Ive been to every nook and corner of Houston and the surrounding area and u haven't lived till u have been through the SLums of 5th ward Houston

felt like I was driving through the bombed out city of Syria or something LOL and the crazy thing is just 5 miles to the west of that is million dollar homes

^ Yes, I noticed elsewhere the pics of your neighbourhood - I am very envious.

Not exactly EPOCH´s original plan for this thread, but perhaps he won´t mind if I invite people to post more pics of places by posing these questions:-

What are the highest/ most northerly/ southerly/ remote places you have been to?

For instance, most easterly for me would be East Berlin, and Haifa:-

http://cdn.lightgalleries.net/4bd5eb...st_121-B-2.jpg
http://soulofamerica.com/soagallerie...kyscraper1.jpg

Germany and Israel may not be the best of friends, but they seem to share the same taste for drab, grey concrete buildings.

Lucky you! Ontario is truly the land of lakes--we have one third of the world's fresh water--but mosquitoes and black flies can suck all the enjoyment out of a hike.

Animals can be problematic too--I've encountered bears in the past. Once, I found a fresh deer carcass, evidently wolves' work. There was thick grey fur and blood all over the hiking trail. Needless to say, I left in a hurry! On the flip side, I've seen a lot of harmless wildlife, and that's always fun. Last winter, it was eight owls--a personal record.

Most northern would be somewhere in Germany or Northern Ontario, most southern would be Florida or California, most eastern would be Prague, and most western would be British Columbia and Washington state.

Most northern was in Föhr, an island in the North Sea, most southern was Tunisia, most western was somewhere in Spain, most eastern was Moscow.

I liked Haifa. The centre of town is pretty ugly, but the seafront is nice, and the eastern side of town, up on the hill, is lovely:

http://www.math.technion.ac.il/institute/Haifa-view.gif

http://i5.tinypic.com/49brlht.jpg

Highest place I've been:

Nepal, 'bout 15 miles south of Everest Base Camp. Always wanted to go to Base Camp and woulda made it too had my companion not fallen ill with altitude sickness. I didn't know him that well and it was tempting to journey on alone but he was in a bad way and it was a 5 day trek back to Lukla and so I couldn't leave him. Just felt wrong. Sometimes you gotta not be an arsehole.

http://www.experiencethehimalayas.co...c1_620x363.jpg


Lowest place:

Dead Sea. Came here a few times when I lived in Israel. Cool place, spookily still, and so silent it hums. Water hurts like hell when you get it in your eyes.

http://farm1.staticflickr.com/238/32...fb9a747b_b.jpg


Most northerly:

Newfoundland, Canada

http://marbleziptours.com/wp-content...ng-616x302.jpg


Most southerly:

Lagos, Nigeria. Crazy, dirty, ugly city. Beautiful country though.

http://howng.com/wp-content/uploads/2015/08/LAGOS1.jpg


Most westerly:

New York. Spent a year here. Didn't like it.

http://i.telegraph.co.uk/multimedia/...k_2705424b.jpg


Most easterly:

New Delhi, India. I love India. It's an assault on the senses and murders any preconceptions you have regarding how the world should be. You might see the most beautiful thing you'll ever seen one moment, and the most distressing or disturbing thing you'll ever see the next. It's that kinda place.

http://i.telegraph.co.uk/multimedia/...t_1803869c.jpg

I read that as 'attitude sickness' :laughing:


Amazing how widely traveled you are.
Were those just your wandering years, or is there some kind of bigger story behind all that?

Attitude sickness? Haha. That's far cooler.

I think my mother influenced my desire to travel. Her and my father hitchhiked from the UK to India in the 70s, hanging out with Bulgarian gypsies and travelling across Afghanistan in beat up hippy camper vans along the way; and the stories she told sounded exciting and exotic. So when I finally had a little money saved up I wanted to have similar experiences.

^ Wow! It sounds like you have to take hiking a lot more seriously in Canada; I also would not like to encounter wolves, bears or mosquitoes.
Prague is a long way from you home patch, Pet_Sounds. I wonder what you were doing there? Everyone says it's a great city.

Congrats,grindy! With Moscow you win the prize for going furthest into Eastern Europe.

For some reason, I imagined you would´ve gone furthur north though - perhaps in search of strange Scandanvian music or something.
Fohr looks a nice place, but this place, 20 miles north of Loch Ness, beats it by about four degrees of latitude:-

http://www.linkslodge.co.uk/Images/Faders/Big/3.jpg

^ What the photo doesn´t show is how windy it is; bleak, bland and windy is how I remember my stay on the Moray Firth coast.


That´s a really impressive portfolio, Mr. Charlie, with some spectacular pics! I often dreamed of going to Nepal or India but never quite had the courage. From what I´ve read about it, your description of India is a very neat summary of a very complex country.

Most southerly for me is Costa Rica, which I was rather disappointed with. The most exciting thing I recall, even though it was in a car, is crossing a very significant watershed. You climb and climb for an hour with the Atlantic to your back, then at last the gradient levels out and changes, and you have started the long descent to the Pacific. I think what made it special for me was that it was already dusk on the Atlantic side, but as we crossed the ridge we came back into sunshine again and could see the sun as it set way off in the low hazy distance.

Nice sharing here. I also love travel like my parents. And they always inspire me to go somewhere for excursion when I am free. LOL!

:beer:

NJ Cedar Swamp.

This is one of the places I go when I'm doing work for my professor. It's very difficult to navigate. Super slippery, trees down everywhere, and moss is covering everything. Plus, it's usually filled with water, you take one step on a soft spot and you're knee deep in muck. Not looking forward to navigating this in snow cover. I love it here, it's dark and relaxing, almost feels like you're in Jurassic Park :D

Short video of me approaching the swamp, and a few pics:



http://i.imgur.com/TSYF7Qbl.jpg?1

http://i.imgur.com/t0UYfbAl.jpg?1

http://i.imgur.com/zSNwPc7l.jpg?1

http://i.imgur.com/py63kTHl.jpg?1

http://i.imgur.com/Oi14FlRl.jpg?1

How is that any different from the rest of New Jersey?

Still have the same shitty forum name I see... Also, the other area I go to that borders the swamp looks like this:

http://www.d90.us/wooden_nutmeg/imag...ine_Barren.jpg

It's insane how fast the terrain changes.

Some landscapes are a little sinister, and that´s how your cedar swamp looks to me, DwnwthVwls, with its old fallen trees and puddles of black water. I hope the look of those trees isn´t down to acid rain...

For inhospitable, virtually impassable terrain, a mangrove swamp takes some beating; when the waterway runs out, what can you do except hack, wade and balance on roots ?

http://www.mangrove.at/images/mangro...e%20forest.jpg

It's just a natural part of the environment, not from environmental damage. I'd love to visit a mangrove some day, I hear they are quite brutal. We have something similar occurring in the cedar swamp. The Bald Cypress tree develops "knees", which are roots that come up from the ground.

The trees around here don't grow knees nearly this big, but they are wild.
https://c1.staticflickr.com/9/8336/8...54331115_b.jpg

Wow! Those "knees" look quite alien. I´ve never seen anything like that before.
If you´re curious, mangroves are worth a short visit, but they are so dense you can´t see very far and they are also full of mosquitos - so not exactly my favourite place to go.

More interesting to me is a dried-up lagoon about 30 miles from where I live; either from the sun or the salt content, a lot of the mud has a thick, slightly disgusting white skin, which I can never resist probing with a stick or a stone. Poor Mexicans build right out to the edge of the mud and just chuck their garbage into the lagoon :-

http://yucatanahora.com.mx/imagenes/...132678624n.jpg

PS: You mentioned "your professor", DWV - are you studying the environment or something?

I assume they're called "knees" because "dicks" wouldn't sound very good in a scientific journal.

I am an envl science major focusing in forestry, hydrology minor.

That lagoon sounds disgusting. Where do you live?

I´m in the Yucatán, SE Mexico; it´s a huge flat limestone plateau about 10 m above sea level, mainly covered with a kind of scrubby forest. This view from the top of a Mayan pyramid conveys the monotony of the landscape pretty well:-

https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikiped...C3%A1_-_11.jpg

Being limestone, there is effectively no surface water and the peninsular has its own special hydrology, the most notable features being the sinkholes. Here´s a particularly picturesque one:-

https://s-media-cache-ak0.pinimg.com...e8afb030eb.jpg

^ That sinkhole is gorgeous.

I like the woods DwnWthVwls posted too. But, to be honest, even windswept bogs and marshes look good to me.

Yeh, that's pretty sweet Lisnaholic.

and I love the cedar swamp. It's kind of depressing but very peaceful.

First of all, where has this thread been all my life?!

Secondly, are food forests part of your studies, DWV? I know your climate is different than the one pictured in the 4 minute video below, still interesting as hell for anyone interested in forest gardening and permaculture systems in general...

"2000 year old food forest found in morocco"...

They are not. I only recently heard about them, and checked out a couple videos on youtube. Definitely something I'm interested in. I'm still exploring the field but I'm leaning towards Silviculture/Prescribed burning for forest restoration.

Thanks for the video.

As in, burning for soil restoration? I have been learning about soil restoration, mostly from a microbiological perspective. If I could go back in time, I would have studied microbiology. Plays such an important role in every type of ecosystem, from permaculture farming to the human body ecological system.

^ Windswept bogs and marshes are good Mr.Charlie! Although they are only mentioned once in this song, that´s excuse enough for me to post it anyway :-



^ Yes, I can understand that - your photos made me think of some H.P. Lovecraft story though: with the sun going down, I would definitely prefer to be back on the main road thanks!

I'm not sure of its effect on soils, but around here there are a couple reasons.

Landscape biodiversity (the oaks are out competing pine stands in a lot of cases where natural fire has been suppressed), safety (to reduce fuel loads on the forest floor), and habitat restoration for hunting (in Pa this is a large focus) and species support.

Here is a great picture Ben Jones presented at the NAFSE workshop my college hosted a few weeks ago:

https://pagamecommission.wordpress.c...-and-wildlife/
https://pagamecommission.files.wordp...beforeafer.jpg

That's wonderful! I'm obsessed with creating self-sustaining habitats, especially for birds and beneficial insects. Where I live, the pines usually outcompete everything else, which sucks since they're a softwood and certainly not as useful to recycle after they come down (which is quite often, due to extreme fluctuations in weather... like snow making the ranches snap easily because of the soft wood). I have to hire a tree service to cut some of my own down, and I'm trying to figure out the best way to recycle the wood; it sucks because I can't use it for hugelkultur (ie: self-composting mound gardening) due to its antimicrobial properties (takes too long to decompose and doesnt retain water well)...so I'll probably just end up chipping the wood and using it for mulch in the garden. I'll probably replant understory trees in their place; something native and useful; like fruit trees, or herbal trees (like sassafrass or watch hazel), or perhaps nitrogen fixing trees (assuming any of those will grow in zone 8 lol).

Where do you live? I know of zones but haven't learned what areas the #s represent.

Also, is all of that just stuff you do as a hobby, or do you have a related career?

No formal education, just another strange obsession of mine. Maybe someday I'll make it "official" with a degree...if life ever slows down enough for that (yeah, right).

Google "zone gardening" for a map. It's more complex than mere linear latitude/longitude lines since you're dealing with climate.

ChelseaDagger and DwnWthVwls : congratulations on making landscape discussion incomprehensible! :bowdown:

Sorry dude. I would have used pictures instead, but I'm not technogically proficient enough to embed them.

^ HaHa! Don´t worry. I was genuinely impressed that suddenly you two were having such a technical discussion!

I enjoyed that.

Todays adventure, and review for my final.

Swarthmore College - Scott Arboretum

cont...

The rest..

Lotta trees.

Posted more for the architecture.. That campus was made in ~1860-70s.. The stonework is amazing.

But yeh, the trees there were all in great health and massive.

Me and Lin's old stomping grounds. Methuen MA.

https://www.google.com/search?q=meth...8dDY8Q_AUICCgD

Most of the pics are too big to post. Methuen is 50 years older than the USA.