#ray boren

[fishstickmonkey]

Ray Boren

(via Bryce Canyon National Park : Image of the Day)

[photosophers]

Snake River's Oxbow Bend

Ray Boren

Oxbow Bend delivers one of the most delightfully pastoral views in Wyoming’s awe-inspiring Jackson Hole valley and Grand Teton National Park. An oxbow is a river’s cut-off, curving meander, or a pool or lake often shaped, as the name suggests, as the wooden yoke on an old-style pioneer wagon, used to harness an ox. The Snake River’s Oxbow Bend, just west of the park entrance at Moran Junction, and a mile east of Jackson Lake Junction, is a fine and particularly scenic example. The Snake’s main current has shifted to the south, creating a reflective backwater, popular with birds such as swans, pelicans, geese and ducks, as well as mammals like otters, moose, elk and other creatures -- including roadside clusters of gawking and often camera-toting humans. While Oxbow Bend is breathtaking in every season, this view photographed on June 6, 2014, reflects the early-summer snow-striped and glacier-carved eastern face of the Teton Range’s Moran Peak. The mountain is named for Thomas Moran, an influential 19th-century landscape artist best known for paintings of the Yellowstone country and of the Grand Canyon. As a young man, he began visiting much of the then-unexplored and unmapped American West on expeditions led by government surveyors and topographers, including Ferdinand Vandeveer Hayden and John Wesley Powell. Moran is credited, via his vibrant, large-scale works (two of them purchased by Congress), and along with the black-and-white photography of his friend William Henry Jackson, with helping visually to inspire the creation of early national parks, including Yellowstone. Photo details: Camera Model: NIKON D3200; Lens: AF-S DX VR Zoom-Nikkor 18-55mm f/3.5-5.6G; Focal Length: 24mm (35mm equivalent: 36mm); Aperture: f/11.0; Exposure Time: 0.0020 s (1/500); ISO equiv: 320; Software: iPhoto 9.5.1. 

[photosophers]

Craters of the Moon

Ray Boren

Some people in the past thought central Idaho’s barren, basalt-black and virtually impassable landscape to be rather otherworldly, and particularly lunar. In reality, of course, the region’s volcanic nature is very much of this Earth. Craters of the Moon National Monument and Preserve, the dark igneous heart of the state’s Snake River Plain, is a place millions of years in the making — with some geologically recent makeovers. When viewed from high above the Snake River Plain looks like a long, curving valley stretching about 400 mi (640 km) from the Oregon-Idaho border northeast toward Yellowstone National Park on the borders of Wyoming, Montana and Idaho. Over millions of years, this valley was created by an underlying volcanic hot spot situated beneath the migrating North American Plate that cooked much of the surface above and fed a series of giant calderas. It’s believed the latest caldera is today’s geologically active Yellowstone region. More recently, a mere 2,000 to 15,000 years ago, magma continued to bubble upward along what is called the Great Rift of Idaho, with lava surging over the land in eight eruptive periods, according to the National Park Service. These events layered an area of 618 sq. mi (1,600 sq. km) with seemingly fresh cinder cones, crags and lava fields that have come to be called Craters of the Moon. A loop road, viewpoints and hiking and walking paths within range of the park’s visitor center, midway between the cities of Twin Falls and Idaho Falls, take visitors through a piled, pitted, spattered, shattered and tubular (lava caves) landscape that seems to stretch far into the distance, toward Idaho’s often snow-capped mountains. Photos taken on March 13, 2014.

Photo details: Top - Camera Model: NIKON D3200; Lens: AF-S DX VR Zoom-Nikkor 18-55mm f/3.5-5.6G; Focal Length: 22mm (35mm equivalent: 33mm); Aperture: f/11.0; Exposure Time: 0.0025 s (1/400); ISO equiv: 400. Bottom - Same except: Focal Length: 36mm (35mm equivalent: 54mm); Aperture: f/10.0; Exposure Time: 0.0031 s (1/320).