Went on a little trip last week, to wonderous San Francisco and points north. Had a great time, but more on that later. Before we got there, we were lucky enough (like many hundreds of people every day I suppose) to fly over the deserts of southern Utah and Nevada. From 30,000 feet, the landscapes are completely surreal: huge striped canyons snaking around here and there, mountain ridges leaping up in the middle of huge plains, isolated towns nestled in hidden valleys, roads to nowhere, giant green circles of pivot irrigation farms in the middle of the desert, etc.. I wouldn't mind flying over that bit of the country for an entire week, if I could.

Here's Comb Ridge, just west of Bluff, Utah:

The road that cuts across the bluff at top of my picture is Rt 163 on the Google map. But, this, as with all of these pictures, is oriented with South on top, so it's rotated 180 deg from a typical map.

And, moving into Nevada, here's the Tonopah Test Range portion of Nellis Air Force Base:

If I had known, at the time, what I was looking at, I'd have lifted the lens up a little bit more, and maybe got a shot of Groom Lake, aka Area 51. It lies about 50mi above and to the left of the small lake at the top-left in my shot. No, I probably wouldn't have caught anything interesting, but hey, what can I say... I was a big fan of the X-Files. Here's that section on Google. Groom Lake is the pentagonal one to the SE, with a little road running through the SW side of it, in the Google map. If you zoom in on Rt 375, to the east, you'll see that it's named "The Extraterrestrial Highway".

And here's the little town of Silver Peak, NV (pop. 200):

I wasn't sure what this was from the sky; but it turns out that it's a lithium mine.

Moving westward a bit farther, we get to the high peaks of Yosemite:

I like the two little bright blue lakes up on the mountains. They were a spectacular vivid blue, but I couldn't get a good picture of them - need a longer lens and a slower plane. I think that's in this area.

More later.