Sunset at the Crescent City Airport
We photographed a test run from the north end of Santa Cruz (N36o 57', W121o 05') to the mouth of the Salinas River (N36o 45', W121o 49'). This was a short run to test our equipment, such as the GPS interface for the camera and the Firewire connection to the computer. The camera and computer were operated on their internal batteries during this flight. 233 images in this flight.
We picked up where we left off. Photographed from the mouth of the Salinas River (N36o 45', W121o 49') to Big Sur. This run was intended to test the fully packaged system, including the inverter which powers the camera and computer. The equipment worked well, but the weather did not cooperate. We encountered fog down near Big Sur but continued to photograph from underneath it. I did not expect the fog to be very detrimental to the photographs, but seeing the results it clearly was. We will recover this ground at a later date. 547 images in this flight.
We resumed photographing where we had encountered the fog near Big Sur with the intention of making it all the way southeast to the edge of the restricted area around Vandenberg AFB. On the way, we encountered equipment problems -- a software configuration error on the Powerbook (processor cycling was turned on when running on external power) limited the frame rate of the camera to approximately one every 5 seconds. This severely limited the forward speed of the helicopter until I realized that the frame rate increased when the inverter was shut down (because processor cycling was turned off when running on batteries). Flew down the coast to Oceano, where we broke for lunch and refueled at the San Luis Obispo Airport. After lunch, we returned to Big Sur to again recover approximately 10 miles of rugged coastline at a higher altitude. 1,191 images in this flight.
This was to be our first overnight trip. We have not wanted to stray far from home until we were sure of our equipment. Our goal was to spend two days photographing from the other side of Vandenberg AFB's restricted area to the Mexican Border. We waited for the right weather for our departure, not wanting to encounter the fog we had seen on our earlier excursion to Big Sur.
We flew to Santa Barbara Airport in the morning and had lunch with an old friend. After lunch, we flew directly to Point Conception and started photographing southeast-bound. Naval Air Reserve Point Mugu was happy to let us transit their restricted area, but briefly sent us up to 1000ft to avoid a "live fire" exercise. After crossing Malibu, we doubled back and made a second pass at a higher altitude, photographing further inland and with less detail. Malibu is some of the prettiest and most threatend coast in Southern California. We stopped briefly as Santa Monica to refuel and continued southbound. Crossing Los Angeles International's Airspace, air traffic control sent us down to 150ft and let us transition along the shoreline underneath the departing jets.
From Santa Monica we flew south, planning on stopping at Carlsbad Airport for the night and continuing to Mexico the next day. Mother Nature had other plans for us. We encountered fog approximately 20 miles north of Carlsbad, at around the San Onofre powerplant and quit for the day. 2438 images taken today, our biggest run ever. We spent the evening in a hotel room transferring the images from by Powerbook to an external Firewire drive to prepare the Powerbook for tomorrow's work.
A total bust. The low fog never cleared from the coastline enough to continue our run to Mexico. We returned home empty-handed and will make another trip at a later date to complete Southern California.
We flew to the Petaluma Airport in the early afternoon to refuel for our trip. We then headed west to the shoreline and started photographing southeast-bound along the shore from the middle of Bodega Bay. We continued our trip through Santa Cruz to the mouth of the Salinas River, reshooting Santa Cruz as the light was better than our first pass. Both sets of images are available online.
We had planned a trip north later in the week, but a good forecast for the fog make us scramble to leave early. We stopped in Ukiah for fuel and lunch and then planned on spending the night in Crescent City. The north coast had unbelievably clear weather, so we decided to see how much we could get in before the sun set. We started at the Oregon Border and photographed as far south as Eureka before dusk, then returned to Crescent City to spend the night.
The weather forecast called for no fog as far south as Mendocino. The forecast was wrong. We were able to photograph a short strip around Eureka and another short strip around Shelter Cove, but otherwise returned home empty-handed. We will make a future trip to cover Eureka to Bodega Bay.
Gabrielle and I spoke (with Mark Massara) about this project at the California and the World Ocean '02 conference in Santa Barbara on the evening of the 29th. A favorable forecast for the San Diego weather encouraged us to pack up our camera gear and take the helicopter down to Santa Barbara. The next morning Santa Barbara had a high overcast, but we were encouraged by the San Diego afternoon forecast and set out. Joining us for the ride was Ken Weiss, a staff writer for the Los Angeles Times who covers the environmental beat.
Since I can't resist an opportunity, we re-photographed some areas of Santa Barbara, Malibu, and Los Angeles at a higher altitude and wider angle as we flew south. This time we were able to coordinate a transition with Los Angeles International that allowed us to take the photographs at our prefered altitude of 500ft. The Los Angeles weather was phenomenal; most of the smog had blown out to sea and downtown was visible in the background. We re-photographed Long Beach, which was almost invisible due to smog in our previous pass.
Unfortunately, this time the Camp Pendleton Restricted Area was in use by military forces training to invade small oil-producing countries. We passed over the Camp Pendleton Restricted Area at 2100 feet, photographing with a long lens. Although not optimal, we now had some photos of this area.
The San Diego weather exceeded our expectations. It was clear with excellent visibility, and we had perfect cooperation from Lindbergh Field and the various military ATC controllers. We completed our coverage to the Mexican Border.
We'd been watching the weather now for a few days and had gotten excited over the exceedingly clear coast of Northern California. Some personal commitments prevented us from making the trip earlier. We awoke to a clear day with a forecast of no coastal stratus north of Point Arena, and were airborne by 8:30am on our way to close the remaining gap in our photography. We stopped in Ukiah, and then again in Eureka, for fuel.
Departing Eureka we started photographing where we had left off and were able to continue as far south as Fort Bragg before encountering coastal fog which stopped us, so we continued on to Little River Airport for fuel, and then home. On the way home we reflected that this project gives a false sense of the California weather, because we only photograph on the clear days.
This trip closed a significant gap in our coverage, and left the remainder of the North Coast well within a single day's trip.
The first Pacific storm of the season blew through early this week and left clear weather and no fog behind it. We awoke to another beautiful day in California and confirmed it with a few web site visitors in the Mendocino area who had volunteered to be "weather lookouts" and roust us out of bed at the first sign of good weather. We departed Watsonville around 11:30am for Little River Airport on the Mendocino coast to pick up fuel and eat lunch.
Departing Little River Airport we first flew north to Big River and photographed the estuary at the mouth. These photographs don't appear on the web site because we haven't figured out exactly how to present them (since they don't sort properly along the coastline). We continued up past Fort Bragg and resumed photographing where we had left off.
From Fort Bragg we worked our way southeast-bound along the coastline, entering Tomales Bay just north of Point Reyes. Tomales Bay has many dunes and similar habitats, and given the wide mouth we decided to include it in the coastline. Unfortunately, on the way back out of the bay, we were facing west and into the sun. The photography of the western shore is quite poor; it is clear to us that there was no way to shoot both sides of the bay in the same visit and an early morning return visit will be needed to capture the western side.
After reaching Point Reyes, we continued southeast-bound photographing from a higher altitude "overview" shots of areas that we had previously covered.
We spent the afternoon of January 16th sight-seeing in the helicopter with some friends. On the west end of Santa Cruz we came across a huge crane parked on West Cliff Drive that appeared to be building a seawall. We returned with the door off and camera in hand to extensively photograph the operation. But first we made a pass along that stretch of coast to add to the website.
Before new seawall construction, September 30, 2002 (from
Image 6583).
Seawall under construction, January 17, 2003 (from
Image 13208).
We're not happy with the quality of some of our early work covering Monterey through Big Sur and wanted to spend some time this year recovering these areas. Today we had a near-perfect forecast with clear skies and no fog in any of central California. We started reshooting at the mouth of the Salinas River intending to cover through at least Big Sur, but were forced by fog to stop around Carmel. However, as a consolation, we were able to capture this bulldozer on the beach.
This year we are planning on re-shooting the southern half of the state (south of N38 latitude). This will be our first "comparison" with our earlier work. Today was unexpectedly clear, so we cancelled our other plans and headed north, photographing southbound back to Watsonville.
Big Sur is one of the hardest areas to photograph because the fog is so unpredictable and there are no airports in the area and hence no local weather reports. The weather north and south of Big Sur looked good today, and the satellite photographs of the coast were encouraging. We waited until shortly after noon for our departure to arrive in the area with optimal lighting. The fog was nowhere to be seen, and we took some spectacular photographs of the area, far better than our 2002 work.
As we progressed southward near Oceano, there was some low haze that we tried to work with.
Our coastal photography is usually squeezed between the summer coastal fog and the winter storms; the storms disturb the fog and give us the crystal-clear days we need. We awoke on October 23rd to an unexpected weather situation -- a storm arriving from the north dictated that if we were going to fly, we needed to leave immediately, yet the weather in southern California was too good to pass up. It was already raining in the San Francisco area when we departed for Santa Barbara, where we would fuel and change pilots prior to beginning our photography at Point Conception. We hastily packed for a few nights, not knowing where we were going to be staying or when the weather in the north would permit us to return home.
Santa Barbara is almost a two hour flight from our home airport. After a quick refueling, we departed for Point Conception, turned south, and began our photography. Photographing this stretch was a lot easier on a weekend -- the various military facilities were not using their airspace and it was easier to arrange the overflights we wanted. Naval Air Reserve Point Mugu let us transition their restricted area without the threat of "live fire" that we encountered in 2002. We stopped in Santa Monica for another refueling, and ate the lunch we had brought with us standing next to the helicopter while the fuel was pumped. The next challenge was a special request for the Los Angeles International Airport control tower to allow us to fly through their departure corridor, which they accomodated after only a brief wait. (They were thankful that we only wanted to do it once!)
Camp Pendleton has a long restricted area that we were forced to fly over in 2002, but they weren't using it this weekend and were able to accomodate our request to photograph in it. As we arrived further south, a fog layer was forming above us that impacted the quality of the pictures. We continued on, hoping that it was a local phenomenom and didn't exist further south, but it did, and we ran out of light before reaching the Mexican Border.
We awoke to hear the story that the Broad Beach Homeowner's Association, with unprecedented audacity, bulldozed the wet sand public beach onto private property, thereby destroying over a mile of beach habitat and creating a six-foot high berm of sand that prevented the public from having safe access to the public part of the beach. Ironically, the movement of this sand moved the high-tide waterline inward, thereby moving the public beach closer to the back yards of their homes.
Not wanting to pass at the opportunity to document this destruction, we decided to spend the day testing the integration of our camera and computer equipment with our new helicopter by rephotographing this area.
We were flying our helicopter up to The Sea Ranch for a short vacation and decided to take advantage of the morning light to photograph two west-facing views; Año Nuevo Island and the west shore of Tomales Bay. Tomales Bay had been covered before in 2002, but we did not have the opportunity to cover the west shore during the morning hours that cast the good light on the counter-facing coast. Año Nuevo Island was not covered as part of our original photography for similar reasons.
We had planned on photographing
from Point
Arena south when we returned, but the fog did not cooperate.
Our goal for 2005 was to update the northern half of California. The best weather is found in October and November; after the fog and before the winter storms. As we entered October, we prepared the helicopter to leave on short notice. We kept it outfitted with the survival gear, overnight bags, camera and computer equipment.
There was a weak front that passed through during the first few days of October. This created an off-shore flow that gave us a few fog-free days. Our objective was to fly up to the Oregon Border and start photographing southward as far as we could make it.
We awoke Tuesday, October 4th, to a crystal-clear day and a forecast of some high clouds in the Crescent City area, scrambled out the door, and arrived in Crescent City (last gas before Oregon) around 12:30. The high clouds had dissipated before our arrival, and we started shooting at the Oregon Border around 1:10pm. Unlike the weather problems we had in 2002, Mother Nature was fully cooperating. We stopped in Eureka for fuel, and continued as far as Gualala before quitting due to failing light around 4:40. After a quick gas stop, we headed home. Wednesday morning we awoke to the same clear weather, and could not pass up the opportunity. We flew back up to Gualala and from there photographed non-stop to the Pajaro River.
Never before had we had such good weather. We completed our goal
for 2005 in only two days. 6331 stunning photographs.
The month of October was spent experimenting with our new Nikon D2x (12.4 Mp). Although we had already completed our goal for re-covering Northern California for 2005, we wanted to test the new camera in an area close to home. We resumed photographing at the mouth of Pajaro River and ended near Oceano at the start of the Vandenberg Restricted Area. The new routine of stopping periodically to change flash cards worked out well; it slows us down a little, but the faster cycle time allows the helicopter to fly faster between swaps.
The clear weather was not only good for our purposes, but enticed a lot of other pilots to go flying.
Our goal for 2006 was to photograph from Point Conception south to the Mexican Border. We were waiting for the fall Santa Ana winds to clear the Los Angeles air, but a good-visibility day arrived. We hurriedly packed in case we were spending an overnight out, and were airborne by 10:30am. After refueling at Lompoc we made our bumpy way over the coastal hills and started our photography at Pt. Conception lighthouse.
The advantage of shooting during a weekend was that military airspace was more easily accessable. Normally Vandenberg AFB's airspace above 500 feet in this area was closed to us, but today it was "cold" and we could shoot the Goleta coast at an altitude more appropriate to the terrain. Further south, Camp Pendleton let us through their coastal airspace at an altitude of our choosing.
The clear air brought out some recreational flyers and working aircraft.
Haze in the San Diego area made this a one-day mission, and we flew
home watching a sunset made blood-red by the ash from a forest
fire north of Los Angeles.
We had been checking the weather each day we were available to fly since our last mission, but every time the fog would be somewhere in the forecast. Finally a clear day showed up about the time we had other business in Southern California, so we flew south a day early. The weather was the best we'd ever seen, allowing us to rephotograph some areas we'd been unable to cover since 2002.
