hey, here's an idea, I'll take some photos of the bridge while I'm there and do a blog post about it.

This is by far the largest bridge I've covered here. It spans the mouth of Chesapeake Bay, and it just goes on and on for 23 miles. Most individual parts of the bridge really aren't that remarkable; much of the distance is over shallow water, this being an estuary and all, so the bridge is just a low trestle structure over those parts. There are two tunnel segments though, along with one higher bridge segment, to accommodate the bay's shipping channels. The reasoning behind the tunnels (as opposed to building more bridge segments) is that the Hampton Roads region is home to the world's largest naval base, and the navy could be blocked in port if the Rooskies or other evildoers managed to collapse bridges into the shipping channels.

At either end of each tunnel is a small artificial island. The island closest to the Norfolk side of the bay actually has a restaurant, gift shop, and fishing pier. (The others have no facilities and I'm not sure you're even allowed to stop on them.) I naturally had to stop and have a look around. Partly for the whole photo / blog post thing, and partly because I didn't get to stop there on my only other trip across the bridge, on a family trip to the East Coast back in 1987. My mom decided it was a tacky tourist trap and she turned up her nose at the idea. So I pretty much had to stop and check the place out. It actually wasn't that tacky, although it very well might have been in 1987.

One other difference versus 1987 is that the bridge now has separate trestles for northbound and southbound traffic, so it's a four lane bridge now except for the tunnel parts. The tunnels still narrow down to one lane each direction, I imagine because building more tunnels would be expensive.

A point about naming: I'd always thought of this as the "Chesapeake Bay Bridge", but it turns out there's an unfortunate naming collision at work here. Further up the bay there's a large bridge that also goes by "Chesapeake Bay Bridge", so you can't drop the word "tunnel" without confusing people. This bridge is technically named the "Lucius J. Kellam Jr. Bridge–Tunnel" after a local civic leader, but as far as I know nobody calls it that. The acronym "CBBT" seems to get a bit of use though.

Did I mention it costs twelve dollars to cross the bridge-tunnel? Seriously. Granted that comes to about 50 cents per mile, but still. Twelve dollars.

Neptune's Park, Virginia Beach

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At the tail end of my recent trip to Virginia, I made a brief detour over to Virginia Beach to take some photos of the huge and sorta-famous King Neptune statue and the surrounding Neptune's Park. The statue is a mascot of the city's Neptune Festival and has actually only been there since 2005. Based on the photos of it that I'd seen, it looked cheesy enough that it merited a side trip, plus I had a rental car I actually liked for a change and I wanted to drive it a bit more.

So I got there and realized there was some sort of municipal weekend festival going on, and the whole area was clogged with tourists, and it was $10 to park in the nearby public parking garage. I only had about 10-15 minutes to spare before I needed to head toward the Norfolk airport, so this was a problem. I don't like to think I'm a stingy person, but paying $1/minute to park struck me as a poor allocation of funds. So I figured I could still pull off a blog post if I drove by the park on Atlantic Avenue and snapped a few quick phone photos of the statue while I was stuck in traffic. The resulting photos turned out to be comically, hilariously bad. I think one of the photos may include part of either the head or the trident, out of focus and behind some festival stands and tents and so forth, but I'm not really sure about that. It could also be a bigfoot sighting, based on the photo quality. For what it's worth, I also had big sticky half-eaten chunk of baklava in the car to maybe chuck at Pat Robertson (who's based in Virginia Beach) if I saw him, and then blog about it from jail, but that didn't pan out either, and I'm pretty sure I wouldn't have actually done it anyway, and I ended up throwing the baklava away at the airport instead.

So I went back and forth trying to decide whether I had enough material for a blog post or not. The photos I ended up with were so terrible that I figured I could go with a "so-bad-it's-good" angle, sort of the Plan 9 from Outer Space of blog posts. And then I thought, if I only go with photos from successful photo-taking forays here, I'm creating a skewed idea of what this blogging lifestyle is really like, and kids will grow up wanting to be just like me, not realizing how frustrating and annoying it can be sometimes, until it's too late. Or something like that. Anyway, trumping all other concerns was the idea that I either use these crappy photos, or I don't get a little "Virginia Beach" pushpin on the map for this humble blog. That's kind of an absurd reason and I imagine I'll get over it sooner or later, but for now I'm still kind of big on adding exciting new places to the map. Even if they're just a blur.

Wallops Island National Wildlife Refuge

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A few photos from Wallops Island National Wildlife Refuge across the road from part of NASA's Wallops Flight Facility. Since the USFWS website is shuttered right now due to a silly government shutdown, here's their description of the place pulled from Google's cached version, since I have no idea when the official site might come back online:

The Wallops Island National Wildlife Refuge was created on July 10, 1975 when 373 acres of land were transferred to the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service from the National Aeronautics and Space Administration (NASA). The refuge, comprised mainly of salt marsh and woodlands, is located east of Wattsville in Accomack County, Virginia and contains habitat for a variety of trust species, including upland- and wetland-dependent migratory birds. Additionally, the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service has an agreement with NASA to use the NASA-owned portion of Wallops Island proper on a non-interference basis for research and management of declining wildlife in special need of protection. The agreement with NASA covers approximately 3,000 acres of Wallops Island proper and is primarily salt marsh. Wallops Island NWR and the agreement with NASA are administered by the staff at Chincoteague National Wildlife Refuge.

A sea-level fen, known as the Simoneston Bay sea-level fen, exist on and is protected by the refuge. Sea-level fens are nutrient-poor, maritime seepage wetlands, confined to a few sites with an unusual combination of environmental conditions for the mid-Atlantic. The fen is located just above the highest tide levels, at the base of a slope where abundant groundwater discharges. Only four occurrences are known in Virginia.

The Wallops Island NWR was opened for the first time ever to public hunting in 2002 to reduce the affects of overbrowsing by deer on refuge habitats and reduce the potential of deer collision with vehicles on the adjacent state highway 175 and neighboring flight facility.

The origin as excess, unused NASA land is similar to how the Merritt Island NWR at Cape Canaveral came about. I'm not sure coastal development pressures are quite as acute here as they are in Florida, but from the NASA standpoint it's great to have a buffer area between your launch pads and encroaching hotels and condos and so forth. The launch pads aren't protected from encroaching nature, though, as an unlucky local frog discovered during the LADEE launch.

As the USFWS description explains, this refuge is administered by the nearby Chincoteague wildlife refuge, and it doesn't have its own visitor's center or really anything in the way of developed facilities. There's just a grassy parking area and a small sign with the name of the place and some hunting and fishing regulations, and an unmarked trailhead leading off into the forest.

I stopped here on the day of the LADEE launch, as there weren't a lot of public activities that day and I had some time to kill. It basically looks like a typical coastal forest and wetland area. It probably wouldn't merit a blog post of its own if I lived in the area and saw scenery like this all the time. Still, if this isn't the sort of environment you see every day, and you're in the area anyway, it's a representative example if you want to have a quick look. Just remember to bring bug spray. I'd just purchased a new can of DEET spray but somehow forgot to put any on before wandering into the wildlife refuge, and I ended up with a few annoying bug bites. As an erstwhile South Carolina resident who really ought to know better, I found this kind of embarrassing.

LADEE Launch, Wallops Island VA

LADEE Minotaur V @ Wallops Island

Photos from Launch Pad 0-B at Wallops Island, Virginia. This Minotaur V rocket (a converted Peacekeeper ICBM) is set to launch the LADEE moon probe tomorrow night, at 11:27pm Eastern.