A new road trip

The part of the trip from Wisconsin to the dragonfly meeting in Virginia and back to Wisconsin is complete. We (4 of us) had some great days in the field and we all shot a lot of species and collected some interesting specimens. A few days we were weather challenged, but collected nymphs anyway.I collected eggs from a female Epiaeschna heros that 3 of us are going use to document embryo development and as interesting photomicrography subjects. The 3 of us are also starting a new longer term research project that will utilize my new imaging system to collect data to test our hypothesis.There is a lightning storm going on tonight but I can't get out to photograph it because of an intermittent fault in my truck headlights that has plagued me on the last half of the trip. It is raining hard and I don't have a good vantage point where I am staying. I am going to be spending a few days visiting relatives in Iowa so should be able to fix the headlight and hopefully we will see some more interesting weatherMy wife is flying in to meet me in Des Moines and then we are going to swing down through the Southwest. I am hoping for dramatic skies and lighting on interesting geological strata, route to be determined en route.I have been occasionally checking here at EvC on my phone. I note there are quite a few discussions with creationists in progress. Just my luck to not to have time to participate. I'm going to have some reading to catch up on when I get home....maybe a little in Des Moines.

I'm in Scotts Bluff in NW Nebraska tonight. Tomorrow I'm headed for Toadstool Geological Park at the end of 18 miles of dusty dirt road. Did I ever mention how much I hate dusty roads? The dust seals on my truck canopy are a distant memory and dust is the bane of all photographers.I am hoping Toadstool will not just be a repeat of the Badlands.Cheers

We reviewed some more info on the web about Toadstool and decided it wouldn't offer much different photographically or geologically from The Badlands.We spent the last couple of days exploring The Rocky Mountains National Park with a lot of other tourists. Our photos are mostly boringly identical to millions of others and I didn't see the exposed strata and uplift views I was hoping to shoot. Still, it is sometimes cathartic to stand in majestic nature writ large and remember just how small and fragile we are.Tomorrow we are visiting Florissant Fossil Beds National Monument

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The Florissant Fossil Beds National Monument is a national monument located in Teller County, Colorado. The location is famous for the abundant and exceptionally preserved insect and plant fossils that are found in the mudstones and shales of the Florissant Formation. Based on argon radiometric dating, the formation is Eocene (approximately 34 million years old [4]) in age and has been interpreted as a lake environment. The fossils have been preserved because of the interaction of the volcanic ash from the nearby Thirtynine Mile volcanic field with diatoms in the lake, causing an diatom bloom. As the diatoms fell to the bottom of the lake, any plants or animals that had recently died were preserved by the diatom falls. Fine layers of clays and muds interspersed with layers of ash form "paper shales" holding beautifully-preserved[5] fossils.

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The Florissant Fossil Beds National Monument was interesting, but I was disappointed that there were not more fossils on display.We stopped at a dinosaur museum in Woodland Park and I paid the $10.50 admission for myself, while my wife waited to see if it was worth it. They had a couple dozen skeletons, some of which were replicas. They did have a very nice collection of pterosaurs and I was glad for a chance to see them.Closer to Colorado Springs we visited the Garden of the Gods Park which has exposures of Paleozoic and Mesozoic rocks that have been tilted to 90 degrees or more. Tall monoliths of Lyons Sandstone slabs stand above strongly eroded pillars and balancing rocks. All are coastal dune deposits of probable Permian age. Unfortunately, there were also thousands of tourists so spending a lot of time creatively photographing the rocks was difficult and returning early this morning must have been on hundreds of other minds as well. Maybe I will have to return in the off season, if there is one.Today we traveled west along Hwy 50 and carefully drove up the scary single lane Skyline Drive along a part of the Dakota Hogback near Canon City. There are some beautiful steeply tilted strata exposures that I photographed.Further along Hwy 50 I photographed Ordovician Manitou Limestone that lies on top of Precambrian Granite. This granite dates back to the Proterozoic Orogeny 1.7 billion years ago. I picked up a couple pieces of 1.7 billion year old granite!Tomorrow we push on to the Black Canyon of the Gunnison National Park.

I (we) made it home last night.Lawns need mowing, computers need to be hauled back over to my photo lab and setup along with the photomicrography imaging system. Photos files need to be transferred to computers and converted to usable formats, GPS location data needs to be added to the metadata of each photo.All this initial processing of digital image files takes a lot of time, even on fast computers, so I figure I can mow while waiting for each operation to complete.That's my plan, I don't know if I can stick to it.I took a lot of images of interesting and beautiful geological strata (and brought home lots of rock samples) that cannot be accounted for by a silly global flood a few thousand years ago.As I work my way through my photos I will post a few here.I also need to prepare for research/photo projects I will be working on with several friends.Life is good when you have too much to do!

Well, I've had some time to look through my photos and I am pleased with some but in general I am quite disappointed. There seems to have been a problem with most of my landscapes shots with my new camera body and one lens. almost all of those shots are severely vignetted (in this case, corners lightened), so completely worthless. This problem was not obvious on the camera viewing screen or the laptop that I uploaded my images to during the trip.My dragonflies and other shots are ok, so I will post a few of those.This is a male Tachopteryx thoreyi, the Gray Petaltail. It is relatively common in a lot of the eastern U.S. It is in the dragonfly family Petaluridae, but unlike most of the other 10 species in the family the nymphs do not construct and live in burrows. Instead they are terrestrial and live under the leaf litter in forested areas. The adults often land on tree trunks where they are incredibly well camouflaged and difficult to see.The blurred, curved features in the shot are spider webs that were stirred by a slight breeze.Shot along Beck Creek, Amherst County, Virginia. Edited by Tanypteryx, : added locality data.

Nope, I use Photoshop, but too extreme to fix. Thank goodness I took some shots with my 35mm, until now I have been quite happy with my 24mm.

This is a male Arigomphus furcifer, the Lilypad Clubtail. This species prefers ponds and lakes with some sort of plants with floating leaves. Most of the Clubtails, Family Gomphidae, are stream specialists but there are exceptions to that general rule. A. furcifer is a species I have wanted to photograph for years.I had to wade out to chest high depth to get close enough and then waited while this male landed on other lilypads too far away to shoot. The first time he was in range a female showed up and the male flew up and grabbed her and then they flew off out of sight while they mated.This was at Spaulding Pond, Jackson County, Wisconsin.

This is an Erpetogomphus disignatus, (the Eastern Ringtail), female in an uncut barley field at the Hardware River Wildlife Management Area, Fulvanna County, Virginia, 9-Jun-17.It was partly cloudy and whenever the sun was hidden the dragonflies would perch in a mostly horizontal posture. There were dozens of dragonflies of several different species hanging out in the field. This was about 1:30 pm and the temperature was in the 90s. Within seconds of the sun hitting them, they repositioned themselves with their abdomen pointing directly at the sun to limit the surface area exposed to direct sunlight. This behavior is known as obelisking.This is a male Erpetogomphus disignatus. At this time Odonate systematics recognizes around 22 Erpetogomphus species. I say "about" because we are unsure if several closely related species/populations are sub-species or unique species. They are different enough that we take note of it, but we don't know for sure if they are in the same individual clade or sister/parent/offspring clades. Eventually, maybe a grad student will spend a year or two studying them and find out.

I was lucky one morning in Virginia to find a Hagenius brevistylus male going through metamorphosis and emergence from the nymph stage to the adult stage. This is the largest North American species in Family Gomphidae. H. brevistylus preys on other dragonflies, hence the English name the Dragonhunter. The reflections on the wings demonstrate that they are not flat, but offset and braced in such a way as to provide longitudinal strengthening without adding additional mass. This gives differential flexibility from base to tip and from front to back and is the key to the acrobatic flight abilities of odonates. The cast skin of the nymph is called an exuviae. This is a female from a post last year. Dragonfly adults normally take a week or so of feeding and flight in the sun to get their mature coloration.