Today’s guest post comes courtesy of Christopher Klemm, who took this photograph in Joshua Tree National Park.
Category: California
Perch
On the rocks of Grizzly Peak, nothing resets your soul like seeing the hills and trees towering above the hazy sprawl of Oakland.
The Scary Door
With a campus as huge and old as Berkeley’s, it’s natural to expect that there would be some odd corners here and there. This particular back door, hiding in an out-of-the-way location at the back of Bowles Hall (and surrounded by creepy fences and trees) seems like the perfect place to hold the meetings of a secret society.
Purple Haze
The evening in the east bay is a magical time and place.
Cloud City
I believe I’ve commented before that San Francisco, once the clouds roll in, bears some resemblance to the Bespin’s cloud city, especially with Sutro tower poking out above everything else.
Berkeley’s Bells
Up in the top of UC Berkeley’s Campanile, the carillon is made up of these enormous bells. In their environment of steel and stone and bronze, the bells seem to resonate even when they’re silent.
More Than a Nose
Dollar Days at Golden Gate Fields: dollar beers, dollar hot dogs, dollar admissions. Delicious, preposterous revelry. And rivalry.
Mostly, I just love the dynamic sense of motion captured here. (And the texture differences between horse, grass, and dirt.)
Perfect Sunset
I love that time of the evening when the earth is dark but the sky is still blue with just hits of orange and red and the clouds have just a little pink hue.
Tree Tunnel
Driving into the canopy of trees on the way to Grizzly Peak means relief from all of the stress of work and life, and a moment with the beautiful roads of northern California. Today is my last day in Berkeley, and so I can’t think of a more fitting metaphor for finishing graduate school and moving away. On the Rimway, as in life, adventure is ahead.
Night Espresso
Looking down over an intersection in the dead of night reminds me of staring at a moment without time. No cars, no one rushing in and out of the coffee shop. Everything is still. The perfect subject, then, for a photograph.
Flower Cactus
Another shot from my recent trip to the UC Botanical Garden in Berkeley, thought this time from the new world desert area of the garden. This cactus featuring lots of brightly colored flowers really caught my eye among the rest of the cactuses.
American Hobbiton
Berkeley is an eclectic, bizarre place to look at homes. This particular alleyway, with its Middle-Earth-esque Old-World charm, it less than a block from UCB’s campus.
Roses are, well… sort of pink
Nestled away in the hills of Berkeley is the spectacular UC Botanical Garden. It contains a truly impressive collection of plants from around the world and is host to a wide variety of other critters. It turns out to be a very nice place to spend an afternoon (and I’ll definitely have to come back, I don’t think I caught everything!) to boot! This shot is from their collection of old roses.
Civ Gradient
I often talk about the “civilization gradient:” the distance required to go from high-density urban land all the way to empty, rural space. Depending on when a given area modernized and switched from, say, horses to cars, this distance can vary drastically. In “older” parts of the US, like the east coast, the gradient was largely established by feasible distances for travel by horse. On the west coast, an area largely developed after the advent of the car, this distance is usually much longer. The best exception to this is the Bay Area, where various parks around the “lip” of the Bay’s “bowl” effectively compress the distance.
In today’s photo, the whole array of Bay Area landscape is visible: the forests and trails along the peak, the industrial buildings of Lawrence Berkeley National Lab, the quasi-sprawl of Berkeley and Emeryville, and the full urban metropolis of San Francisco at the edge of the clouds.
Grizzly Sunset
The Sun never quite cooperates, even when it’s at its loveliest. Winter means stark sunsets behind the Golden Gate Bridge or San Francisco itself; summer typically means only foggy nights. This was a rare occasion with broad cloud-wings in the upper atmosphere, but in early summer, the Sun drops behind the hills to the north.
Decaseconds 