Orion's Photos: places - Arizona - 2004 - grand_canyon
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Fellow UIUC graduate students Gengbin Zheng and Chao Huang (0262), and I skipped out on the Phoenix conference, Supercomputing 2003, we were attending and drove four hours north to the grand canyon on November 20, 2003. We arrived at the canyon just before noon.
As usual, there are quite a few stereo sets here---later shots move to the right, often over tens of meters of baseline.
Our first stop (0164-0187) was Mather Point, working our way east a few hundred feet for stereo baseline. At Yavapai Station, we passed an absurdly fat, presumably tourist-fed, squirrel (0189); and I took a panorama (0190-0200). We then moved on to Bright Angel Lodge (pictured in 0206), where we ate lunch and caught the bus to Trailview Overlook (0201-0206).
From there we moved on to Powell Point, the site of the old 1960's Orphan uranium mine (0207). I took a panorama (0208-0214) and a photo of one of the more photogenic trees (0218). We then made the short hop to Hopi Point, where I took a huge-baseline stereo series (0219-0231), with at least 10m between each photo. I was intrigued by one tiny remaining dot of red earth on a triangular plateau, and took another stereo series (0234-0236, 0253).
Our next stop was Mohave Point (0240-0262). The handrails are installed on extraordinarily sturdy mounts (0242) bolted to concrete pads--I suspect you could safely prop up a fully loaded semi on a single handrail mount. A raven floated upward past us, surfing the cliff's thermals (0254-0259).
Our final stop was Hermit's Rest, the end of the bus route. The view from the overlook (0263-0268) wasn't too impressive; but we hiked down into the canyon. On the trail down, we passed a bizarre ground plant (0269-0273) with a gigantic seed stem; easily 5m tall. As we descended the trail, I saw and climbed out to a spit (0288), where the wind nearly pushed me off the 2,000 foot cliff. We hiked back up through the weird red light of sunset (0291-0293), and took a few pictures of the canyon at sunset before heading back.
All images taken by Orion Lawlor
and placed completely in the public domain.
Converted to HTML on Thu Jul 29 13:11:11 CDT 2004.
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