View From The Plane - Trip To NM, And Back

I just love geography! For me airplane trips are a wonderful way to become reaquainted with the topography of various places, and learn things I never knew before. My trip to Albuquerque and back passed through Los Angeles, so here I become reacquainted with California and New Mexico. It's surprising, despite its large population (35 million, and more) just how under-populated a lot of California is. You learn that by flying over it and seeing just how empty much of it is. And I still don't really understand the mountainous jumble of Southern California, whose rocks have been tortured by the San Andreas Fault.

Here are a few pictures from the airplane (Flight to NM on Friday afternoon, July 23, 2010).

Left: Sacramento's ARCO Arena.

Left: Union Pacific Trestle and the Capital City Freeway cross the American River near Sacramento's Cal Expo.

Cal Expo, site of the California State Fair (which is underway far below).

Left: The American River Parkway. From bottom to top: William B. Pond Recreation Area, River Bend Park, Hagan Community Park, and Ancil Hoffman Park.

Left: Jackson Road (Highway 16) just west of Rancho Murieta.

Left: Ye gads! Yosemite Valley, seen a number of miles west of where people usually see it. Clearly visible on the left side of the valley, El Capitan!

Left: Hensley Lake Recreation Area, just NE of Madera, CA.

Left: San Joaquin River Valley, just north of Fresno (and NW of Clovis) along Highway 41.

Left: The Fresno Air Terminal (better known to me by its three-letter acronym, FAT).

Left: The strange, dessicated wilderness of the Buena Vista Lake Bed, SW of Bakersfield.

Looking SE, I was startled by a sudden flash in the desert: the sun had reflected off the solar power plant in the Mojave Desert, nearly a hundred miles away, at Kramer Junction!
Left: Kern County's Elk Hills have been intensively-drilled for oil for more than a century, leaving a very odd-looking landscape behind.

Left: The southern end of the Central Valley (more or less). Near Taft.

Left: A sidelong look to the NE at the Antelope Valley, home of Edwards AFB (out of picture, to the right) with the Tehachapi Mountains in the background, and the San Gabriel Mountains in the foreground.

From space, the Antelope Valley seems to form a very prominent wedge. When Space Shuttle astronauts want to land at Edwards AFB, and the Shuttle pitches forward, allowing the astonauts to see the Earth for the first time after reentry, the Antelope Valley wedge is the first thing the astronauts can recognize: from hundreds of miles away! To the Space Shuttle astronauts, the Antelope Valley wedge means home!

Left: Lake Piru.

Left: Santa Clara River Valley, on the southern outskirts of Piru.

Below: Simi Valley.

Left: Hilltop development in the general vicinity of Malibu.

People in the Malibu area seem to gather on hilltops. You know what also likes to gather on hilltops in the Malibu area? Fires!

Oddly, I couldn't get my camera to focus while passing over Malibu, Santa Monica, and Pacific Palisades. I think Barbara Streisand must have been sending out a camera-scrambling signal!

Left: Brentwood on the left and Westwood on the right.

Left: Downtown Westwood.

Left: Hollywood. The whitish square in the foreground is Paramount Studios.

Left: A rather hallucinatory view of downtown Los Angeles.

First landing, at LAX. A short time later, takeoff to Albuquerque!

Lef: Here are the two tall stacks of the coastal El Segundo Power Plant. I've done air quality modeling for this power plant, on and off, for nine years. In the background are the many tanks of Chevron's Oil Refinery, in Torrance.

Below: POLA/POLB (Port of Los Angeles and Port of Long Beach).

Left: Long Beach

Left: Anaheim Bay National Wildlife Refuge (awfully cramped quarters for a Wildlife Refuge!)

Left: Looking north along Highway 57, where it meets I-5 and Highway 22 (in the vicinity of the cities of Orange, Garden Grove, and Santa Ana). Disneyland is just off to the left!

Below: San Jacinto Mountains, with Banning Pass beyond. These tall and prominent mountains stand sentinel over Palm Springs and mark the geographic eastward end of the Los Angeles Basin. If you drive west from Palm Springs, Banning Pass is where the smog starts!

Left: Eagle Mountain.

The iron for the WWII's Pacific Liberty ships came exclusively from the Eagle Mountain open pit mine.

From 1992 to 1995, I did a lot of air quality modeling for the proposed Eagle Mountain landfill. The open pit would have been filled with garbage from LA, making it the world's largest municipal landfill - the largest landfill ever constructed in such a dry place. Nevertheless, the National Park Service strenuously objected to the project (since nearby Joshua Tree was upgraded from a National Monument to a National Park in 1994). True to form for many proposed mega-projects in California that face stiff opposition, the landfill was never built, and Eagle Mountain today is only a little different than it was in 1946.

Old oxbows of the Colorado River make themselves evident near the modern river, along Highway 95, not far from Vidal, CA.

Left: The southwestern monsoon brought all kinds of clouds to Arizona, completely obscuring the state. This gorgeous cloudscape is somewhere over central Arizona.

Below: The Rio Puerco River, SW of Albuquerque.

Left: Albuquerque, and the Sandia Mountains.

(Pictures of return flight below: afternoon and evening of Sunday, August 1, 2010).

Left: Tijeras Canyon, which lies between the Sandia and Manzano Mountains, and forms the historic corridor through which Route 66 used to go, and where Interstate 40 goes today, to the Great Plains to the east.

Left: Steep, turning climb! Albuquerque's Northeast Heights, and the Sandia Mountains.

Left: Looking north, up the Rio Grande River Valley, from over Albuqerque

Left: Looking NW. On this side of the Rio Grande River is Albuquerque and Alameda. On the other side, from left to right, is Taylor Ranch, Paradise Hills, Rio Rancho, and Corrales.

Note how, despite years of modern development, that the Spanish form of land use - thin strips of land perpendicular to the river - is still evident in the valley. This form of land use derived from Spain's province of Galicia, where so many New Mexicans originally came from, and which permits settlers to have access to water, as well as access to grazing in the hills beyond the river.

Left: In the foreground is Paradise Hills (settled longer, and thus greener, with more trees). In the background is Rio Rancho.

Left: On the way to LA, our aircraft crossed just under some other jet's contrail (probably heading to LA too). On the ground below, the same contrail casts a prominent shadow over the Mojave Desert, somewhere near 29 Palms, CA.

Contrails have a surprising impact on how much sunlight reaches the ground. After 9/11, when commercial flights were grounded, almost no contrails appeared over the U.S. for a few days, and atmospheric scientists were able to accurately measure the effects on contrails on cloudiness, solar insolation, and even temperature!

Left: Crossing back over Banning Pass from the east, one runs right away into the Los Angeles smog front!

Left: Riverside, CA.

Left: Highway 60 and I-15 meet in the vicinity of Ontario and Fontana.

Left: I-10, the Orange Freeway, and the Chino Valley Freeway all come together!

Left: Sunlight glistens from water in the San Jose Creek concrete channel. Just east of La Puente.

Left: Whittier Narrows. I suppose this is where the famous dam site was (which burst and flooded many years ago), or close to it, at any rate.

Left: Back in Oz again (South Central LA in the foreground).

Left: Hollywood Park racetrack, just east of LAX.