wordsfromanneli

Thoughts, ideas, photos, and stories.

Category Archives: Geology


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Stoned on the Beach

I hope I don’t offend anyone with this shocking bit of nudity, and I hope I don’t get arrested for posting this photo when I can’t give credit to its owner, but whoever you are, Mr. Photographer, you have given me a smile every time I look at this photo on my laptop. I wanted to share it to pass on the smiles.

Please don’t do anything to infringe on the photographer’s copyright, and I hope I’m not doing that myself. I’m not making money on it, but I sure have got a lot of smiles from it.

“This is just so cool,” he says,

“Lying on the beach.”

“Shame the blanket’s small and won’t,

Accommodate us each.”

 

“Sorry dear, I’ll move aside,

And have you seen my hat?”

“Typical,” she grumbles on,

“Men! They’re all like that.”

 

Soaking up the warming rays,

They drift into a dream,

He loves her and she loves him,

Always they’re a team.


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Composition isn’t Everything …

but it sure helps.

After the snow that, thankfully, stayed up in the hills, I wanted to take a picture of it. As always in photos taken from my house, the power lines ruin the composition for me.

I got thinking about the composition of photos and when I received this photo of my nephew, I had a chuckle over the post that seems to be growing out of his head.

Going way, way back to about 1975, I found this photo of when the Captain and I lived on the Queen Charlotte Islands. My parents came from Vancouver Island to visit us. At the beach,  my mother and I decided to take pictures of each other for posterity. It was one of those rare times when it wasn’t raining and the sand was relatively dry, so she sat on the sand and pointed her Brownie camera at me, and I lay on a log, posing as I prepared to take a picture of her. We laughed when we realized that with the cameras in front of our faces we wouldn’t get much of a picture so we had to take turns. In the photo you see I’ve lowered my camera while she took my picture, and then it was my turn to take hers. We had the giggles and I think that’s why she couldn’t hold the camera steady and ended up taking a picture of her own boots. (For the purposes of this blog post, I’ve taken out my face, but I was grinning a lot in the picture.)

Later she sent me the photo and I laughed all over again. Not the greatest composition, but it was unique.

My mother died in 1982, and this bad photo of her gumboots is one of my special treasures because of the happy memories it evokes.

Don’t forget my other blog, anneli’s place, if you are interested in informal writing tips.


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Slip Sliding Away

Along the drive from the Osoyoos to Hope, in southern BC, it is not uncommon to see talus slopes (evidence of land or rock slides).


In some of these slides, trees grew as if nothing had happened. Did the trees grow there after the slide, or  did they survive the slide, and the rocks whooshed past them and around them? I suppose it would help to know how long ago the slides happened.

These larger trees at the base of the slide (below), must have had the fright of their lives as they watched the mountain come down and then stop a short distance from them. A few more feet, a few more seconds, could have meant annihilation for them.

Below, you can see that some tree trunks lie like unburied skeletons, casualties of the disaster.

But not all living things were left unburied. I wondered how many unsuspecting little animals were swept away and buried forever under the slides.

Some of these steep slopes will continue to loosen and slide for ages, perhaps sometimes just a few rocks bouncing down the hill, or other times, a more major slip of the mountain. Wind, rain, earthquakes, and gravity can all play a role in determining when the earth will move.

Imagine the volume of the gravel and rock that came down in the photo below. If we could put it all back, would it be a hill as high as the ones beside the top of that slide? The upper part of the slide seems to be composed of smaller rocks and gravel, but just look at the size of the boulders that kept bouncing farther down the hill.

A slide cut just a small swath down this hill. Aren’t you glad you weren’t hiking there just then?


Earlier I did a post about the deadly slide that happened outside the town of Hope in 1965, killing four people. If you missed that post and  would like to  see it, here is the link to it. https://wordsfromanneli.com/2018/11/03/the-hope-slide/


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Rocky Times

This part of the beach is very much to Emma’s liking. Sand is easier to run on than rocks.

Farther along, some giant hurled a handful of rocks onto the beach, to the north …

and to the south.

A closer look at some of them make me suspect that over thousands (maybe millions?) of years, some clumps of sand hardened into rocks like the one below. It’s a temporary resting place for the baby rock on its back, or maybe it’s on his face….

Do you see the face in this rock? A big slash for a mouth above the chin; a smooshed up nose; two puffy eyes; a scar that goes from his left eye to the right corner of his mouth; and a wart on his left cheek.

Yes, the maple leaf tells us we are in Canada. I’ll let you speculate what it means that the leaf is upside down just now. ( I didn’t touch it! That’s just the way it is.)

I must learn to be more like the old barnacles on the rock by the end of the maple leaf stem, and hang in there. Time marches on and things change. The tide comes in and the tide goes out. Maybe the next tide will flip the leaf over.

 


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The Hope Slide

About 100 miles east of Vancouver, BC, lies the town of Hope. From here the highway winds through a beautiful stretch of hilly country for 82 miles to the town of Princeton.

Just about 10 miles east of Hope is a viewpoint where I took some photos of the second largest landslide in Canadian history. The Hope Slide came down the mountain on January 9, 1965, burying several vehicles and killing four people. The bodies of two were retrieved, but two others remain buried beneath tons of rock.

I quote Wikipedia here: The slide completely displaced the water and mud in Outram Lake below with incredible force, throwing it against the opposite side of the valley, wiping all vegetation and trees down to the bare rock, then splashed back up the original, now bare, slope before settling.

I see no indication of an Outram Lake on modern maps, but there is an Outram Mountain nearby.

About a mile and a half of the highway was covered in rock, so a gravel road was constructed as a detour until a new section of highway could be built. A portion of the old highway still lies under the slide.

One sweet thing about this whole sad story is that beside the viewpoint, masses of wild strawberries are growing in the moss that covers the gritty gravel beside the road.