#SteepDescent

Mountainous Parts of the Northern Hemisphere.

August 11th, 2023.

Miner Road

Orinda, California.

The clients are a couple of environmental scientists who, along with their two sons, relocated from the Oakland Hills to the warmer climate of Orinda. Their commitment to sustainability, including a request for net-zero energy performance annually, was evident in their thinking throughout the design process. A three-bedroom program began as a remodel of a 1954 ranch house at the foot of a hill next to a seasonal creek. After finding the existing structure and soils to be unsuitable, the direction settled on reusing the existing footprint under the shade of a Valley Oak that had grown up close to the original house. The surviving portion of the original house is the fireplace which was wrapped in concrete and utilized for structural support. This made additional grading unnecessary and allowed the new house to maintain the same intimate relation to the old oak.

By Faulkner Architects

The Lake, Liniewo, Poland

The vibrancy of autumn in an Irish woodland with red leaves sitting on moss-covered rocks as water flows past.

It's a time of year when I could spend all my hours outdoors, photographing and hiking through the countryside.

Portrait of Mathilda By Jeff Stanford, 2024 Buy prints at: https://jeff-stanford.pixels.com/

Iceberg by Fiona McAllister Via Flickr: Another from the archives, taken on a travel expedition to Antarctica in 2010. One of the highlights of the trip for me personally, was the zodiac explores, getting up close to the incredible icebergs and seeing their stunning colours and formations. It makes you feel so completely in awe and dumb-struck, and a humbling realisation of how majestic mother nature and our awesome planet really is.

Happy National Bison Day!

Bison and elk share winter ranges in the National Elk Refuge near Jackson, Wyoming, in this image from our archives.

4 November 2023

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National Bison Day is an annual event that honors the American bison, also known as buffalo.

It highlights the cultural, historical, and ecological significance of these massive mammals in the United States and Canada.

The day encourages people to learn about bison, their role in indigenous cultures, and their vital contribution to the natural environment.

Polly

A HDR photo I took a few years ago at Green Hill Lake

Something different this time.✨

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Landscape and spirituality are not, for us, inevitably interwoven. We experience no inescapable linkage between our "place" and our way of conceiving the holy, between habitat and habitus, where one lives and how one practices a habit of being. Our concern is simply to move as quickly (and freely) as possible from one place to another. We are bereft of rituals of entry that allow us to participate fully in the places we inhabit.

We have lost the ability even to heed the natural environment, much less perceive it through the lens of a particular tradition. Modern Western culture is largely shorn of attentiveness to both habitat and habitus. Where we live—to what we are rooted—no longer defines who we are. We have learned to distrust all disciplines of formative spiritual traditions, with their communal ways of perceiving the world. We have realized, in the end, the "free individual" at the expense of a network of interrelated meanings. Belden C. Lane, The Solace of Fierce Landscapes: Exploring Desert and Mountain Spirituality [beguines]

i was looking thru old spelljammer ships and found this

talking about this ship:

Follow me on Bluethumb….for beautiful art set in nature!

https://bluethumb.com.au/tracey-ann-reynolds/Artwork/glass-rainforest\

Volkspark Rehberge, Berlin, Germany

Morning in flores island 🇬🇹🍓🍉🥑