Monthly Archives: September 2015

In the middle of the day the Blue Ridge Mountains look green, but at sunrise and sunset, when viewed from a distance, they have a very visible blue haze. This is nature’s healthy smog, produced when plants breathe. They exhale hydrocarbons into the air, and these tiny molecules join in […]

This falls is named for nearby Looking Glass Rock, a massive monolith almost 4000 feet tall named for the way its granite face can sometimes be covered with frozen water in winter, reflecting the sun like a mirror. A river runs by the rock and at the point where I […]

  Roan Mountain straddles North Carolina and Tennessee and the Appalachian trail runs along much of its ridge, reaching elevations over 6000 feet. The Friends of Roan Mountain is a group fostering appreciation of this amazing ecosystem, and this weekend is their fall naturalist’s rally. I dragged myself out of […]

This is a shot taken en route to Asheville, with a glimpse of mountains cloaked in clouds. Looking out the window, I was transfixed by the impossible blue of sky at this height, the complex geometry of endless shapes and layers of clouds. There was a familiar giddy feeling at […]

I returned to Madison Square Park after finding it so photogenic with my recent squirrel encounter. This time I turned my camera to the Flatiron building, constructed at the turn of the century. Its triangular shape tapers to an astonishingly narrow 6 feet, and this combined with its height and […]

As I was leaving Grand Central, I felt a single drop of rain. Wondering if I imagined it, I looked up and saw thousands of tiny drops suspended in the night air far above me. They were easily visible because of the almost overpowering light. The Chrysler building provided the […]

Although this pedicab driver is taking a break from pedaling, he seems to be quite busy. A master of multitasking, he is listening to music, smoking a cigarette, and checking his phone- maybe his Instagram- as cars, cabs and buses whiz by in the background. Pedicabs became part of New […]

Faberge is synonymous with the amazingly intricate Easter eggs created for the czar and his family from the late 1800s until 1917, when the Revolution ended that relationship. But the craftsmanship is equally impressive with the amazing flowers currently on a rotating display at the Met. Though less famous than […]

It is said that gray squirrels once could travel the entire east coast without touching the ground, moving from the top of one tree to the next. There are records in the 19th century, including by Audubon, of enormous squirrel movements. In 1842 a scurry of squirrels (the technical term […]