28 Aug 17 With Harvey being the major headline these last several days I'm reminded of the power of nature and how anything we do pales in comparison. Our first year of our three year tour ('95 - 98) in P-Cola presented us with three hurricanes. The first which was a < Level 1 occurred while we were house hunting; the second, a Level 3, the day were were packing out of Pt Mugu and heading to P-Cola; and the third, a Level 5 offshore that diminished to a 2 as it hit the shore, about two months after we moved in. The following year there was one (Daniel) that veered off and hit Mobile, AL and actually hung offshore for over a week literally sucking Mobile Bay dry! You truly have to live through these storms to appreciate their RAW power. Seeing them via some electronic device just doesn't provide an appreciation for what they can do. Likewise with an earthquake several of which we lived through growing up in the Puget Sound area. To a slightly lesser degree are winter storms and the snow storm I got to experience last February in Yellowstone really gave me some idea of the power contained in the Midwestern storms. That winter snowfall brought a lot of stored water for the Greater Yellowstone Ecosystem and the benefits of it were readily observable this spring. I've written several times about the amount of water we saw in the rivers, lakes, and elsewhere when we were there in May, but thought this panorama might help in appreciating what occurred. You will likely need to blow this up to at least 50%, preferably 100%, to fully appreciate what it shows. I spent a lot of time working on this at an 11% magnification thinking I was seeing a few problems when I finally realized that most of them were just do to working at such a compressed size, so do blow it up. There is a lot of curvature in the image due to it being a 12 frame pano so just be aware that all that curvature you see in the front green area isn't curved, it is mostly straight. In the LRH corner, next to the copyright symbol, you will notice a set of several stumps sticking out of the water. Normally they are on dry land. ALL of the water behind that curved green band is normally dry land, and the water covered area in front of the light blue curved band is generally dry land. About 1/4 the way in from the left in the middle of the photo is a dark spot which, when you enlarge it, will be seen as a large stump. The width of the water - river - at that point is it's normal width, and the water generally bends around not exceeding the inside edge of that light blue contour line that curves around the entire picture. A huge difference from the normal width of the river combined with a much higher flow rate. All from one winter's snowfall. So while we can appreciate this for all the life giving water provided the park, I think we can get some very tiny idea of what Harvey has to have done to the areas under it's path where the water deposited was more harmful than beneficial!
As I mentioned above, this is a 12 shot pano. I've cropped the resultant merge for best composition, tried to balance the lighting as best I could but didn't quite get fully there, and added a small amount of micro contrast enhancement for the sky. Nikon D500; 18 - 200; Aperture priority; ISO 200; 1/500 sec @ f /10.