Looking Out of Windows

When I was Vivian and Evan's age, I didn't blink when I was in a rare airplane ride - because there was so much to see outside the windows. Sometimes, I can get Vivian and Evan to look. Mostly they don't. But I continue to stare. Here are a few photos from a recent trip to San Diego.

If it's particularly interesting I come back and look it up. This is near Dateland, Arizona. It is one of the world's largest solar power plants and provides energy to California.

Below is the Yuma Proving Grounds north east of Yuma, Arizona. It's the world's largest military test facility. On the western (left) edge of the picture is the Colorado river just before what remains of it flows into Mexico. The Army Corps of Engineers tested amphibious crossings and built pontoon boats to train it engineers during World War II here. The air strip at the south end is the Laguna Army Air Filed. To the east is the circular track for testing army vehicles and is a part of GM's commercial Yuma Desert Proving Ground.

The lake in the photo below is the Salton Sea and is California's largest lake by area, but it was made accidentally. The area occupied by the lake has apparently filled and dried in 400-500 year cycles historically, but was a low dry desert when a rail depot was built here in the 1860s. Then in 1905, excessive rain and silt in canals built five years prior from the Colorado river breached their banks and the main flow of the Colorado started filling the dry lake bed. It took two years to plug the breach and by that time, viola - there was a lake. Since then it has been in it's drying cycle and has gone from freshwater to more saline than the Pacific Ocean, killing off the resort towns and resident fish populations. 

And here's Lake Travis - as we came back to Austin from the west - with a splash of the setting sun reflected off a cloud and the lake. Mansfield Dam and the outgoing Colorado River - not the one in Arizona and California - are on the the top leftish. The Oasis restaurant is the large built-up blob at about 7 o'clock on the main basin of the lake. The body of the lake carries on to the right and the Cypress Creek arm is on the bottom right. This is the lake where I mostly do my sailing.