Sugarhouse park, April 25

I haven't taken any bird pictures lately, so I went down to the sugarhouse park to catch up with some seagulls. Here are some of my more successful pictures.

... 

... 

... 

... 

... 

Ensign peak, April 22


As the ski season was winding down, I figured it was time for some hiking. To ease myself into the hiking season, I started with the relatively easy Ensign-City Creek Peak hike, which offers picturesque views to downtown and Antelope island. Pictured above is Ensign peak and downtown.

One more shot of Ensign Peak and the valley behind.

I saw a fascinating short movie at Sundance, called site_specific: Las Vegas 05. The filmmaker, Olivo Barbieri films cities from a helicopter, using a tilt&shift lens to achieve a miniature-like effect. Some googling revealed that this illusion can be reproduced quite well by cleverly blurring and otherwise tweaking the image in Photoshop, and there is quite a craze going on flickr. Here is my contribution (original pic taken from Ensign peak)...

Temple square, from the peak.

A wide angle view of the valley from Ensign peak.

The building with the red columns is the Rice-Eccles stadium, much-debated home of the Real Salt Lake soccer team (who were generous enough to invite Real Madrid and receive a very restrained 2-0 punishment).

Here is a shot of the infamous I-15 & I-80 intersection, which was nominated to be one of the most complicated intersections of the US on the Google Earth forums. (If you haven't tried Google Earth, do it now!)

City Creek Peak, which lies behind and above Ensign Peak, offers a nice view of the southern corner of the Lake and Antelope island.

Finally, here is a panoramic shot of the valley from the peak.

On the way this Butterfly posed for me... I see them these Swallowtails (thanks for the correction, Dave) as well as a few other kinds all the time, but they are usually long gone before I can take a picture of them. So I consider this image a minor victory...

Snowshoeing at Brighton, April 2


A colleague of mine (Vijay) from India was here for the spring for a month. He convinced me to do try snowshoeing, which I've always wanted to. The major impediment in the past was that if a weekend was sunny I felt an overwhelming call to go skiing instead of messing around with snowshoes, and when the weather was ugly I would just stay home. I did get a few pangs of "I'd rather be skiing" on the way, but I also enjoyed walking around in the snowcovered forest a lot. We went to Brighton, hiked around the base and then went up to Twin Peaks Reservoir.

I attempted to take a picture of the Evergreen lift framed exactly the same as the one I took on the Alta-Brighton hike back in October. When I got home and compared them, I was astonished to discover how close I got.

We came upon this nice winter residence on the way up. They had their own snowplow on the driveway, and for a good reason...

The twin lakes reservoir was covered by a good helping of snow. For comparison, please refer to this picture.

As usual, I couldn't resist taking a panoramic shot...

On the way down in the canyon, there was a mess of cars and people all over the road. It turned out that a mountain goat was giving an afternoon show on a particularly vertical section of the canyon wall. The following couple of pictures are my attempt to convey the insane maneuvers the goat was performing. (I'm still surprised this species survived as long as it had – they don't have too much of a margin for error.)

...

...

India, week 4


During my last week a couple of my colleagues were kind enough to take me on a trip to the ancient temples of Belur and Halebidu. Due to the traffic conditions being as they are, this 250 mile trip takes an entire long day. Here is a representative sample of what you might see on the road...