Road Trip - Dragonflies - Photography - Geology

I am getting ready for a road trip from Oregon to Tennessee and back, starting about May 15. I am meeting a group of friends to try photographing and capturing an undescribed species of dragonfly. It has been observed at two localities several hundred miles apart by members of our group. It is larger than any other known living dragonfly and we are sure, represents a new genus and probably a new sub-family level clade.I plan to spend 12 days getting to Tennessee, a week or so there and then another 10-12 days getting back.I think I will swing down to Las Vegas and around the South Rim of the GC and then head east.I hope to visit a string of interesting geological features and aquatic habitats, so if anyone has some good suggestions, I would love to hear them. I am making a trip to Utah later in the summer so I will skip it on this trip. I am completely open on my return trip, but I would like to make some stops where I can see fossils.I just ordered a new rock hammer since mine seems to have disappeared last year in Pennsylvania.

Libellula saturata male, common name, Flame Skimmer. One of my favorites!

I will read up on them, thanks!One of the things we run into, that is so different from the west is, how little public land there is. One of the 2 sites in Tennessee is on a private hunt club and they want $100 per person for access. Lots of land owners won't let us on their land no, matter what.

They are mean that way, they land on my net handle, too. How the heck can you net them if they're hanging onto the handle?But, we call one of my friends "the dragonfly whisperer." He has the uncanny knack of hypnotizing them by pointing his finger at them and moving it in a circle as he gets closer and closer. Eventually, they will often crawl onto his finger.And they never steal his stuff.

My plan is to leave home Sunday and end up in Nashville, TN on May 26. This trip will be a lot different from the ones I made the last few years, mainly because my wife has decided to come along. It will be like old times with a couple of old timers. She will fly from Nashville to Des Moines to visit my sister and I will meet her there after our backwoods search for what is being called The Sasquatch Dragonfly..I hope to get some interesting photos of new (to me) geological outcroppings and I always hope for opportunities to shoot extreme weather.One place I am looking forward to seeing on the way home is Wind River Canyon in Wyoming. I read that the tipped strata is marked by roadside signs denoting the geological ages represented by different layers.I think we will be on the road for 5-6 weeks so I will probably get behind on my reading here, but I am going to really try to pay attention to getting good shots for illustrations in future discussions of geology and evolution here.

Their airspeed is quite low, but they can reach very high elevations and drop the hammer with precise accuracy.

Hmmmm. I read about it in my Planet of the Bugs book. Maybe I need to do more research.

We made it home with only a few minor mishaps, lots of good memories, and ~4500 photos. Saw dinosaurs skeletons, a wooly mammoth dig (61 skeletons and counting), some fantastic dragonflies and a LOT of beautiful rocks and strata exposures.One of the best parts of the trip: we heard limited news. It was a nice break.

The story will come as I get my photos transferred to my desktop computer. Unpacking, lawn mowing, etc.I tracked the entire trip on my GPS and my cameras were synced to it. I have a program that will insert my lat/long position into the photo metadata and that makes it easier to remember exactly where my images were taken in the context of the whole trip.It will take a couple days to get every thing organized.

A big toothbrush.....

I'm glad you liked it. I finished it on the trip. The friends I met in Tennessee for a dragonfly survey all want to read it too.I liked the way he discussed the geological ages when different insect orders evolved and what their impact was on the evolution of the plants and other animals in those periods.

Ok, I am going to start with a few shots from early in the trip (Nevada).My wife came along on this trip and acted as navigator. She had not accompanied me on a long road trip for quite a few years, so we had fun reminiscing. She was great at finding interesting features and habitats ahead of us along our planned route. We changed plans often to check out interesting photo ops.We took Hwy 50 across Nevada from Carson City to Ely. I have traveled this route many times over the years and remember the first time in 1995 when I was on the way to a dragonfly meeting in New Mexico, by myself. There were signs along the way calling it the Lonliest Highway in America.Traffic is very light and the route passes through classic basin and range terrain; wide, open, sparsely vegetated valleys separated by rugged mountain ranges that are primarily oriented north-south. The basins often have dried alkali salt flat remains of ancient lakes.It is a starling contrast to suddenly see a large isolated sand dune seeming to have popped up from nowhere at the base of a surrounding mountainous area. This, appropriately is called Sand Mountain and is a national recreation site.This shot is a panorama made from 30 individual shots. It was downsized from 8274 x 3695 pixels. Zoom in to see more detail. People come here to ride dune buggies up and down the dune which tends to spoil the chance to get clean dune shots for photographers. This is a closer view from the above shot. The question in my mind was: where did all this sand come from?Wikipedia says:

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Sand Mountain is a Singing sand dune 20 miles east of Fallon, Nevada along U.S. Route 50. The dune is two miles long and 600 feet high. The sand originates from the ancient Lake Lahontan, that for the most part dried up 9,000 years ago.

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This satellite view shows that the sand must have been blown from a SW direction and piled up against the surrounding rocky outcroppings.

We just had a fast moving thunderstorm here so I am going to jump ahead to Oklahoma. We had a thunderstorm while we were in the Motel 6 in Clinton, OK. This makes it clear that even if you are in the middle of "Tornado Alley", if you are unfamiliar with the area around your vicinity, finding a good place to take storm photos is almost impossible. Where are good roads and places to park where you can watch storms approaching and position yourself where the landscape is photogenic? Is your camera going to get wet? Can you remain in your vehicle where you are relatively safe from lightning? Etc.When you are stuck at the motel shooting powerlines, rooftops, parking lot lights are likely to spoil the the scene. On a side note, we discovered that Motel 6s have mostly been remodeled and upgraded while remaining one of the cheaper lodging options. Super 8 and Economy Inn are overpriced crapholes that will no longer get my business.

We visited Canyonlands National Park in Utah and after spending a little time in the visitor center I walked over to the edge for my first look. Seeing vehicles going both directions on this road hanging a thousand feet or more above the bottom completely took my breath away and left me more than a little shaky. As we drove through the park we encountered this road numerous times. There were even people riding bicycles along it.

I am not sure if there is a specific name for very thin layers of strata like this sandstone in Canyonlands National Park.I took this shot to show that there are places where close observation reveals that the layers were not deposited in flat, level, continuous layers, but are sometimes thicker in places and thinner in others and sometimes thin out to nothing.I found places where thin layers had "de-laminated" from the underlying layers and were like a flexible membrane when you walked on them.