Geo Blogging with Mark

Journey's end

2008-02-18T15:45:00.010Z

This is where the real journey for Mark and our virtual, geographical journey ended on Friday afternoon in the Avenue de Wagram just off the Place de L'Etoile in Paris. The tracker kept running well after Mark crossed the line and recorded all the spots where the interviewers and photographers ushered him to get the best shots! In keeping with what became the norm throughout this blog whenever Mark was in a big city, I will gloss over the geography and simply say that in Paris there is too much geography .......and history, art, literature and culture to do justice to it in a blog.

On Friday the geography in any case was not about a city but about the conclusion of a journey which had taken Mark around the world. His circumnavigation of the globe makes our world seem both smaller and bigger.... smaller because one guy has cycled round it on a bike but much bigger because in doing so, he has shown us the environmental and cultural diversity which exists in 360 degrees of longitude. It was a priviledge to be in Paris to watch the return of this extraordinary young man who has engaged so many people with the world.

I was recently at an event where Michael Palin was speaking about Geography. He said "Geography is as much about what you see outside as what you learn inside". Mark's gargantuan efforts over 195 days have given us a new perspective on the world and the chance to see it 'on the outside' in a different way. 'Geo Blogging with Mark' has been a learning journey for me and if I have managed to share some of my enthusiasm for the subject I love with a wider audience, it will have been a very worthwhile project.

When I started writing about Mark's journey, I had intended simply writing the occasional posting as part of my departmental blog for school. Somewhere towards the 'end' of Europe, the potential for a bigger project suggested itself and I migrated all the postings onto 'Geo Blogging with Mark' and since then, like Topsy, it just 'growed'.

A lot of people have asked me what will happen to the blog. The first thing I plan to do is to proof read and sort the errors then I will print out a hardcopy to give to Mark. At 600+ pages it will be a long read but I hope it will remind him of some of the places he cycled through but had no time to explore. At some point I will also 'tag' the posts with some extra labels so that the geographical content is more accessible for teachers in the classroom. I would like to think that in years to come, when I need a good example of an ox bow lake, I will know exactly where to look!

And finally, for those who liked the 'big pictures', here's the biggest and best picture of all........

I'm going to miss following that blue line!

If you have enjoyed my geographical meanderings, please consider making a donation to Mark's charities http://www.justgiving.com/artemisworldcycle . They are all very worthy causes and by giving a little you will be doing a lot to help children, young people, communities and environments around our wonderful world.

Over 300 visitors in a day

2008-02-16T11:43:00.006Z

According to the CLUSTRMAP
329 visitors the previous 'day' to GeoBloggingwithMark...
Lots of press and media coverage.

BBC NEWS web pages with a link to how HSD pupils followed Mark's journey (check out the 'Open at a Glance' window)

BBC NEWSROUND article.

The HINDU article.

The INDEPENDENT article.

The GUARDIAN article.

The DAILY TELEGRAPH article.

Even The SUN - headline: "A ride result...."

Bike Radar website article

The COURIER article.

The DAILY RECORD article.
This article also has a list of facts...

THE FACTS

18,300 - The number of miles Mark cycled.

13 - His average speed in mph.

20 - The number of countries cycled through on the epic trip.

3 - The number of crashes he had.

12 - The number of tyres used.

7 - The number of punctures.

6 - The number of pairs of shorts worn out.

115-120 - Mark's average heart rate measured in beats per minute.

2000-6000 - How many calories he burned off every day.

10-20 - The number of pints of liquid he drank every day.

8 - The number of police cells Mark slept in.

£ 45,000 - The total cost of the record attempt, that was raised through sponsorship.

Still time to donate to Mark's charities.

AP

AKA "Mrs. V"

Mark de Triumph!

2008-02-15T17:02:00.014Z

As promised, and courtesy of the wonderful digital world we now live in, here are just a few pics of this afternoon's events here in Paris.....

It was a freezing day..... cold, frosty, foggy and a long wait for the crowds and the press pack at the Arc de Triomphe but it was just amazing to see Mark and his police escort approach the finish line...

...at the top of the Avenue de Wagram

Official congratulations from the British Ambassador...... Triumph at the Triomphe..... (my son tells me that the car in the background is an Aston Martin DB9 coupé and that there couldn't be a better backdrop for a world record breaker!)

Coping with the paparazzi

...and not looking at all like someone who's just cycled around the world......

Before signing off from Paris, I would like to offer public thanks to my good friend and fellow geographer Alan Parkinson who has maintained the blog so well in the last couple of days and while I was away at Christmas.

The final day...

2008-02-15T09:50:00.004Z

First view on tracker - the excitement is mounting...The team are all installed in Paris waiting for the first sight of Mark.
Below is an item from the Independent's blog. Click the image to read the full article.
Also 2 articles on BBC News site: one with a big mention for this blog and the work of Mrs. V.

Head of geography Val Vannet and junior school ICT teacher Sharon Tonner developed a series of school projects tracking Mark's journey.

The two teachers have travelled to Paris to welcome him across the finish line.

Mrs Vannet said: "This is a fantastic endeavour, but it has also given us new ways to capture the imagination of our pupils.

Sharon Tonner and Val Vannet have travelled to Paris

"Knowing that Mark is actually passing through these places, and experiencing these cultures, helps to bring them to life for our pupils."

Mrs Tonner added: "Mark's journey is not just useful in helping to capture interest in learning about other countries in our world, but the very fact that he is undertaking such a journey has been a great source of inspiration for many of them, by showing them what one individual can achieve."

Mark's mother Una Beaumont has praised the efforts of the teachers, in particular the blog put together by Mrs Vannet.

She said: "She's written the most amazing parallel journey about the geography.

"Everyday she's written about the geography that he's passing through and people around the world have just been absolutely engrossed and delighted with all that she's been writing.

"She herself is very excited about all she's learned from it."

One of the pleasures awaiting Mark is going to be to read through what Val has written I'm sure and add a final dimension to his journey.

The final miles are through the outskirts of Paris where Mark will be picked up by a police escort.

Over to Val

Alan Parkinson
AKA "Mrs. V"

Cadence...

2008-02-14T10:17:00.011Z

First view this morning was of a patchwork landscape as Mark carried on towards Paris - on the outskirts of Villedomain, which is 220 kilometres from Paris ! Mark had a long day yesterday including cycling through the dark, and some surprisingly hilly terrain to pass through.

A few other bits of admin first. It's worth checking out the new photo galleries on the Artemis website. When I was blogging through New Zealand I spotted on Google Earth that Mark was passing a place called St. Andrews that had a golf course. It seems that Mark noticed it too, because he has an image of the entrance. It costs a lot less to play here than on the Old Course, but I doubt the 18th hole is quite as dramatic...Image: Mark Beaumont

According to Mark's web diary:

The BBC [are] joining up around lunch time [today] until the finishing line on Friday afternoon.

French road police are kindly going to meet Mark on the outskirts of Paris and escort him in along with the film crew. Lot of press and television interest for features and live coverage.

Keep an eye out on News 24 and BBC Scotland news. There was no mention tonight (Thursday)

Mark has passed through a series of patches of woodland, such as the Foret Domaniale de Russy, one of the remnants of the woodland that used to cover the whole area, and into the city of Blois, on the Loire (which rhymes...) - I wonder how many other place names rhyme with the river they stand on ?
Blois has a fine bridge which Mark would have crossed, and if he raised his eyes from the handlebars he would have seen the fine castle dominating the skyline, and then crossed the A10 autoroute, or L'Aquitaine, which I drove up last October coincidentally...
North of Blois, Mark carried on through a procession of small communes virtually unknown to Google ... At the village of Pontijou, I called up Google Earth and discovered that Mark was, at that point, less than 100 miles from the finish as the (French) crow flies... Another important point in the journey.
Mark continued on towards Chartres / Orleans as the light faded, with more chateaux along the route...

I will make a final post tomorrow morning when we get the first movement, and then return you to Mrs. V.

Sleep well !

Alan Parkinson
AKA "Mrs. V"

A stretch in the Limousin...

2008-02-13T10:02:00.012Z

Bonjour once again from Norfolk...
Val is now on her way to Paris to meet Mark and team at the finishing line, and I will take you through the next few days, and try to close the final (ever narrowing) gap in the route, before Val returns to 'close the circle'.
If you haven't already, you might like to read the feature on Mark that is in today's SCOTSMAN newspaper.
Click the logo below to read, or HERE.
And why not do as I did and order a replica cycling jersey to help support Mark's charities.

As I logged on this morning, Mark was on the outskirts of Angouleme.

My favourite sporting event is, appropriately enough, the Tour de France...Angouleme hosted a stage finish in the 2007 Tour, which had an appropriately geographical logo...

Mark travelled through the area north of Angouleme. This is apparently becoming a very popular area with Parisians who want a second home. Living in Norfolk, I am familiar with the impact of the impact of this desire on property prices and the communities which can become rather deserted on weekdays. On the other hand, it can help reverse the underpopulation of these villages which have lost the younger generation to the pull of the cities and neglect of the wonderful old buildings that one comes across in these places.
There's a long list of people who have moved to France and then written books about their 'hilarious' encounters with local people and local bureaucracy.
It probably began with Peter Mayle's 'Year in Provence' in the late 80's, and a string of books has followed people who have converted chateaux, farmhouses etc... This could be one way of reinforcing national stereotypes.

Wonder if Mark will tuck in to this local delicacy at lunchtime...Image by Flickr user Anne...

And I wonder how many villages like this one (which he passed through) Mark will pass through over the next few days...Image by Flickr user jaytee07

As Val mentioned yesterday, Mark is skirting Cognac country, as seen on the map below. I'm a single malt man myself...
Mark headed eastwards, skirting Limoges, famous for porcelain and oak barrels to age cognac. With its link to pottery, the UK twin-town of Limoges is a good match. Can you guess which town it's twinned with ?
He then headed northwards through the area known as Limousin - a procession of small communes. I have driven through France on numerous occasions and can visualise the small villages which he will cycle through and out the other side in just a few minutes, such as Le Dorat

Photo of Le Dorat copyright Flickr user hmckmcg

More tomorrow as the distance narrows to Paris...

Alan Parkinson
AKA "Mrs. V"

A nice Bordeaux or two!

2008-02-12T20:47:00.001Z

I have just looked at today's route and felt obliged to pour myself a glass of Saint Emilion......

Although Mark started the day in the Landes (described in yesterday's posting), for much of the day he cycled through a number of the Bordeaux wine producing areas, across the Gironde and the Dordogne rivers before ending the day just south of Angouleme.

Shortly after leaving Roquefort this morning, Mark passed an area of the Landes which stood out on the aerial imagery and which, according to Google Earth, is a target practice area for French fighter planes.....

It would seem that the nearest air base where the planes which do their 'testing' in the Landes forest are based, is at Mont de Marsan which Mark passed yesterday....

Incidentally, if you follow the link, you might want to beware of the English translation of Wikipedia pages - it is not always very accurate!

On their northern edge the Landes give way to lowlands surrounding the Garonne and Dordogne rivers and the estuary of the Gironde - Bordeaux wine country!Cycling from south to north, Mark crossed a whole spectrum of famous wine producing areas... of which more shortly. We have encountered grape vines in many locations along Mark's route - in Europe at the start of his journey, Turkey, Iran, Australia, New Zealand, USA, Portugal, Spain and now France and according to some research I've just done, 71% of all the grapes produced in the world are used for wine.... and the area of grape vines for wine production is growing at 2% per annum!

I have struggled to find a map of the Bordeaux wines which is going to be legible on the blog but I think this one should do...

I am not at all a connoisseur of wine but I do find the connections between wine and geography interesting. For example, in the south of the Bordeaux wine region is the area which produces Sauternes, a sweet dessert wine. This area lies just to the west of Langon where Mark crossed the Garonne this morning. The intense sweetness of the Sauternes wine is the result of the grapes being affected by a fungus that is commonly known as noble rot. In the autumn, the Ciron river, a tributary of the Garonne, produces mist that descends upon the area and persists till after dawn. These conditions are conducive to the growth of the fungus which dries out the grape and concentrates the sugars inside.

Across the river and in the area between the Garonne and the Dordogne is the region which produces 'Entre Deux Mers' dry white wine. Literally 'between two seas', the name refers to the two great tidal rivers which bound its vineyards. The wine producers of the Entre deux mers have a good website (click image to link)

Having cycled through the Entre Deux Mers territory, Mark reached the Dordogne at Branne, where I reckon he must have crossed the river by this bridge before heading into the area referred to the 'right bank' (of the Dordogne) before its confluence with its tributary, the Isle, at Libourne. The right bank region is associated with red wines such as Pomerol and Saint Emilion (hic!). Here on the right are some vineyards in the vicinity of Saint Emilion and a view of the confluence of the Dordogne and the Isle at Libourne ..... North of Libourne, it is still wine country - mainly reds and belonging to what is termed the generic Bordeaux and Bordeaux Superieur appellations. Mark cycled a lot of miles through fields like these today!

And tomorrow, he'll be nearing Cognac country....

However, as I shall be preparing to depart for Paris, I am delighted to say that Alan Parkinson my 'guest presenter' who kindly blogged during my absence over Christmas while Mark was in New Zealand and the San Francisco area, has volunteered to Geoblog the next couple of days on the approach to Paris. There will therefore, be no interruption to normal service! If all goes to plan and technology doesn't let me down, my next posting should be from Paris.

A bientôt!

Bienvenue en France

2008-02-11T20:45:00.001Z

Having read the web diary, it seems that Mark went on yesterday a little further than the GPS tracker led us to believe and that he stopped overnight just a few kilometres short of the French border in the village of Luzaide....The image above, sourced from Flickr, gives some impression of the terrain he tackled at the end of the day yesterday ! At this altitude (over 1000m) in the Pyrenees the predominant land use is woodland and pasture. It is, on average, 6 degrees cooler up here than at sea level and this dramatically shortens the growing season. In addition there is little flat land. However, it is also very wet! This area receives between 1500 and 2000mm of rain with no seasonal let -up. Rain bearing winds enter the Bay of Biscay from the Atlantic and there is nowhere for them to go except up. Believe me - this is the voice of experience talking. A camping holiday in the Western Pyrenees should not be undertaken lightly!

Shortly after setting out this morning, Mark crossed the French border. It is strange to think that after six months of watching him cross national borders, this is the last one. Of all the borders he crossed, I think it was the one between Turkey and Iran which sticks most in my mind. You can reread the relevant post here . At the time it seemed to me to be a crossing into the unknown and yet, as things turned out, both for Mark on the ground and for me 'virtually', Iran was a revelation and probably the place on his route which I'd most now like to visit. But I digress.......

The image right shows the border crossing which Mark would have passed through this morning before entering the region of Aquitaine and the département of Pyrenees Atlantiques. The administrative division of France is quite complicated but basically there are 22 regions which are sub-divided into 96 départments. These in turn are further sub divided into arondissements, cantons and communes. This hierarchical administrative system is explained here and the map below links to a website offering clickable maps of regions and départements....

Despite a cold start to the day, it looks as if the high pressure is, as predicted, holding fast. The satellite image left, courtesy of the Met Office, shows clear skies over Western Europe extending over the UK - except for the fog bank over eastern Scotland!

Isobars are still widely spaced meaning light winds and with the pressure situation not predicted to change much all week, the weather is likely to stay fine with sunshine predicted for Paris all week until Friday and beyond. So for those bound for Paris, the good news is that you shouldn't require your brollies!

By lunchtime today, Mark was already at Orthez....

Interestingly, when you read the web diary for today, there is a suggestion that after descending the north side of the Pyrenees, Mark was surprised by the very rolling nature of the terrain in eastern Aquitaine. The Pyrenees are drained by many rivers which flow north and west towards the Bay of Biscay, each separated by higher interfluve areas, so unfortunately he was cutting across all of these valleys and ridges as he cycled towards Orthez. The little clouds on the map above mark out these areas of higher ground where rising air has led to condensation of water vapour in air which has probably come in from the west.

Orthez itself is situated at a bridging point on one of these rivers - the Gave de Pau. Unfortunately, as you can see below, the boundary between some low res imagery (left) and high res imagery (right) cuts right through the town...

However, the imagery was evidently captured at different seasons and so provides a contrast between the greening fields of spring and the harvested fields of mid summer.

Beyond Orthez there is a pronounced change of land use as Mont de Marsan is approached. It is very clearly visible from 'space' as a dark triangle pushing in from the coast...

This is the Landes - an extensive area of managed pine forest which dates from the 18th century.... "Most of the region now occupied by the Landes forest was swampy land that was sparsely inhabited until the 19th century. The forest was planted to rehabilitate the landscape and provide for regional economic development. Since the 1970s, parts of the forest have given way to intensive agriculture (in particular, grain farming.)Many local people are still employed in forest-related pursuits, including forestry, sawmills and papermills, woodcrafts and fabrication of paper-based products."

It's almost like being back in the southern states if the USA again! If you'd like to get a better impression of the landscape of this quite unique corner of France, click here to take a virtual walk through the pine forests.

According to the web diary, Mark reached Roquefort this evening - not the Roquefort but one of at least another three in France which carry the same name.

The 'big picture' today is very reassuring as the head and tail of the blue line draw ever closer together .....

However, I thought you might also like to see a couple of images of our very low tech tracker at school. In August the map was covered in a trail of yellow pins, which one by one have given way to red...... ...and now there are only two more to go.....

France on the horizon

2008-02-10T10:59:00.002Z

One of the things this blog has had to accommodate along Mark's route around the world has been time difference. As he cycled east, he kept getting further and further ahead of me so each day I was doing catch up with the blog. Then, once he got to the States, he was 'behind' me and I had to wait until the following day to chart where he'd been on the previous. It was, therefore, quite a novelty when he got back to Europe last week and for a brief time while he was in Portugal we were in the same time zone. For now and the remainder of the journey he is only one hour ahead, meaning that I can make a start on the blog in the morning and finish it later once he has reached his day's destination.

So, at 11.00 on the 10th (noon in Spain)Mark is already across the Ebro valley and heading for Pamplona....

The weather is again set fair for today. I was looking earlier at the forecast for Agreda where Mark stayed last night and noticed that it was only 2 degrees and foggy at 8am this morning. That is entirely in keeping with high pressure in winter. As the earth loses energy to clear skies overnight, the ground gets super cooled and the contact between it and the air condenses any moisture in the air to give fog. As the sun rises higher and the air warms, so gradually the fog dissipates. The problem of high pressure fog is particularly pronounced in valleys as cold air sinks and gets trapped .... so this morning the fog in the Ebro valley on the satellite photo of Spain. However, the fog is lifting, the sun is coming out and it is already 15 degrees in Pamplona. For the rest of the week, the pressure chart looks wonderful.... high pressure all the way to Paris!

For the first part of today, Mark was descending into the Ebro valley following one of its tributaries. Valverde caught my eye - a reminder that in this part of Spain, it is not always cold and frosty (as most of the Google imagery is showing). For much of the year it will be hot and dry and valleys like these will be the only green areas in the otherwise parched landscape of the long Mediterranean summer. The Google Maps imagery has clearly been captured in winter. In fact, much of the north of Spain seems to have been 'snapped' then - probably in the same sort of high pressure conditions which are prevailing this week. When you look closely at some of the images, they are really beautiful - almost reminiscent of Medieval maps on parchment....

The Ebro is Spain's longest river. (The Tagus is longer but it is shared with Portugal.) It has the highest discharge of any river in the Iberian peninsula and its importance can be measured by the fact that it drains almost 20% of Spain's land area, delivering a large sediment load to its mouth where it is building up a large delta. Despite its volume, the river often runs very low - particularly in summer and autumn - after the abstraction of more than half of its water for irrigation. The Canal de Tuesta, first dug almost 8 centuries ago, parallels it course and is the main artery of irrigation over the Ebro's floodplain. The river can occasionally flood badly in spring when snow melt from the Pyrenees joins run off from seasonal rain.

On his approach to the valley floor, Mark crossed this local boundary cutting through neatly tended vineyards. This is Rioja country! Tucked in between the Meseta to the south and the Pyrenees to the north and protected by the Cantabrian mountains along Spain's north coast, the Ebro valley enjoys the warming effects of the Mediterranean without the moderating and wetter effects of the Atlantc and so is ideal wine producing country.

This image shows Rioja vines in winter and is therefore representative of the current state of the vineyards as mark will be seeing them. Amazing to think that in less than a year they will produce fine wines like these.

Mark crossed the Ebro at Castejon which, and as with so many of the rivers we have encountered along his route, the arial imagery shows how a river breathes life into semi arid environments.
Apart from the intensive cultivation which the river supports, there is also, if you look closely, evidence in the form of an old meander loop that the Ebro has changed its course over the years. The image below, which comes from the Panoramio layer in Google shows the river just a mile west of the bridge which Mark would have crossed.

North of the Ebro the route weaves gradually away from the irrigated lowlands and into a landscape of cultivation which is dependent on seasonal rainfall.
Between the river Ebro and Pamplona the largest settlement is Tafalla which, like many small municipalities these days, uses the Internet as a way of advertising itself . If you click on the coat of arms, you can link to the website of Tafalla and explore some of the pages.

The 'Galeria Fotos' has many views of the town and its surroundings. I have included one below since I think it shows a marked change in architecture from the buildings of central Spain. Here in the north there is much more stone and less of the whitewashed walls and red tiled roofs.

Between Tafalla and Pamplona these limestone quarries at Tiebas caught my eye...

They are very similar in scale to limestone quarries I visit each year with pupils when we are doing fieldwork in the Yorkshire Dales.

Ten miles north of Tiebas is Pamplona , capital of the Basque country and spiritual home of the Basque Nationalists. I won't even attempt to give a summarised version of the cultural and historical background to Basque nationalism and would suggest that if you are interested, you follow the link above to the Wikipedia entry which is pretty comprehensive. The event for which Pamplona has earned some notoriety is the annual running of the bulls which takes place each year on the 7th July. On a more positive note and entirely in keeping with the spirit of this blog is the fact that Miguel Indurian, five times winner of the Tour de France is a native of Pamplona. I am guessing that since mountain climbs are
so much part of the Tour, Indurian probably cycled many times the road up to the French border which Mark tackled late today. Below are a sequence of images which I found on Flickr taken along that route....

.....leading finally at the end of the day to Aurizberri which by my reckoning is just a few miles short of the French border.

Beyond the Guadarrama

2008-02-09T12:45:00.001Z

A change of plans means that instead of heading for Burgos, Mark is now following the N 110 to Soria and from there on to Pamplona. First, however, he had to get over the col in the Sierra de Guadarrama north of last night's terminus at Somosierra.

The image on the right shows how lines of communication often 'jostle' for position as they seek out the low points on a mountain ridge. The col here is the only major gap through the eastern end of the Sierra and is thus an important link between the north of Spain and the Madrid area. Motorway, highway, minor roads and a railway all use this narrow corridor.

Beyond the col, Mark turned north east towards Soria...

The high peaks of the Sierra which he has just crossed are now to his right and if you look at the image above, you will be able to make out the settlement of la Pinilla bottom right. La Pinilla is a ski resort! If you click on the banner above, it will link to the resort website where the live webcam will give you an idea of the conditions. As you can see above, at 13.00h on 9th February it was a beautiful sunny day with, according to the website, sufficient snow to have about half of the uplit facilities open. Below is a bit of video of skiing at La Pinilla. It reminds me of skiing in the Cairngorms - only there's more snow and better weather!

Continuing on past the road to la Pinilla, Mark descended into the well wooded valley in which Riaza is located. The municipal authorities of Riaza have produced rather a nice web site with a clever 'fly in'. On the web site here are some good images which you can access by following Entrar, Fotos, Panoramicos 360.

It was interesting to listen to Mark's interview on radio Scotland this morning (You can access it here . Fast forward 20 minutes into the Sports Weekly programme). At one point Mark was talking about how cold it was in the morning - and that, despite the sunshine evident on the webcam at la Pinilla. Low temperatures are entirely consistent with a) the altitude and b) the high pressure which is set to dominate the weather of western Europe over the next few days. This will be really good news for Mark as he dashes for the tape....The map above is the expected pressure situation for Sunday and there is little change predicted for the next few days. Winds are very light and from the south and the nearest frontal system......well, wouldn't you know it! As a consequence, skies in Spain will be clear, bringing lots of sunshine and temperatures picking up during the day but cold nights as any warmth is lost to the clear skies.

North and east of Riaza Mark has cycled over very undulating terrain towards Soria and beyond. A whole series of river valleys, mainly tributaries of the Duero (Douro)cut into the plateau and between them land rises high enough to catch the frost of high pressure nights in winter and spring as in this image from Google maps.

At 785 km the river Duero is actually the third longest river in the Iberian peninsula and the second largest in terms of its drainage basin..

According to Wikipedia, it flows in its upper course through a region which , "for the most part, is one of semi-arid plains planted with wheat and in some places, wine grapes. Sheep rearing is also still important."

Below are a couple of images of the river Duero in this part of its course. Firstly at San Esteban where Mark crossed the river and where its importance for irrigation is evident...

...and then again at Soria

Mark passed through Soria this afternoon. Here is some promotional footage for Soria courtesy of YouTube... even if you don't understand a word of the Spanish, it gives a pretty good impression of the town and its environment...

East of Soria, there were another couple of climbs to cross the 1400m Sierra del Madero and then down to Agreda where Mark ended the day. The image below shows his location tonight, poised to descend to the Ebro valley and on to Pamplona and the French border tomorrow....

A journey through the centre of the earth

2008-02-08T19:11:00.000Z

I have just read the web diary account of yesterday and it seems that I wasn't the only one having difficulty with the roads! However, according to the tracker, Mark is now about 45 miles north of Madrid and bound for Burgos tomorrow. He has stopped tonight just south of the border with the province of Spain called Segovia.

The significance of Madrid, apart from it being a major milestone through Spain, is that it is one of two antipodal points along Mark's route. According to the Guinness criteria, which you can read under the route tab on http://www.artemis.com/ , the route for a global circumnavigation must include two antipodal points.

That is actually harder to achieve than it sounds as there are fewer antipodal points on land than you might imagine. Antipodes are diametrically opposite one another i.e. they can be linked by a line going through the centre of the earth. However, most of the earth's land surfaces have ocean at their antipodes, this being a consequence of most land being in the northern hemisphere. This must have been a significant factor when planning the route. The globe shows how few the options actually were .....if Mark was to avoid Antarctica, the islands of Indonesia, the Amazon basin, Outer Mongolia, the Sahara, some Pacific islands and Siberia! Small wonder that he opted for New Zealand and Spain.

Within New Zealand and Spain, there are three pairs of antipodal cities - Hamilton and Cordoba, Auckland and Malaga and Wellington and Madrid. Malaga and Cordoba would have taken Mark too far south in Spain, leaving Wellington and Madrid as the obvious choice.

However, the Guinness rules are not just as simple as that. The longitude values have to add up to 180 degrees and the latitude values should be the same. If there is a difference on either or both, the total difference should not be more than 5 degrees. Let's check it out.....

If we round up to degrees, minutes and seconds (bearing in mind that there are 60 seconds in a minute and 60 minutes in a degree) , the latitude difference is 52' 6" - under 1 degree. The longitude values add up to 178 degrees 28' 44" giving a difference from 180 degrees of 1 degree 31' 16". The total 'error' is therefore just over 2 degrees - well within the 5 degrees allowed by the Guinness criteria.

Now, there is a much more fun way of doing antipodal points.....

If you click on Holey Moley, you can find out!

Having taken a slightly different tack in today's posting, I think I might take the liberty of bypassing Madrid and fast forwarding to the last part of today's journey which took Mark into the foothills of the Sierra de Guadarrama. The highest peaks in this range rise to around 2500m (hence the snow as in the Sierra de Gredos which we saw yesterday) but his route tomorrow morning will take him across a col at around 1500m. However, in order to reach there, there were two tough climbs today. This is because, as you can see from the map below the highest ground forms a V shaped ridge with an intermontane valley. So, having ascended the first ridge (Sierra de la Cabrera) and dropped down into the valley, it would have been all uphill again!

Incidentally, the underlying geology of this region is granite, as witnessed by a number of granite quarries such as this one in the vicinity of la Cabrera ....

...and below some weathered granite rocks in the Sierra de Cabrera borrowed from Flickr. Because of the way in which granite weathers along its joints, it gives rise to these very distinctive 'tor' landforms wherever it occurs in the world. The view below could be Dartmoor or Ben Macdhui .... blue sky? ... perhaps not!Legislation to designate a large part of the Sierra de Guadarrama as Spain's 15th national park is likely to be passed this year and one of the promotional videos (by an organisation with an unfortunate abbreviation) for that proposal is included below .....

If the embedded video does not play, click here to view it in its original location.

Mark has ended the day today at around 1200m - high enough to produce a cooler microclimatic zone. These images, all borrowed from Flickr and taken within a few miles of where Mark is this evening, give an impression of the surrounding landscape ......

It could be quite cool up there!

A barrage of barrages

2008-02-07T21:33:00.000Z

First, a 'big picture' to help fix location....
At end of day today Mark had reached the valley of the Alberche, a tributary of the Tagus and was about 50 miles south west of Madrid. The view of today's route (left) doesn't give much away. The snow capped peaks are the Sierra de Gredos which include the highest peak in central Spain - Pico de Almanzor (2600m) . It is worth remembering that altitude causes a temperature drop of 6.5 degrees for every 1000m. Thus the summits of the Sierra will be around 10 degrees colder than the plateau from which they rise giving a sort of sub Arctic climate in winter. Cutting across the area from east to west south of the mountains is the Tagus but for most of its course, except where it has been dammed, it flows in a narrow valley with little in the way of a floodplain. From 'this' height, therefore, the landuse which usually helps to identify a river's course is just not visible. The good news, however, is that the nature of the valley makes it very suitable for the construction of reservoirs which will provide a theme for today's posting.

From yesterday's overnight location, the first part of today's route took Mark through another western spur of the Sierra de Guadelupe - not unlike the terrain he encountered yesterday between Badajoz and Caceres. The zig zag road on the image above marks the route through these hills. Here, the ground is too high to benefit from irrigation and so the landscape is predominantly pasture and trees...

Once across the hills, Mark descended towards the Tagus . There are very few large settlements along this part of the river and I do wonder whether it is the nature of the valley - the fact that it is quite constricted -which has hindered communications an settlement. This lack of large settlements, combined with the fact that Mark had to use minor roads, meant that there have been fewer points of reference today.

I have decided therefore that I will follow a theme rather than a route for the remainder of today's journey; the theme being the river Tagus and the management of its waters. The Tagus at just over 1000 km long is the longest river in the Iberian peninsula but it pales into insignificance compared to some of the rivers we have looked at recently in the US! As mentioned already, its course through Spain is fairly constricted - it doesn't have much of a flood plain until it enters Portugal. Just before the border is the largest dam and reservoir along the river - the Alcantara. The waters held back by the dam extend a full 50 km upstream.

With the Alcantara dam downstream to his west, Mark met the Tagus just to the east of a small dam which holds back the waters of a tributary of the Tagus. Its purpose is just visible on the image below but clearer on the next...

I reckon this is the second nuclear power station along Mark's route - the other one was on the coast of California and described in this posting. Location factors for nuclear power stations include distance from large settlements and water for cooling and the Almaraz nuclear power station meets both of those criteria. Below, a view of the power station from the reservoir....

Just to the east of Almaraz the Tagus is dammed spectacularly by the Valdecanas dam...

This dam is also linked to power production - this time HEP but it also serves to hold back a 15km lake so regulating the flow of water in the river and preventing down-stream flooding - particularly across the border in Portugal. As mentioned previously, the valley surrounding the lake is narrow and rises fairly steeply from the edge of the water so there is limited potential for irrigation here.

Further upstream water is abstracted for irrigation from the waters behind the Azutan dam .....

Further upstream still, at the confluence of the Tagus and its tributary the Alberche, there is the first really extensive area of irrigation and cultivation of the day. From here, if you were to follow the Tagus upstream, it would lead to Toledo. Tomorrow Mark heads north east towards Madrid.

¡Hola Espagna!

2008-02-06T21:47:00.002Z

A long time ago in the mists of antiquity, I studied Spanish for a couple of years. I remember very little of it, although the quirky business of putting exclamation marks at the beginning and end of sentences has stuck with me..... hence today's title.

When you look at most atlas maps of Spain, it is quite difficult to get a real sense of the topography. This is because most of the country is a plateau. It is high enough to be 'orange' but not quite high enough to be 'brown'! However, when browsing on Wikipedia earlier, I came across this map which has layer shading which emphasises the main relief features. It might be useful for referring back to in the next couple of days.....

The plateau referred to above is called the Meseta and is more extensive and generally higher in the north than in the south. North west of Madrid in the Sierra de Guadarrama and in the Cordillera Cantabrica bordering the the bay of Biscay, mountains rise from the plateau to about 2500m while in the south, the Sierra Nevada reach a high point of 3500m well above the average height of the southern part of the Meseta. The north eastern edge of the Meseta is bounded by the Ebro valley and to the north east of that lie the Pyrennees. Three major river systems flow west and south from the Meseta - the Guadalquivir which reaches the coast in the Gulf of Cadiz, the Tagus which we have already 'met' at Lisbon and the Guadiana which flows through Badajoz (starting point for today's stretch of leg 7) and then south to the Gulf of Cadiz ....

Today's route began just across the Portuguese/Spanish border at Badajoz and ended to the north of Trujillo which is about 200km from Madrid. As mentioned above, Badajoz lies at a major bridging point of the Guadiana river. For those interested in the Spanish Civil War, Badajoz was the site of one of the first Nationalist victories in 1936. It is also remembered for a massacre of civilians which saw the deaths of at least 2000 people.

On a more geographical note, Badajoz is located at the confluence of the Guadiana river and its tributary, the Zapaton. The Guadiana has a total of 1824 dams in its basin which makes it one of the most 'managed' rivers in Europe. In the vicinity of Badajoz, a number of major gravity fed canals transfer water to irrigate land around both rivers. Below, some of that irrigated land north of the city along the banks of the Zapaton......

...and here to the east where an irrigation canal allows cultivation in the gravity-fed downslope portion of the valley but not above the canal. ...

As mentioned in previous postings, this part of Europe experiences a Mediterranean climate, although as Mark heads higher into the Meseta, he can expect altitude to make the temperatures cold. Summers, however, are hot and dry and cultivation is really only possible with the help of irrigation. Because winters and spring are rainy, when temperatures begin to rise in late February/ March, this is the season for wild flowers. by late spring the drought begins to bite and grasses and flowering plants dry up. the following image was sourced from Flickr and shows spring flowers near La Roca de la Sierra, a village through which mark passed this morning. Unfortunately he is probably just a few weeks too early for this kind of show but it reminds us that there is a very different face to the Mediterranean from the dessicated one we are familiar with in the summer....

As Mark headed north past la Roca de la Sierra, he would have noticed a steady climb into the Sierra de San Pedro across a number of low ridges and northwest southeast trending valleys. At Pueblo de Obando, a closer inspection of Google maps revealed a very interesting pattern of land use.....
a nucleated settlement with strip farming laid out around it. The image below is from the Panoramio layer in Google and relates to one of the blue dots bottom right on the image....

If you haven't yet discovered the Panoranio layer in Google Earth, I'd encourage you to seek it out as it is an excellent way of bringing those aerial views to life.

Beyond the low hills of the Sierra de San Pedro, the UNESCO world heritage city of Caceres perches above the Tagus valley. The following gives a flavour of why it achieved the designation ( you don't have to understand the Spanish !).....

The road east from Caceres leads to Trujillo and somewhere along that road Mark would have cycled past this spot and also the Guadiloba dam which looks like some sort of Chinese dragon from the air! (The Guadiloba is a tributary of the Tagus)..The rather blurry view below shows the dam with Caceres in the distance.

The road led finally to Trujillo - another historical and architectural 'gem' of this part of Spain..

Tiles, cork, wine and marble!

2008-02-05T00:03:00.003Z

The Artemis web site diary recounts how Mark found a 'nice wee hotel' in Montemor o Novo last night....There is a good description of the town here and an excellent set of photos on Flickr of which this is just one. Montemor o Novo, like many small towns and villages throughout the Mediterranean occupies a hilltop site. Unlike the UK where villages would normally seek low ground, Mediterranean settlements perch on the high ground. Often, as in the case of Montemor, it was for reasons of defence (there is an old castello on the hill just south of the town) but in a country where the most easily irrigated land is in the valleys, there is little point in using that land for settlement. Hence, towns and villages grew up on the hilltops as predominantly farming communities with farmed land spread out below. There are other good examples of this type of site and function in other settlements along Mark's route today.

The photo above and a 'zoom in' on Google to any of the settlements in this part of Portugal reveal a mass of striking red roofs. Almost every building is covered in terracotta tiles. One of the things which I find interesting about architecture is that buildings often reflect local geology..... thus the grey, unweathered granite houses in Aberdeen or the honey coloured, edges-softened-by-the-rain, houses in the Cotswolds, the slates on the roofs in Wales etc. Here in Portugal the red tiles are made of red clay - terra rossa -which is the predominant soil type. From above it gives a rich colour to bare earth seen here on an aerial shot from Google along Mark's route today. Terra rossa soils tend to develop in areas which are underlain by limestone and which have a Mediterranean climate. I don't claim to fully understand the chemistry but the red is iron oxide and is the result of clay residue from weathered limestone oxidising. It is considered to be a very good soil for growing vines.

One of the other agricultural products for which this region of Portugal is particularly noted is cork. More than half of the world's cork oak forests are found in the Alentejo of Portugal and they traditionally supplied the cork for wine producers all over the world. There is ,however, an environmental 'issue' related to the current trend of replacing cork with plastic 'corks' or even screw tops! This WWF video explains .....

...and below 'harvested' cork

Along Mark's route today there were many small dams - reminders of the aridity of summer in this part of Portugal and the need to store water from the winter to permit cultivation on irrigated land in the summer. Many of the irrigated areas have the centre pivot systems which we have become familiar with all across the world....

It is worth remembering that apart from vines and tree crops such as olives, few other crops would survive the summer drought without the aid of irrigation. Where land is not irrigated, little will grow in the summer months. On the image below of Vimieiro, for example, many of the fields will have been harvested of their crop of wheat early in the summer and will now lie empty until they are sown in time for the autumn rains.

The image above and this one of Vila Boim also serve to illustrate the pattern of land tenure described earlier in this posting. In the UK we are used to a pattern of dispersed rural settlement with isolated farmhouses surrounded by their land. Here in Portugal, the farms are clustered together close to the villages with their land scattered in several plots around the surrounding countryside. It ensures that all farmers have an equal share of the range of types of land but it is much less efficient than farming contiguous plots of land.

In all of these images the terra rossa soils are very noticeable and their presence links to two other products of this part of the Alentejo. Firstly, as mentioned, terra rossa develops on limestone. The metamorphosed form of limestone is marble and this region is famous throughout the world for its high quality marble. Portugal is the second largest exporter of marble in the world (after Italy) and 85% of it comes from the area around Estremoz, Borba and Vila Vicosa through which Mark travelled this afternoon. The Google imagery is rather low res in this area but it does give an impression of the extent of the quarries and the image below, sourced from Flickr, shows one of the Estremoz quarries in operation.

Terra rossa soils are also particularly good for vine growing and the region around Estremoz and Borba has an abundance of vineyards which produce high quality wines.

Estremoz, is another fine example of a hilltop town clustered around a citadel.......

So also is Elvas, just before the Spanish border, which sounds like a gem if its Wikipedia entry is anything to go by.

Mark ended the day just beyond the Spanish border at Badajoz - time for the first 'big picture' of Leg 7 I think!

"Alo Portugal"

2008-02-04T19:45:00.000Z

On every new leg of Mark's journey, I have felt that there was something exciting about finding the tracker in a new part of the world. Today there was the same sense of anticipation as I waited for the first 'fix' in Portugal.... By mid morning there is was - right beside the Portelo airport in Lisbon!

However, the city of Lisbon presents me with the same problem that all the cities along Mark's route have - there is just too much geography to do any of it justice and so I intend 'leaving' the city to the abundance of information in the Wikipedia link above and picking up the blue line on the outskirts.

The map left shows the route Mark covered today and you can see that he had first to negotiate the mouth of the Tagus river before heading east. Motorists who are prepared to pay the 2 Euro toll have the option of crossing the river mouth by the stunning Vasco da Gama bridge just visible to the east of Lisbon on the map.

The bridge was completed in 1998 after only 18 months of construction. At ten miles long, it is the longest bridge in Europe and carries six lanes of traffic with a 75mph speed limit. It's probably just as well that Mark went the long way round!

The alternative route crosses the Tagus at Villa Franca de Xira and this is the bridge which Mark would have used to cross the river.
The tree-lined route in the photo is the N10 which crosses the flat, intensively farmed floodplain of the river towards a settlement which is located right on the edge of the floodplain. This is Samora Correia which was virtually destroyed in 1909 by an earthquake the epicentre of which was just a few kilometers to the north. It is a reminder that this is a seismically active zone - where the African and European plates are converging - and that Lisbon suffered a massive earthquake in 1755 with a loss of life of between 60,000 and 100,000.

Looking at the floodplain from both high altitude and zoomed-in perspectives, those centre pivot irrigation systems which we have seen in so many areas of the world, appear again!

In order to understand the farming regime in Portugal, it is probably worth reminding ourselves of the main characteristics of the Mediterranean climate as shown by the climate graph for Lisbon. This is a climate which has a year round growing season but has limited agricultural potential from June to September without the aid of irrigation. Cereal crops such as wheat can be grown but they are harvested at the beginning of summer. Vegetables and salad crops grow year round but only where water is available in summer. Tree crops including almonds and olives can withstand the summer drought. Vines require the rains of spring to swell the grapes and the long, hot, dry summers to ripen the grapes and increase their sugar content.

Once across the Tagus and heading south east Mark would have quickly left the urban landscape of Lisbon behind. I searched the Internet in vain for a good relief map of this part of Portugal and so have resorted to scanning an old atlas to get a map which gives a reasonable impression of the terrain .....Mark is heading east into the region of Portugal called the Alentejo (shown in red) and towards the Spanish border at Badajoz. 'Tejo' is the name the Portuguese give to the Tagus and Alentejo is literally 'beyond the Tagus'. "The area is commonly known as the "bread basket" of Portugal, a region of vast open countryside with undulating plains and rich fertile soil. With very few exceptions all the major towns are mainly reliant on agriculture, livestock and wood".

To meet the needs of domestic users and farmers a large number of dams are needed to hold back water from the winter rains and all along Mark's route today there was ample evidence of these.....
... and of smaller 'tanks' irrigating patches of land.
The landscape of this part of Portugal is very much one of low rolling hills and wide farmed plains. Some areas are intensively farmed such as here near to Pegoes which Mark passed through this afternoon. This region is on eof Portugal's best known wine producing areas and many of the farmers are members of a wine cooperative. If you click on the image below, you will link to a very informative website about the cooperative.... The last part of Mark's route today took him east of Pegoes into the foothills of the Alto Alentejo...

... where a unique land use and one very much associated with Portugal can be found. More of hich tomorrow........

He's there!

2008-02-03T00:02:00.000Z

The beach at St Augustine - says it all really!

I posted the image above at midnight but the rest follows at a more respectable hour on a Sunday morning.....

Yesterday's route started on a campsite in the Ocala National Forest and ended on the Atlantic coast at St Augustine. The Ocala National Forest occupies about 600 square miles in central Florida to the east of Ocala. It is the oldest national forest east of the Mississippi and is a mix of pine forest, scrubland, swamp and freshwater habitats associated with the myriad of 'prairie lakes' described in previous postings. Like most state and national forests in the US, it is managed to balance the demands of forestry, conservation and recreation.

The largest concentration of black bears in Florida inhabit these woods and the advice on the forest web site is ...

"Be Bear Aware! You are in Bear Country.
Bears are naturally shy of people. If you see a bear, enjoy it from a safe distance. Keeps dogs and children close to you. Loose dogs may agitate bears. NEVER approach a bear! Make noise so the bear knows you are there. If a bear approaches, DO NOT RUN. Back away SLOWLY"

And as if that's not enough ....

"Alligators are present in this forest. They are an important part of Florida’s ecology and may be found wherever there is a body of water. They have a natural fear of man, but may lose that fear by being around people especially if they are fed. When this happens alligators can be dangerous. For this reason alligators should not be fed or molested in any way."

Reading the web diary this morning, it is interesting to note that Mark commented on burning in the forest. Very close to his campsite there is clear evidence of how the forest is managed and this will include periodic, controlled burning. On this image you can see stands of trees at all stages of management - newly cleared, newly planted and maturing. An explanation and rationale for burning forests is given here. (Scroll down to the section on Ocala and you can read about wild fires and prescribed burning).

The largest of the lakes in the region is Lake George - location of the last alligator fatality in Florida as described here on the BBC news website! Mark's nearest location to lake George was at Salt Springs which, as its name suggests, produces mineral richwater for Lake George, raising its salinity. The waters of Lake George are sufficiently brackish for salt water species e.g. blue crab to migrate up the St John's river in sufficient numbers to support a local fishery on the lake. The image below, 'borrowed' from Fickr, shows sunrise over the lake...
From Lake George Mark cycled north to the river crossing on the St John's river at Palatka. ...

With a length of 310 miles and a difference in altitude of only 10 metres between source and mouth, the St John's river is one of the world's 'laziest' and most languid rivers. Once navigable by paddleboat steamers, there is a nice video of a journey up the river available here. Just west of Palatka is an industrial enterprise which we've become quite familiar with in the 'South' - another huge pulp and papermill...This one is the Georgia Pacific paper mill - an operation which employs some 1200 people. It uses 1.5 million tons of locally sourced pine to produce about half a million tons of paper products annually. Effluent from the mill receives a high level of treatment, first in a 360-foot-diameter primary clarifier and then during a 40-day journey through a 1,000-acre biological treatment pond system that comprises the mill’s secondary treatment process. (visible top left in the first image).

Between Palatka and the coast on the drier, sandy soils of old dune ridges, there is a chequerboard of intensive cultivation of vegetable and salad crops... and close to St Augustine a golf resort ....

Until a friend who is a keen historian told me, I had no idea of the historical significance of St Augustine - the eastern terminus of the American leg of Mark's journey. Founded in 1565 by the Spanish, St Augustine is the oldest port and oldest continuously occupied European settlement in North America...

Although founded by the Spaniards in the 17th century, St Augustine passed to British control for a while before coming under Spanish control again in the 18th century. At that time the Castillo de San Marcos (right and below)was built to protect Spanish interests in the area. It is testimony to over 300 years of history - a long time in American terms!

St Augustine also has several claims to notoriety associated with rather inglorious events during the civil rights struggles of the 1960s which you can read about here.

However, not wishing to end the American leg on a negative note, I thought we should have a final 'big picture' of the 3575 miles across the USA - it's been quite a learning journey!

"Way down upon...."

2008-02-02T00:16:00.001Z

Today's posting starts with two musical 'clues' to help complete the title.......
First some Gershwin by Gershwin. Stick with it - it gets there after 30 seconds!

And then something with a more 'folky' feeling

Now that's what I call banjo playing though I'm not sure that the bass player in the background is in quite the same class!

It looks from the map as if Mark had a long day and covered quite a bit of ground yesterday so should be paddling in the Atlantic by later today! (St Augustine is hiding just behind the 'call out' of the GPS tracker).

However, the first part of yesterday's route takes us back to the title of this posting and the musical clues. Shortly after leaving Mayo, Mark crossed the Suwannee river. Despite the difference in spelling, this is the 'Swannee River' of Gershwin's song and Stephen Foster's 'Old Folks at Home' - the official state song of Florida.
At some point in the mists of time, I knew quite a lot about the geography of the USA. I have forgotten a lot of it but one thing that has always remained with me is the Okefenokee swamp. (I guess like the volcano Popocatepetl it just sounds nice and so the name sticks!). The Okefenokee is a swamp area in the south east of Georgia and it is the source of the Suwannee river which Mark crossed just west of Banford...

Apparently all river crossings of the Suwannee announce their connection with the Stephen Foster song, providing travellers with the first few bars....

...and rewarding them as well with beautiful views such as this

South of Branford, Mark followed the river for some distance before turning east towards Bronson. What is interesting when you look at the image left and the one below is how the agricultural land avoids the valleys and is concentrated on the drier interfluve areas, unlike all the 'green ribbons' in deserts where farming competes for a position beside the river, which we saw earlier in Mark's journey across the States .

The green ribbons in Florida follow the rivers and are the swampy, forested areas which are unsuitable for cultivation.

Bronson and East Bronson may only have populations of 964 and 1075 respectively (according to Wikipedia) but the number of entries in Google relating to real estate for both settlements probably explain the huge areas which look like this.... South of Bronson and past Trenton and Williston land use is predominantly pasture and forest but here and there, especially as you get closer to Ocala, there is evidence of something for which this part of Florida is known worldwide...

Zooming in closer gives an even better view..

Along Mark's route we have discussed location factors for quite a number of enterprises from observatories to steel mills and today it's the turn of Thoroughbred breeding and training!

" The rich grazing, rolling hills, and year round pastures not available in other states, contributed to the development of the Thoroughbred industry in Marion County. The first Thoroughbred farm, "Rosemere", was established in 1935. In 1956, an unknown three year old named "Needles" won the Kentucky Derby and the Belmont Stakes, and Marion County became a focus for the racing world. Marion County boasts over 1,000 farms and training centers including approximately 450 Thoroughbred farms, and is home to nearly 50 different horse breeds. In 1999, Ocala/Marion County was recognized by the U.S. Department of Agriculture census as the "Horse Capital of the World" and as having more horses and ponies than any other county in the nation. Nearly 29,000 residents are employed in the county's Thoroughbred industry alone. This unique rural character combined with the Thoroughbred industry puts Ocala/Marion County in the elite company of Lexington, Kentucky; Newmarket, England; and Chantilly, France as the major Thoroughbred centers in the world. "

Apparently the Florida horse industry employs 72,000 people and is worth $2.2 billion to the economy of the state.

Despite an original plan to overnight in Ocala, Mark continued on east and camped in the Ocala National Forest - a vast area of forest, scrubland and over 600 lakes and ponds .The forest is riddled with slow-moving rivers and wet prairies as described in yesterday's posting. They are sunny, shallow expanses of water, usually ringed by cypress trees and filled water lilies and other aquatic plants. The largest is lake George, of which, more tomorrow.

P.S. If you are reading this on 02.02.08, you might be making the 10,000th 'hit'!

Florida...second time around

2008-02-01T19:18:00.000Z

Completing his litttle detour into Georgia, Mark headed south yesterday from Thomasville and back into Florida. By my reckoning, it's the only state whose border Mark will have crossed three times on his journey. All others he's crossed twice except for.....?

And for those who like the occasional 'big picture', here's the latest one with blue GPS markers creeping ever nearer to the Atlantic...

Between Thomasville and the Florida border, the landscape of southern Georgia is quite different from the intensively farmed irrigated land which we saw along Mark's route two days ago. Approaching the border, forest once again becomes the dominant land use as cultivated land gives way to a mixed land use of trees, swampy areas and some patches of grassland and cultivation. At the Florida border, the view is like this....
You may notice one or two areas of surface water in the view above. They are just a few of literally hundreds of small 'prairie lakes' and ponds in this part of north central Florida which have taken me a couple of days to research. They are related to the underlying geology and unlike most lakes which are the result of in-flowing surface drainage, these lakes represent places where the water table and underground aquifers are intersected by surface relief. The low points in the relief which permit the appearance of water at the surface are called sink holes and represent dissolved joints in underlying limestone rock which permit access to the water table. During periods of drought, when the water table drops, these lakes may dry up completely as explained here.

One of the largest of the prairie lakes in Florida is Lake Miccosukee which lies just a couple of miles west of the route Mark followed south from the Florida border. Like many of the prairie lakes, Lake Miccosukee is hypereutrophic. This means that the water is nutrient rich and frequently has an algal bloom. If you check out the lake in Google and zoom in close, you will have no difficulty in identifying the algal bloom. below is a photo of the lake 'borrowed' from Flickr...
The small town of Monticello is named after the Virginia estate of Thomas Jefferson, third president of the United States. However, other than carrying its name, the town has no other connection with the former president. Close to Monticello some more interesting land use patterns hove into view....

I have to admit to being a bit 'stumped' by these. It is clearly reafforestation of some sort - patches of the former forest cover are still visible nearby. I do wonder if it could simply be that the trees are planted along contours to enhance the impression of relief once they grow. Any other ideas?

Also in the vicinity of Monticello are these land use patterns but I think they are more easily explained. These look to me to be areas of intensive cultivation of vegetable and salad crops in fields sheeted with polythene (plasticulture as it is sometimes called) to help retain soil moisture. You can also see an algal bloom of one of the prairie lakes described above.

South of Monticello the next major settlement along Mark's route yesterday was the town of Parry which has the dubious distinction of being a town with a bad smell and the focus of a long running environmental dispute. Both arise from this industrial enterprise....

This is the Buckeye Cellulose Corporation's plant at Foley just to the south east of Parry. It uses slash pine timber and cotton fiber as the principal raw materials in the manufacture of the company's specialty cellulose and absorbent cellulose products (most of which end up in nappies). The region surrounding Buckeye's plant in Perry, Florida(the Foley Plant) has a high concentration of slash pine timber, which enables Buckeye to purchase adequate supplies of a species well suited to its products at an attractive cost. The plant is the largest employer in Taylor county.

It is located on the Fernholloway river which is now heavily polluted by toxic factory effluent. The environmental damage has been the subject of extensive legal wrangling involving the state, environmental groups, the US Environmental Protection Agency and the Buckeye Cellulose Corporation who have proposed building a pipeline to take effluent directly to the Gulf. Environmental campaigners believe that will only relocate the problem.

And finally.... the information on the Artemis web diary today means that we can locate precisely the motel Mark used in Mayo last night. What a small world we live in though I'll bet that thought hasn't gone through Mark's mind lately!

And the view across the road this morning would have been of the Lafayette County Courthouse.

"Georgia on my mind"

2008-01-31T10:07:00.001Z

Yesterday Mark made a sortie into Georgia and added a 'bonus' state to our American experience! However, as his transit through the state will be brief, I will dispense with the temptation to 'do' Georgia in an evening and leave you to follow the link above to Wikipedia (which may well take you all evening to read anyway!)

Now, have you been paying attention these last six weeks? Look at the map of the US states - can you name in sequence all the states which Mark has passed through? It seems easy to me now but if I'm honest, I don't know if I'd have got them all right six weeks ago. Shame on me but then, that's not what we 'do' in geography classrooms these days. If you've been following the Geo Blog along the route or even just delving into it now and again, I really hope you have gained an impression of what a varied and interesting classroom subject it is these days. 'Geography is everywhere' is a truism which Mark's trip has certainly shown. Over the last six months have looked at a whole range of physical and human geography topics with a bit of environmental geography thrown in here and there for good measure. In the last few days alone the topics have ranged through hurricanes, coastal features, weather, beach resorts, forestry, rivers. And today, from a quick look at the route Mark took yesterday, the focus is definitely on land use....

As Mark cycled through the north of Florida on Tuesday, the landscape was dominated by both state managed and commercial forests. Over the border and into Georgia, that theme continues along the valley of the Flint river towards Bainbridge. Closer inspection reveals this to be an area of well managed forest. The trees are in clear 'stands' of similar aged/species of tree, there are clear felled areas with patches of trees left for habitat conservation and there are some area of young trees (in rows) on the left of the image.
There is also a mysterious line cutting right through the forest. My first thoughts on this were that as it is about 40m wide, it could be a fire break and then I zoomed in for a good look and spotted these....

so on second thoughts I wonder if the cleared line serves two purposes - fire break and power line route.

Meanwhile to the west of the river valley and further north beyond Bainbridge, a completely new form of land use is appearing .....
Mile upon mile of pivot irrigation circles. Although we have seen these at many locations along Mark's route - notably in Iran, Australia, New Zealand and western USA, I don't think I've ever seen densities like these. Their presence suggests that although this area receives about 1300mm of rain (that's about equivalent to west central Scotland), the high levels of evapotranspiration because of high summer temperatures will reduce the efficacy of the precipitation and so necessitate irrigation.

A bit of research has produced a figure of just over 3 million acres of cultivated land in Georgia, half of which is irrigated. As for the likely crops... well, if Las Cruces way back in New Mexico was the centre of pecan production, this part of Georgia specialises in peanuts. The long growing season (275 days) means that cultivation is almost a year round activity and many farmers can produce more than one crop from their land in a year. In addition to peanuts, the farmers of south west Georgia produce a huge range of vegetables as described here. That last link produced another which finally led to the information I wanted....

"Nearly 10,000 of these center-pivot irrigation systems cover 1 million acres of productive farmland in south Georgia. Tapping the deep, pure waters of the Upper Floridan aquifer, their wells pump not only water but also dollars into the region. The additional growth of high-quality peanuts, sweet corn, cotton and animal feeds, made possible as these irrigation systems fill in rainfall gaps, means dollars for the local economy." And here is you want to read it is the source.
It makes for a most interesting pattern of land use right alongside the route which Mark followed yesterday. From ground level, however, the view would have been more like this field of peanuts being irrigated by centre pivot irrigation.....

Hopeful - what a lovely name for the furthest north spot that Mark reached in Georgia! Turn right and head south and east and the land use changes again. There is still cultivation but less irrigation...

Having then crossed the well wooded valley of the Ochlockonee, the last GPS 'fix' yesterday was just north of Thomasville which you can enjoy a flavour of below...

Meanderings....

2008-01-30T17:40:00.000Z

I am writing the blog late today as I have spent ages on-line this evening booking tickets for going to Paris! If you are reading this and you are also to be in Paris, I look forward to meeting you and celebrating together Mark's most amazing achievement. But to get back to yesterday....The first meandering mentioned in the title of today's posting is the route which Mark took yesterday. Having imagined him to be on a course due east to the Atlantic, it was a bit of a surprise seeing him suddenly change direction and head north. All was explained later in the web diary ... the wee detour is to add up some extra miles... as you do when you've already done about 16,500! The benefit of the change of direction is also that it lets us look at a different sort of environment to the one we've been looking at in the last couple of days.

However, we've not quite finished with coasts yet. ..

One of the features I have noticed along this Emerald Coast in Florida is a number of air force bases and yesterday, shortly after leaving Panama City, Mark cycled past Tyndall Air Force base.

It takes in 29,000 acres of land, extending well to the south east of the runway complex.

Seawards of the base is another set of barrier islands as described in yesterday's posting and separated from the mainland by the sheltered waters of St Andrew Sound ..... Further along the coast, almost at the point where Mark headed inland, is another significant feature of coastal deposition. The feature is a spit and as far as students of geography are concerned, spits are to coasts as ox bow lakes are to rivers. Few have seen them but they can all write about them!

Spits are formed when the currents which take beach material along a coastline by a process known as longshore drift, continue on beyond a point where the coast changes direction. This could be at a headland as here in Florida or it can be at the mouth of an estuary like the Humber in England where it has resulted in the formation of Spurn Head. Sometimes, as here at Cape San Blas, the spit may become 'recurved' if prevailing winds and tides drive the sediment back towards the shore....

There is a short animation here which shows how spits are formed .

This aerial view of the spit which is part of the St Joseph State park in Florida shows the typical features of parallel dune ridges at the recurved tip. and the image below from Flickr shows the seaward side of the spit looking north.

Mark turned inland at Port St Joe opposite the tip of the spit and very quickly left the coastal environment behind. Beaches quickly give way to forest in this part of Florida. As a state, Florida is well forested. It has 25,000 square miles of forest which is half of the state's area. The forests are in both private and state ownership producing 650 million cubic metres of timber and a huge number of timber products annually. Surprisingly (to me at any rate) Florida's highest value agricultural product is trees. Over $16.6 billion is infused into Florida's economy from the manufacturing and distribution of forest products each year.

The first part of the route inland took Mark through many miles of commercial forest with evidence in places of clearfelling and reafforestation. As he approached Gaskins Still and Wewahitchka, the commercial forests gave way to the swamp natural forests on the floodplain of the Apalachicola river and its tributary the Chipola. And here are the second 'meanderings' - this time on the river itself...
After all these months of looking at rivers across the globe, I feel confident I can leave you to explain what you are seeing here! However, what you won't see from this altitude is that there are many small rafts on the river Apalachicola... They are floating bee hives and they are linked to a very unique product of the region - Tupelo honey! The town of Wewawitchika is the global centre of Tupelo honey production as explained here.... and here the website of the company who dominate production.

North of Wewawitchika lies the Dead Lakes so named bacause deposition from the Apalachicola blocked the mouth of the Chipola causing it to dam up and flood its valley. Dead Lakes State Recreation Area activities include hiking, fishing, boating, camping and nature viewing. Among the wildlife of the park are foxes, cotton rats, racoons, deer , beavers, turtles, snakes and alligators. A variety of trees can be found in the park, including longleaf pines, magnolia and cypress trees.

>Beyond Dead Lakes Mark meandered his way north toward the border with Georgia where he stopped last night just south of Lake Seminole at the town of Sneads. Lake Seminole was formed by damming the Chattahoochee and Flint rivers which flow into the lake from the north and east respectively. The Jim Woodruff lock and dam impounds the lake from which the main outflow is the Apalachicola river.

Life's a beach!

2008-01-29T14:45:00.000Z

Yesterday's route was one long beach! It started at Navarre beach and ended at Panama City Beach via Wynnehaven, Fort Walton, Destin, Miramar, Blue Mountain, Grayton, Seagrove, Alys, Hollywood and Laguna (all plus 'beach' in their name!). This Gulf coastline of Florida's 'Pan handle' is known as the Emerald Coast and is an almost continuously built up string of beachfront developments facing on to white quartz sand and turquoise water (when the weather is fine).....
Incidentally, I came across this bit of trivia about the Florida Panhandle.... shortly after the Civil War, residents of Florida's peninsula considered ceding the state's entire western arm to Alabama for a million dollars. Alabama's leaders decided that the land was "a sand bank and gopher region," and not worth the money! As a result, the Panhandle remained a part of Florida. and is now a major source of revenue for the state today.

But to get back to those glorious beaches.... looking at this coastline reminds me that we have actually seen quite a few contrasting coastlines along Mark's route and that this might be a good time to do a bit of revision! When we study the physical features of coastlines in geography, they are usually classified as either coastlines of erosion or coastlines of deposition. Mark has 'taken' us to some fine examples of both. Do you remember back in Australia the Bunda Cliffs on the Southern Ocean described in this posting on the 19th and a few days later the cove at Ellison described in this posting on the 24th?

And then there was Cape Catastrophe at the south end of the Eyre peninsula which was described here in the entry fo 25th November .

They are all fine examples of coastlines which are being carved out by a variety of erosion processes.

Then, still in Australia, there was the lovely Coorong at the mouth of the River Murray where prehistoric sand dunes had been inundated by rising seas. You can read about it again in this posting - a reminder that some coastlines are the result of deposition...... which brings us back to the Emerald coast and a coastline which looks not dissimilar to the coastline at the Coorong and may, in fact, have formed in a similar way. The barrier islands of the Gulf coast such as Santa Rosa island offshore from Navarre where Mark overnighted on Monday are a series of sandy islands running parallel to the mainland. Between the islands and the mainland is a tidal lagoon. The jury is out on the origin of barrier islands but they tend to develop on coasts with powerful waves and a low tidal range. One theory is that they formed originally off shore below the low tide mark and that they have 'rolled' progressively on-shore. Another theory (the one favoured for the Coorong) is that post glacial sea level rise partly submerged old beach ridges.

Either way, the Emerald coastline of Florida is lovely..... with a whole sequence of beach resorts lining both the mainland and the barrier islands, linked one with the other by a number of causeways and bridges. There is little to distinguish one resort from the next (though I daresay their municipal authorities might disagree!). Here is just a flavour of some of them starting at Navarre beach and heading east along the coast......
.....towards Fort Walton

...past Okaloosa and the harbour and beach at Destin

which you can see more of below...

..and the golf resort residences which look pretty smart ....
even if the bunkers are a bit tricky!

Although continuously built up for almost 200 miles, this coastal playground is little more than a narrow strip when viewed from the air. Only a mile inland, natural woodlands take over from the flamboyant land uses of the coast.... Above is Point Washington State Forest with what was at first a puzzling, rather 'blotchy' appearance until I read ..An important management tool used on the Point Washington State Forest is the prescribed burning program. The use of controlled fire in managing timber, wildlife and ecological resources on Point Washington State Forest is necessary for the Division of Forestry to fulfill its goal of protecting and managing Florida's forest resources. Objectives of the prescribed burning program include reducing undergrowth and maintaining biodiversity.

.... and finally, still on the Emerald coast, Mark's stop over location for the 28th at Panama City beach...

Nice beach ....shame about the buildings!

Day to state ratio slipping!

2008-01-28T19:44:00.000Z

Mark's day to state ratio has slipped - only two yesterday! He started the day in Alabama and ended up in Florida- the state with an Atlantic coast. Yes!!

... and here, for those who prefer, is the 'big picture'. In only a few days Mark will be able to dip his toes in the Atlantic and add another ocean to his list. In fact, by the time he reaches Paris, Mark will be able to 'tick off' four continents and four oceans. And they are........?!

Like Mississippi on Saturday, Mark's passage through Alabama was short. Again this is because of the configuration of the state boundary...

Just as Louisiana 'eats' into the coastal lands of Mississippi, so the pan handle of Florida pushes west, leaving Alabama with only a 65 mile wide stretch of Gulf coastline. But what a coastline! here's just a sample ...
Mark's day began yesterday with a circuit of Mobile Bay. The city of Mobile itself is Alabama's only major port but it serves not only as a seaport but also as a 'break of bulk' port at the entrance to an extensive navigable inland waterway system which links the Gulf to the midwest.

Alabama, like Mississippi, suffered considerable economic hardship in the years between The Civil War and WW2. However, diversification of its economy into manufacturing and mineral extraction and more recently into aerospace and high tech industry has meant that it has fared rather better than its neighbour to the west. An interesting recent development has been the choice of Mobile by a German company to locate a $3.7billion steel plant to the north of the city. At a time when few developed countries can compete in steel production, this is an interesting choice of location but is almost entirely the consequence of the need to meet local demand. Car manufacturing is currently a boom industry in Alabama. By 2009 Alabama will overtake Michigan (Detroit) as the major car manufacturing state in the US.

Approaching the top of Mobile Bay, Mark passed McDuffie island on his right where the largest coal and iron ore importing facility on the Gulf coast is located , much of it doubtless destined for the steel furnaces.....

At the head of the bay, before crossing the causeway, is Battleship Memorial Park

Away from Mobile and down the east shore of the of the bay, there are some rather attractive waterfront residential areas with the inevitable out-of-town shopping mall - which, if you look carefully, even has a street named after one of its stores. Watch out for an Asda Avenue near you!!

The second half of yesterday's route took Mark cross country to the Alabama/Florida border at Paradise Beach and on into Florida.... ...which by my reckoning is the eighth US state which Mark has visited on this trip.

First 'port of call' in Florida was Pensacola, gateway to the Gulf holiday coastline of Florida.

The Gulf coastline in west Florida is fringed by a line of barrier islands and glorious beaches. Mark overnighted yesterday at Navarre... Across the lagoon lies the barrier island of Santa Rosa with Pensacola beach....and some rather nice beach front residences....

I should really discuss the formation of barrier beaches but it can wait until tomorrow...

Three states in one day!

2008-01-27T09:52:00.000Z

Louisiana, Mississippi and Alabama all in one day. Amazing when you think that Texas took ten!

After leaving Slidell, the first part of yesterday's route took Mark across a huge swamp which is drained by the Pearl river and its distributaries. In the vicinity of Mark's route the swamp is known as Honey Island Swamp. It is one of the least altered river swamps in the US. Several companies organise swamp tours and if you click on either of the 'gators below you can explore the swamp 'virtually'....

Or, even better, here's a short video of the Honey Island swamp!

There are apparently 1,000,000 alligators in Louisiana - and a lot of them are in the swamp! Here's just one in a million....

The distributary known as the East Pearl River is the Louisiana/Mississippi state boundary...

In the Artemis web diary today there is talk of 'houses on stilts' in the swamp and I guess those shown above must be some of them. A search on Flickr also produced these image of a house on the Pearl River (above)and river front house in the swamp...

OK... enough swamp talk... time to move in to the state of Mississippi... through which, due to the configuration of its western boundary with Louisiana, Mark only had an 80 mile journey yesterday.

In many ways, the state of Mississippi typifies the 'Deep South' of the USA and its current socio economic status today is a consequence of a long history of cultural and racial tensions, political differences with 'the north' and the fluctuating fortunes of farming and industry. At 37% it is the state with the largest % of African Americans and in August, 2007, a report by the United States census Bureau indicated that Mississippi is the poorest state in the country. There is a pretty thorough description of the social and economic history of Mississippi here which you might care to read for more background information.

One of the facts which is recorded is that back in the early 1990s, in an effort to boost the economic fortunes of the state, the state legislature legalized casino gambling along the the Gulf Coast including the towns of Bay St Louis (left), Gulfport and Biloxi through which Mark cycled yesterday. An indication of how much gambling tax was earned by the state is the fact that it lost half a million dollars a day following damage to casinos on the Gulf Coast in the wake of Hurricane Katrina.

Although much of the world's attention was focused on New Orleans at the time of Katrina in August 2005, massive damage was sustained by communities along the Mississippi Gulf Coast as witnessed by the images in this excellent set .
Bay St Louis, for example, 'lost' its bridge link to the rest of the Gulf coast during the hurricane and this was only restored in May 2007 . East of Bay St Louis on Long Beach I reckon that the damage to beach front areas is visible on the image below where buildings have been removed leaving only foundations ..
..and here again further along the coast ...In fact, if I have learned one new thing today while 'trawling' for the blog, it is the extent to which areas well to the east of New Orleans were devastated by Hurricane Katrina. Statistics suggest that 90% of the buildings along the coast in Biloxi and neighboring Gulfport were destroyed by the hurricane. Katrina claimed the lives of 53 people in Biloxi. Since 2005, 6000 people have left Biloxi.
...and so on east to the swamps surrounding the river Pascagoula - which is apparently the only major US river entering the Gulf which has not been 'managed' by building dams and through the city of Pascagoula which suffered major flooding at the time of Hurricane Katrina as witnessed by the image below showing flooding at the Chevron oil terminal to the east of the city...

Beyond Pascagoula was the border with Alabama, the third state of the day.......

of which, more tomorrow!

Mississippi miscellany...

2008-01-26T20:23:00.000Z

Yesterday, 25th January, I received a short text message from Mark with a few geographical and meteorological observations about Louisiana. It concluded "enjoying the flatlands but wish the wind and rain would leave me alone"... then on the Artemis diary "rain got very heavy in the afternoon - heaviest since Malaysia - and lightning storm at the end of the day".

The 25th January is coincidentally the day on which Robert Burns is remembered around the world and so in celebration of our national bard and because geography teachers are encouraged to seek cross curricular links here is how he might have described the day... !

The wind blew as 'twad blown its last

The rattlin showers rose on the blast

The lightning flashed from pole to pole

Near and more near the thunder rolled

(adapted very loosely from 'Tam o'Shanter')

On a more serious note, the weather has clearly been pretty awful in the last couple of days so the first bit of today's miscellany is meteorological. Mark should expect the weather to pick up considerably tomorrow...

The pressure map above for Sunday shows the front which brought the rain clearing east across Florida and high pressure building over Louisiana. High pressure normally brings clear skies and, with widely spaced isobars, light winds. The winds follow the isobars blowing clockwise around the centre of high pressure. At night time it will be cold because the clear skies allow any warmth built up during the day to escape to the atmosphere but during the day in these sub tropical latitudes, temperatures should rise nicely. That, at least is the theory! However, it would seem that the predictions for tomorrow are pretty much in line with that..

...very little cloud

....very chilly first thing in the morning

.....quite cosy by the afternoon

and light winds from the north.

Fingers crossed for a better day!

Yesterday, after bike repairs in Baton Rouge, Mark took a route through the area called North Shore. The shore in question is the north side of Lake Pontchartrain which lies between New Orleans on the delta of the Mississippi and the 'mainland'.

Lake Ponchartrain is, in fact, an almost enclosed shallow estuary of several small rivers flowing south to the Gulf of Mexico east of the Mississippi delta. As the entrance to the sea is very narrow and constantly silting, seawater does not penetrate far into the lake and so it is 'brackish' rather than salty. The role of lake Pontchartrain in the coastal defences of the area is well explained in the link above and, in particular, the events of Hurricane Katrina which made landfall here, are explained.

One of the things which you notice immediately on both the zoomed out and the zoomed in view of the lake is the causeway which crosses it. Despite being the longest bridge in the world, I was until today, completely unaware of its existence! The Lake Ponchartrain Causeway is actually two parallel bridges, each almost 24 miles long, the first built in 1956 and the second in 1969. They brought the North Shore into the New Orleans Metropolitan Area and made commuting a resonable proposition for the communities on the North Shore area. Because they miraculously survived Hurricane Katrina, they were a very important lifeline to the people of New Orleans in the aftermath of the hurricane. The view below looks north across the causeway towards North Shore.

I wouldn't like to leave this area without a little mention for the Mississippi delta! From the air it is one of those areas on our planet which I think are really beautiful...The sediment being disgorged by the river not only builds up new land but also gives a palette of shades to the waters of the Gulf of Mexico. The image above contains the main channel used by river traffic on the Mississippi but this 'finger' is just one of countless branches which make up the delta. Deltas form where a river loses energy when it enters the sea and deposits the load it is carrying. They can be arcuate like the Nile delta or 'bird's foot' as here on the Mississippi.

...but to get back to North Shore where Mark covered most of yesterday's miles. Both of the major settlements there - Covington and Slidell, where he overnighted, have seen massive population booms in the last two and half years as a result of resettlement by people who have chosen to move out of New Orleans. And here is some of the evdence in Covington.....I guess when you are clearing trees and laying out new building plots in a hurry, you don't have time to think up street names. It would be nice to think that the new residents now have more interesting adresses than A - K street or 1st to 3rd street!

The huge building boom in both Slidell and Covington is despite the fact that the lakeside area of Slidell lay right in the path of the eye of Katrina and suffered appalling flooding and storm damage as witnessed by these Flickr images.

Old Man River....

2008-01-24T23:19:00.003Z

(It is actually Friday 25th January but for some reason this posting has been tagged on to yesterday's!)

I've been waiting a couple of days to be able to use that title ! After the unfortunate events of Tuesday and the delays which that created, Mark finally reached the Mississippi yesterday afternoon....

The route had taken him east from Opelousas to Baton Rouge which is located on the Mississippi about 70 miles upriver from New Orleans ...more of which later.

About 15 miles east of Opelousas, Mark crossed the River Atchafalaya at Krotz Springs. As you can see below, this river flows in the middle of a very broad, swampy floodplain within which only a few patches are reclaimed for farming .. The river Atchafalaya is technically a distributary of the Mississippi. A distributary is the opposite of a tributary i.e. it is a channel that branches off and flows away from a main stream channel. They are a common feature of river deltas. The diagram above shows how the Atchafalaya is related to the Mississippi. It is 170 miles long and is an important navigable link to the Mississippi. Mark crossed the river at Krotz Springs, which, as you can see on the image below has its own refinery which has direct access to the navigable channel of the river. The town itself takes its name from an unexpected (and somewhat disappointing) discovery of artesian water during exploration for oil.

Although much of the land on either side of the river is not reclaimed for farming, there are a few areas of cultivation where the most likely crop would seem to be rice. After sugar cane and cotton, rice is crop number three for Louisiana and almost certainly is what we can see here north of Krotz Springs and in this Flickr image of rice growing in Louisiana.... There is an interesting connection between the rice fields in Louisiana and a local delicacy, the crawfish, which is central to many traditional dishes in this part of the world. Click on the banner above to link to the official site of the Louisiana Crawfish Promotion and Research Board. Amongst its pages is a downloadable pdf recipe book which is definitely worth a read - particularly the first few pages which give a great deal of information about the history of crawfish farming in Louisiana. The connection with rice farming is a relatively recent development and is explained as follows "when it is time to plant the rice the fields are flooded and the rice seeds are dropped by plane. At this time male and female crawfish are also put into the fields. The rice grows and the crawfish prosper eating the stubble from the previous year's rice, and multiply. When it is time to harvest the rice the fields are drained. The crawfish burrow deep into the ground in search of water. The fields then are hard enough for the harvesting equipment. After the rice is harvested the fields are flooded again and the crawfish come up from their burrows. Traps are laid in the flooded fields and a crop of crawfish is harvested."

About 25 miles east of the Atchafalaya, Mark finally reached the muddy waters of the Mississippi at a huge meander just north of Baton Rouge, the state capital of Louisiana.

Highway 190 crosses the Mississippi at the Huey P. Long bridge, the first bridge built across the Mississippi in Louisiana.

Immediately downstream of the bridge the land on either side of the river is dominated by oil refining and the views below shows the huge ExxonMobil Baton Rouge refinery. It is the second largest oil refinery in the United States processing over 20 million gallons of petroleum each day. According to the Environmental Protection Agency, it is also the country's second largest polluter...
....complete with tanker taking refined products on board. I have to say that the resolution of the imagery on Google Maps and Google Earth is wonderful in this area and you could have an interesting virtual journey following the river upstream and downstream towards New Orlenas. The activity on and surrounding the river is fascinating.

Baton Rouge, like New Orleans is largely dependent on levees (raised river banks which form naturally during each flood event but may be subsequently reinforced) to protect the city from flooding. In places these cities are at or slightly below the level of water in the river and the levees are all that lie between them and disaster.... as New Orleans discovered in August 2005 when the levees protecting the city breached in 50 places under the onslaught of Hurricane Katrina . Although Mark is not passing through New Orleans, this might be a good place to remind ourselves of those events and the aftermath. Here is a presentation I made at the time for using in school..... If you have difficulty viewing it within the blog, you can link to it here.

View Upload your own

Cotton pickin, Jambalaya and Zydeco!

2008-01-24T19:31:00.001Z

I began yesterday's posting by admitting that I really only knew a couple of things about Louisiana. After the events of late Tuesday and overnight to yesterday, I know a couple more now!

The consequence of those events was that Mark had a short day yesterday, beginning late at Mamou and then overnighting about 25kms away at Opelousas. Much of the ride between the two settlements took Mark through cultivated agricultural land....

This is an interesting landscape and quite different from the very mixed land use of trees and farming seen yesterday close to the Texan border. Here, the trees probably remain as wind breaks to save the soil from wind erosion at times of the year when the fields have been ploughed or newly planted - as in the Google maps image above which was probably taken in spring when the growing season had just begun. The commencement of the growing season will be much earlier in Louisiana than in the UK. Winters are cool but they are short and crops will commence growth in early February. As mentioned yesterday, it is likely that many of these fields are planted with cotton, sugar cane and soybeans. The image above shows cotton growing in the vicinity of Mamou.

The town of Opelousas ... or 'city' as its website proclaims advertises itself as the third oldest city in Louisiana, Opelousas is home to a diverse culture of Creole and Cajun ancestry. Sounds of Zydeco (Opelousas is the capital of Zydeco), Swamp Pop, and Cajun music fill the air. And, don't forget the food -- jambalaya, gumbo, boiled crawfish and shrimp. Reminds me of an old Carpenters' hit from way back!Just north of Opelousas is a Wal-Mart distribition centre taking advantage of location at the junction of Interstate 49 and Highway 190 - an easy place from where to sent trucks in all directions! South west of the town.. oops city... a reminder that in this part of the world you are never far from oil...

However, I thought I might finish tonight's posting on a cultural 'note'. Zydeco music meant nothing to me when I read the Opelousas website earlier so I have done a bit of research and discovered that "it is is a form of American folk music that evolved during the late 1800s from the vocal music of the black and multiracial French speaking Creoles. Usually fast-tempo, and dominated by the button or piano accordion and a form of a washboard known as frottoir, zydeco music was originally created for house dances so the blacks and free people of color of south Louisiana could gather for socializing. "

And here is a sample... from a Zydeco festival in Opelousas....sung in Creole French

Into Louisiana

2008-01-23T20:14:00.000Z

Louisiana...... mmm...... I'm sure I should know a thing or two about Louisiana but at the moment thing one is the Mississippi and thing two is New Orleans! However, I have a feeling I am about to find out a lot more, starting here with Mark's first full day in the state which is named after a king of France.... After 11 days to cross Texas, the largest state of the contiguous USA states, day 1 in Louisiana has taken him almost one third of the way across the state. The screen shot from Google Maps above is quite deceptive if you are hoping to get an impression of the lie of the land in Louisiana.

Basically, there is no high ground! The light shading of the SW of the state where Mark is at present is an area of high albedo (high reflectivity from light coloured fields). The darker areas follow the swampy, forested creeks.

East central Louisiana is, of course, dominated by the Mississippi and the view below shows 'Ol' Man River' on the right with an expanse of back swamps to the left.

What is interesting (and we can explore it when Mark gets nearer) is the fact that cultivation takes place right up to the edge of the Mississippi whereas there is none in the backswamp area. There is an explanation but it can wait!

In the south west of the state, where Mark began yesterday's stage, land use is more mixed and not dissimilar to what we saw in the east of Texas - even down to to paper mills such as those we saw yesterday....

This one is at De Ridder ...oops City of De Ridder as Wikipedia (with typical American hyperbole) states.

The coastal plain of Louisiana is crossed by numerous rivers such as the Calcasieu (below) displaying features similar to those seen yesterday along the Neches and Sabine rivers. Approximately 200 miles (320 km) long, it drains a largely rural area of forests and bayou (abandoned stream) country, meandering southward to the Gulf of Mexico. .... and despite what the tracker says, it is highly unlikely that Mark crossed at this spot!

Now, after all the talk in the last few days of ox bow lakes, I have tried a little experiment this evening. If it has worked, you should be able to see a short video file I made some time back for use in class showing how a meander can be cut off , develop into an oxbow and finally silt up. It took me a VERY long time to make but don't blink or you'll miss it! The river here is the Cuckmere in Sussex but the processes are the same all over the world.

Despite what the tracker appears to say, I think Mark is more likely to have crossed the Calcasieu at the bridge......

East of the Calcasieu crossing , there was a noticeable change in land use with fewer trees and much more cultivated land with some most attractive ploughing patterns. According to some farm statistics which I found for Louisiana, the most important cultivated crops in the state are cotton, sugar cane, rice and soybeans. It is impossible to tell what might be cultivated here but it certainly looks good from the air.....

Last 'port of call' yesterday was the town of Mamou, in the heart of Louisiana's Cajun country. It bills itself as 'The Cajun music capital of the World'. The Cajun link above gives a good historical explanation of Cajun culture - did you know that the Cajuns came to Louisiana as French speaking refugees from Nova Scotia in the mid 18th century?

What is striking about this landscape south east of Mamou is the sheer density of population - quite unusual in a rural area but an indicator of its productivity.

Added 24.02.08... In view of the latest news on the Artemis web site, it is probably best to draw a veil over the remainder of Tuesday's route. The geography pales into insignificance....

Woodn't you know it!

2008-01-22T23:21:00.001Z

When I signed off yesterday after describing Mark's route on Sunday, I envisaged him camping in the cold in the backwoods of east Texas. In the event, as the web diary entry today explains, Mark received some kind hospitality from a Texan couple who invited him to stay with them at their home here in Mosshill.

Yesterday's route, therefore, started at Mosshill and took Mark 180km east and into the state of Louisiana...

And here's one specially for the people who prefer the big picture.... The 'really big picture' tells its own story too. Just awesome!

On a serious note, you can see how blessed we are these days when teaching scale. 'Zoomable' maps have only featured in geography classrooms in the last five years or so and they have revolutionised the teaching of scale.

A few miles out of Mosshill yesterday, Mark would have passed signs to Sour Lake - just a few miles off his route to the south. Oil was discovered there in 1901 and today Sour Lake is known a) as the birthplace of Texaco and b) as the location of the oldest continuously producing oilfield in the world. New drilling is still underway there and there is ample evidence in the view from the air. ... though I'm not sure how I'd feel about oil storage tanks in my back garden!

Between Sour Lake and the route Mark was following is a vast expanse of trees known as the 'Big Thicket National Preserve ' .... it's a sort of 'can't see the wood for the trees' area......

The photo below is from Flickr and shows a view of a swampy area in the Big Thicket close to Silsbee which was directly on Mark's route yesterday.... Small wonder that pulp and paper mills are a feature of settlements such as here at Silsbee.. ....and a few miles further east at Evadale where the Temple Eastex pulp and paper mill takes advantage of ample local supplies of timber. I have to admit that lumbering and lumber industries were not something I had previously associated with Texas but then ,as I keep saying, this is a learning journey for me!

Because it follows a number of different water courses in the region, the Big Thicket comes into view again at Evadale, here occupying the flat and poorly drained valley of the River Neches. ...
Mark turned NE at Evadale, heading for the border with Louisiana and some of the finest river features I've seen on the whole of his journey. If I've been doing my job properly along the way, then you should be able to explain what you are seeing here.

What does the water colour tell you about this river? Why is there deposition on the inside of the meanders? What has happened at Steamboat Bend and why does the border of Texas and Louisiana not follow the river? I don't expect Mark gave any of that a thought as he crossed the bridge into Louisiana! The river is the Sabine (seen above somewhere along the Texas/Louisiana border) and is a treasure trove of wonderful river features and intriguing names. I have just spotted Alligator Bayou......

Mark ended the day yesterday just a couple of miles into the state of Louisiana .

However, as a final salute to south east Texas, here's something I found which speaks for us all (click image to link)

"Houston - we have no problem!"

2008-01-21T20:06:00.000Z

I turned over my desk calendar this morning and had a sense of deja vu (a mixed metaphor given that the calendar is German!). .... However, the question is... "where and when did we see these along Mark's route?"

Returning to Mark's current wherabouts, the GPS tracker this morning showed yesterday's route as follows.... Given that there is a six hour time difference between Texas and GMT, Mark apparently pitched his tent late last night after a day when his cycle computer turned 16000 miles somewhere in the vicinity of Houston. It's amazing to think that there are just 2000 miles to go! (If you want to get a fix on how far that is, it is approximately the distance Mark cycled between Paris and Istanbul ... and he seemed to do that in no time at all!)

Having mentioned Houston, although it was not strictly speaking along Mark's route yesterday, I took a wee 'detour' to look for NASA's Johnson Space Centre and here it is. This is Mission Control and astronaut training centre, Houston which, judging from the number of parked cars, must house thousands of employees......

More directly on Mark's route yesterday was the Sam Houston National Forest surrounding the northern portion of Lake Conroe. I have to say that until the last couple of days forestry was certainly not something I would have associated with south east Texas. Yet, it would seem that the 'Piney Woods' are a recognised ecoregion in southeastern USA. The moderate to high rainfall supports a sort of coniferous rainforest dominated by several species of pine including the 'indicator species' Loblolly Pine . The Sam Houston National Forest is managed under the multiple purpose concept. Under this concept, the uses of the forest, such as recreation, fish and wildlife, timber, grazing, soil and water, and minerals, are planned to maintain a balance among the benefits, yet provide for public needs. Mark's route yesterday morning took him through an area of Piney Wood forest which he noted as 'beautiful' in the Artemis web diary and certainly the route through the trees and across the causeway at the north end of Lake Conroe must have seemed such a contrast to the high plains of west Texas where he was just a few days ago. Lake Conroe, the result of damming the San Jacinto river back in 1973, helps supply water to the city of Houston but it is also managed for recreation..... and real estate at its southern edge if the image on the right found on Flickr is anything to go by...

About 30 miles east of Lake Conroe, while traversing more Piney Woods, Mark crossed the valley of the Trinity River which exhibits some of the best examples of ox bow lakes in the making which I have ever seen.....

This image 'reads' just like a textbook - deposition on the inside of the meander and erosion on the outside, causing the meanders to become more sinuous over time until one day the river takes a short cut just as it has done below.....

.....leaving the old meander to silt up and separate from the river's course forming an ox-bow lake.

From a little higher the valley of the Trinity River stands out in the landscape in a way so different from the rivers crossing deserts which we have seen on many occasions along Mark's route...

Instead of cultivated land being beside the river where it can benefit from irrigation water, here the cutivated land is on the higher interfluve areas avoiding the wet and poorly drained valley floor. The map shows the Trinity to be another of those Texan rivers with very narrow drainage basins and many dams in its upper course designed to regulate flow.

And finally... the answer to the question at the beginning of today's posting is a beach near Dunedin in New Zealand as described in this posting on 18th December.

Take a Luecke at this!

2008-01-20T10:46:00.001Z

Here is something which we can see on Mark's route yesterday but which he will not have! This unusal 'signature' is only visible from the air and is located just a few miles east of Bastrop at the start of yesterday's stage. A bit of 'investigation' has revealed that the word is the surname of a local landowner who arranged for trees on his land to be clearfelled to reveal this pattern. The word is almost three miles long and so clearly visible from space that NASA have been able to use it to "estimate spatial resolution for lower contrast vegetation boundaries. By clearing forest so that a pattern would be visible to landing aircraft, a landowner outside Austin, Texas created a target that is also useful for evaluating spatial resolution of astronaut photographs".

The landowner was not, however, commissioned by NASA to do this! Setting aside his possible megalomaniac tendencies, good land management practices these days require some degree of habitat preservation when clearfelling. The same thing happens when commercial forestry is cleared in the UK . By leaving some of the original forest cover a small portion of the woodland habitat is preserved. The view above is of the same feature but from an aircraft.

What has surprised me as I have researched this is that the woodland here in east central Texas is natural pine wood (the clearing is to increase available grazing land). The woodland theme will become more prevalent as Mark heads east today (Sunday) and I will return to it in tomorrow's posting.
If we backtrack just a few miles to the outskirts of Bastrop Mark would have passed a road end marked 'Power Plant Road'. Just a couple of miles up the road is lake Bastrop and on its shores the Sam Gideon power plant. Location factors for power generation (apart from nuclear) dictate a location close to the source of fuel plus water for cooling. This 40 year old power plant was built to exploit local supplies of natural gas and the lake was created as a vast cooling pond. It also serves as a focus for recreation and there are a number of campsites and hiking trails along the shoreline and in the surrounding woods. I couldn't find an image of the power station but among several of the lake, I found this one of high voltage power lines crossing the lake!

Between Bastrop and Brenham Mark's route was Highway 290. Close up views of the agricultural landscape reveal a farm economy based on a mix of cultivation and stock rearing. Typical crops in this part of Texas include cotton, soyabean, maize, sorghum, peanuts and hay. As cotton can be grown with less water than any other cash crop in the area, it is likely to be the dominant crop. There are also apparently a very large number of dairy cattle but many of them are stall fed. At Brenham a long established creamery uses the milk of 50,000 local cows to produce what is reckoned to be the best ice cream in the USA! (Click banner to link to their website) Just west of Navasote, Mark crossed the floodplain of the River Brazos where the cultivation of a wider range of crops is possible. The River Brazos, in keeping with most of the rivers which cross the coastal plain towards the Gulf of Mexico is a NW/SE flowing river with an elongated drainage basin....

Considering the river is 1280 miles long, it looks positively puny as it passes Navasote and this despite the fact that it is already two thirds of its way to the sea. The reason for this is that like most of the rivers in this part of Texas, its waters are managed. Upstream dams deprive the lower course of the volume of water which would otherwise be flowing in it. The Brazos River Authority manages the waters of the Brazos and you can link to their website and read some detail of how the river is managed by clicking on their logo.

The end of the day yesterday is recorded as follows in the web diary "Camped 15 miles after Navasota. Freezing! Thanks to lady who brought dinner! " According to the GPS tracker, this is where that was ... in Anderson - a little settlement with a good Scottish name and some good Scottish sounding hospitality as well

Over the Edge.....

2008-01-19T20:26:00.000Z

Having just read the web diary entry for yesterday "Grimmest day in the wet and cold" I am feeling that Mark might well like to draw a veil over 18th January. However, the title of this posting has nothing to do with Mark's state of mind but is rather about a geographical divide... of which more later.

Yesterday Mark cycled the 130km from Blanco to Bastrop and hopefully, after a depressing day of rain, was able to look at 'the big picture' like the one below and be reassured by progress....

I reckon today has been better weather-wise. Certainly the radar view today suggests that all the rain of yesterday has moved away east.....
About 30kms after leaving Blanco yesterday Mark passed closed to the largest body of water which we have seen for some days. Given the weather, however, it is doubtful if he would have seen Canyon Lake! Canyon Lake is a reservoir on the Guadalupe river and when it was built in the early 1960s its main purpose was flood protection for communities lower down the Guadalupe river. By holding back the waters of the river, damaging floods could be lessened, and in the process, the water used for HEP production and domestic and agricultural water supply. It is therefore a multi-purpose water management scheme. The lake has become a very important recreation destination with marinas, camping grounds, holiday accommodation etc. lining its shores.

During a flood episode in 2005, the dam was unable to hold back enough water and the surplus poured over the spillway and in just three days carved out the Canyon Lake Gorge- a powerful testimony of the erosive capacity of water!

Beyond Canyon Lake, even through the driving rain, Mark would have been aware of a significant drop in altitude as he approached San Marcos. Thie is the 'edge' referred to earlier and visible below as a NE / SW trending line in the landscape when viewed from the air.

The town of San Marcos sits astride that line at the foot of the Balcones fault line. The surface expression of the fault is the Balcones Escarpment, which forms the eastern boundary of the Texas hill country and the western boundary of the Texas coastal plain . Many cities are located along this fault zone, and that is not a coincidence. Frequently, springs such as San Marcos Springs emerge at the foot of a fault providing a source of fresh water and an obvious place for human settlement. Below, San Marcos "on the edge".......

East of San Marcos there is a significant change in geology which you should be able to discern even in this low res image. The greens of the Texan hill country end at the Balcones fault and to the east of it the 'striped' area is a swathe of impermeable rocks on which water can be retained without difficulty at the surface......

On the subject of water, I spotted this river feature close to Mark's route yesterday. It comes with the title "What happens next?" If you have been following the blog (from memory, postings about the Ganges valley and the River Murray), you will know!

Bastrop provided a welcome respite from the rain for Mark at the end of the day yesterday . It is apparently 'the most historic small town in Texas'. Its history dates back to 1804 which is a long time in American terms! The image below from Wikipedia carries the description "historic buildings with quaint shops and restaurants line the main street in Bastrop"

Mason to Blanco

2008-01-18T22:39:00.001Z

Spatial distribution is a theme which appears in almost every definition of the scope of the geography and so it has been interesting for me to watch how the patterns on the cluster map on the blog have evolved over the last few months. It is clearly not a random distribution! The coincidence with Mark's route is striking but there are other factors at play as well. English speakers predominate and population density and distribution are also playing a part - hence India's 1 billion+ population are well represented throughout the country while over in Australia (apart from the solitary dot at Alice Springs) most of the readership are on the coastal fringe. Likewise in Canada, those reading the blog are primarily in the cities in the south of the country - apart from my reader or readers in Churchill on Hudson Bay. The geographer in me is fascinated by all of this. So please feel free to add comments to the blog - wherever you are (always bearing in mind that I do retain the option to moderate!) .
Over in Texas there has been a noticeable difference in the land use of the terrain Mark has been cycling through. Yesterday he was still in what the Texans refer to as 'hill country' but the climate is slowly changing as he enters the 'mid green', more humid centre and east of the state. Austin, just a little east of his position yesterday, receives an annual total of 800mm making it as wet as Dundee in Scotland where this blog is being written. However, and it is a big however, that rainfall is not evenly distributed. The driest time of the year coincides with the highest temperatures and at other times when there is more ample rainfall, temperatures are high enough to cause a big loss through evapotranspiration. Then there are the years, common in sun tropical areas of the world, when the rains fail and there are problems of severe drought. It is worth remembering that Texas (though not the main state to be affected)was one of the Dust Bowl states back in the 1930s when a prolonged drought and severe winds brought misery to so many farmers in America's mid west.

Thus it is not surprising to find significant evidence of irrigation and soil conservation practices along this section of Mark's route. Here(right) is some pivot irrigation just west of Mason where Mark commenced his route yesterday and below two areas near Stonewall which he passed later in the day which are representative of the wide areas of contour ploughing evident in this part of Texas. We have encountered this form of soil conservation before along the route of Mark's journey as described here in Australia.
The insufficiency and unreliability of rainfall dictates that farming in this part of Texas is remains mainly pastoral - cultivation is often to produce fodder crops for cattle, sheep and quite a large number of mohair producing goats. There is some interesting information about Texan farm produce available here. Amongst other statistics, it reveals that Texas is the number one state in the US for the production of cattle, sheep, mohair and hay.

Mark's route yesterday took him through undulating and extensively farmed hill country and through valleys with increasing signs of cultivation and more habitation than had been evident on the higher, drier land further west......places like Fredericksburg below which acquired its German name from the fact that it was settled by German immigrants to Texas in the 1840sIt is , according to Wikipedia, "notable as the home of Texas German, a dialect spoken by the first generations of settlers who refused to own slaves and were an important part of the Pro-Union Texas resistance during the Civil War, facing ostracization from their slaveholding neighbours. "
Fredericksburg's other claim to fame is more geological than cultural and relates to its location just a few miles south of this rock feature known as a bathlolith whose origins are similar to the mighty Uluru (Ayers Rock) in Australia. It is called Enchanted Rock and represents the summit of a huge dome of granite which once lay deep within the crust and which has been slowly revealed by erosion of the overlying sedimentary rocks. Had Mark known to look out for it as he headed towards Fredericksburg, he would certainly have spotted it as it is a visible feature from miles around.
One of the agricultural legacies of the early German settlers to the area was viticulture and , as the map shows, Fredericksburg is the centre of an extensive area of grape production in central Texas. The area shaded in pink is described as the "Texas Hill Country Viticultural Area" . A description of a typical winery in the region are here. I'd never have associated Texas with viticulture but you learn something new every day!

Having reached Fredericksburg, the route yesterday took Mark east along the valley of the Pedernales river to Johnson 'City' and south to Blanco......... he passed Stonewall, birthplace of Lyndon Johnson... ....and Johnson City itself named after one of Johnson's predecessors who founded the town in the 19th century. Just west of the town is the LBJ National Historical Park which commemorates the life of the 36th American president and preserves the ranch where he lived for most of his life and is buried.

By the end of the day Mark had reached Blanco on the Blanco River.
Like many of the rivers in this part of Texas the Blanco river has a very variable regime (dictated by climate and the permeability of the rocks in its basin). many weirs have been constructed across the river and here at Blanco itself the weirs combine to create a recreational area which has been designated a state park.

Turn left at the next Junction for London...

2008-01-17T20:13:00.000Z

The route yesterday took Mark from Ozona via Sonora and on to Junction where he finally parted company with the I 10 and headed north east to the improbably named London. Ozona, with a population of around 4000 is the county seat of Crockett county. Although Davy Crockett never set foot in this part of Texas, the county was named after the legendary frontiersman who died at the Alamo. This monument in Ozona reminds the locals of the connection. According to the Ozona Chamber of Commerce website "ranching and the oil and gas businesses keep the economy of the hinterland and the town steady ".

East of Ozona it is still very much oil country...... So far we have given very little consideration as to why oil is found over such a large part of Texas. The answer lies in geological history - organic material trapped in layers of sedimetary rock being converted through heat and pressure into liquid and gaseous hydrocarbons. These, because they are lighter than rock or water, migrate up through the layers of rock often becoming trapped in porous rocks beneath impermeable rocks forming a reservoir or oil field from which the petroleum can be drilled or pumped....... or something like that! If you are really keen to learn more, I suggest you read this.
The sedimentary rocks in question in this part of Texas include limestone and just west of Sonora and a few miles south of the I 10 are the Caverns of Sonora - a vast cave system dissolved through the limestone by subterranean drainage systems which have now disappeared, leaving passageways and caves on four different levels in which flowstones and various other calcite formations have formed over thousands of years.

Above ground the land use towards Sonora is still dominated by 'Texas tea' as the following image shows... However, according to this source which contains a very good potted history of Sonora, oil and gas exploration peaked in the 1970s and the town of Sonora had a population of almost 6000 in 1977. Just thirty years later the population has halved. Despite that, the Sonoran Chamber of Commerce puts an up-beat slant on the area's economy. .. "The principal source of income is the oil and gas industry and related service companies. Other income is derived from agriculture, tourism, and retail business".

The local hospital is the Lillian Hudspeth Memorial Hospital and I include a photo as I like the optimism of a hospital calling itself a 'wellness centre"!

East of Sonora there is a discernible change in the landscape when viewed from the air.

After mile upon mile of extensive ranching, there are finally signs of cultivation!

At the aptly named Junction ( focus of no fewer than six routes) , Mark left the I10 and headed NE on Highway 377. You can read the explanation for this apparent detour on today's web diary on the Artemis site. Junction is located on the Llano river - a tributary of the Texan Colorado. Rivers seem quite a novelty after the absence of surface drainage we've seen along the route of Mark's journey in the last few days...... ... and the inhabitants of Junction clearly appreciate its signifcance too!

18 miles north east of Junction is London Town! (Explanation here). mark camped just north of there last night.

"There's black gold in them thar hills"

2008-01-16T16:59:00.000Z

... and a lot of wind power too judging by what I spotted on the hills just to the north of the Interstate 10 about 15kms out of Fort Stockton (more of which in a moment!).

Firstly, in the temporary absence of the tracker, I made a guess about how far Mark would have progressed along Interstate10 yesterday and plotted it on Google Earth...

which, in the 'bigger picture' , looks like this. With the tracker now back in operation and confirmation from the web diary of Mark's whereabouts, it looks like it was a good 'guestimate'!

Getting back to the wind power... between Fort Stockton and Bakersfield, there is an area where there would appear to be literally dozens of wind turbines on the high plateaux to the north of the road. Close up they look like this - it is the black shadows rather than the turbines which are the visible evidence. (To give a sense of scale each turbine is taller than the Empire State Building. )The 107 turbines of Desert Sky Wind Farm on Indian Mesa produces enough electricity to power 54,000 homes and is sold to the municipal electricity utility of the city of San Antonio. There is some excellent information about the project here (click banner to link) including a very good video...

While browsing around for information about this wind energy project, I happened upon this website where there is a whole sequence of really high res photos which follow in sequence the route which Mark took yesterday. Here is one which shows some of the first turbines as Mark would have seen them on the skyline to his left as he cycled along the road towards Bakersfield...

And below, another batch giving an impression of just how numerous they are....

However, as we saw at the end of yesterday's posting, it is not wind power which is the main energy source normally associated with west Texas. Mark's route yesterday and today has taken him across the vast west Texas oilfields. The pattern which these create from the air had me puzzling for a while but having 'cracked' it at the end of yesterday's posting, I am now seeing evidence of oil everywhere along Mark's route. The website which produced the images of the wind turbines above also provides the following ...

For tens of miles in all directions there is a network of cleared patches carrying small derricks and 'Christmas tree' wells linked by access tracks used by tankers such as the one above to collect the oil. This pattern is particlarly well exemplified by the area of the Yates Oilfield which is to the east of Bakersfield and north of the Interstate 10 near to the town of Iraan...

The pattern is also captured by the NASA image below which carries the following accompanying information ...The Permian Basin of west Texas and southeastern New Mexico is one of the most productive petroleum provinces of North America. The area holds one of the thickest deposits of rock from the Permian Period, which lasted from approximately 290 to 251 million years ago. The Basin is a large depression in the bedrock which filled with thick layers of sediment during the Paleozoic Era (about 545 to 251 million years ago) as the region was alternately covered by shallow oceans, or exposed as coastal salt flats. The sediments hardened into organic-rich carbonate and minerals such as common table salt. Later activity in the Earth’s crust caused folding of the sedimentary layers, creating ideal conditions for the formation, trapping, and storage of petroleum. In this NASA photograph, numerous white well locations and petroleum drilling structures mark the Yates Oil Field. The nearby city of Iraan, Texas, is named for Ira and Ann Yates, the owners of the land where oil was initially discovered in 1926. The Yates Field started petroleum production in 1926, and by 1995 had produced over 2 billion barrels of oil. While the Yates Field was still actively producing oil and natural gas in 2006, new petroleum discoveries in the area were considered unlikely due to the already-dense well development.

Until a day or two ago I had never before seen a land use pattern like the one below but as I've said many times in the last 165 days, 'you learn something new every day'! And although it's slightly off-location, after yesterday's ranching and today's oil wells, I couldn't resist this.....

That takes me back a year or two!

End of day yesterday was at Ozona which advertises itself as

Marathon Day - or not!

2008-01-15T19:26:00.000Z

I have to admit to a bit of confusion when I logged into the GPS tracker earlier today. Having expected Mark to head east from Marathon yesterday, I was more than a little surprised to note that he'd headed north again and was back within a hundred miles of where he'd set out from on Sunday! Oh dear - surely all the years Mark spent in the Geography department at HSD had given him better map reading skills than that?! It was therefore a bit of a relief to read the explanation in the web diary today. It seems that the threat of stormy weather to the south and strong headwinds had prompted the decision to move further north.

Although the Yellowbrick server seems to be having a few problems at present which are affecting the way we see the GPS tracker, Mark definitely overnighted yesterday at Fort Stockton and earlier today things were looking OK weatherwise up there.... cold but fairly calm at 9am.

The forecast for the rest of today in SW Texas as far as wind speed is concerned does not look too bad either. This map is from the US National Weather Service (NOAA) and shows that wind direction will be ESE (remember that winds are named by the direction they come from and on this map the 'tails' are up-wind) The speed of the wind will be in the region of 5-10 knots - unlike further north in Oklahoma and further south along the coast. However, by tomorrow evening it looks as if the winds will have picked up a lot......

It would be good to see Mark a bit nearer San Antonio by then. ...and under cover as it is likely to rain !

The unsettled weather is all to do with a centre of low pressure and the cold front shown on the map below....There is a huge amount of information available on the NOAA website. I have hyperlinked the wind direction and strength maps into the graphical forecast maps for the 'south plains'. If you link to the page, you can get very detailed information about a host of weather elements in the area for the present and for some time in the future.

But to get back to yesterday's route........... It was interesting to read the title of yesterday's web diary posting - "In the wilderness of west Texas". Until the last couple of days I wouldn't really have though of west Texas as 'wilderness' but if you zoom in on the road between Marathon and Fort Stockton, you certainly see wilderness! It's not the barren, desert sort of wilderness, it's just mile upon mile of ranch country which looks geographically unpromising...... until you chance on a gem! I wonder if Mark knew that yesterday he cycled through one of the largest cattle ranches in the United States? Or that the black cattle which he was probably seeing plenty of were Angus crossbreeds from his home country? The ranch is the 300,000 acre'La Escalera' (Spanish for 'ladder') ...

...and if I haven't managed to tempt you to follow the link to the US Weather Service, then you simply have to follow this one! It is a wonderful website - informative, colourful and evocative. Here is just a sample of some of the lovely images it contains...

And if you can spare 30 minutes, sit back and enjoy this lovely documentary, shot on the ranch over two days in 2005 which I found on Google video. Complete with 'Big Country' music, it is a wonderful record of ranching and the environment in this part of Texas.

The 'La Escalera' website has also answered a question which has been puzzling me for a few days. Here and there in ranch country Texas I have been seeing patches like this and wondered what they were ......... and I am now thinking that this might be the explanation.

20 miles north of La Escalera, Mark ended the day at Fort Stockton

I'm sure it's getting greener!

2008-01-14T09:03:00.001Z

Every so often it helps to get a proper 'fix' on the GPS by zooming out and having a look at 'the bigger picture'. Today, it is reassuring to note that after 19 days in the saddle on American soil, it looks as if Mark is about half way to the Atlantic coast.

However, from his starting position outside Kent in west Texas yesterday, the Atlantic probably seemed a long way away. I have mentioned before about the Panoramio layer in Google Earth and the route which Mark followed yesterday is represented by many good images, some of which are reproduced in this posting. It is well worth looking at the route in GE as besides the images, the facility to produce an oblique view also gives a better understanding of the terrain. Mark's starting point yesterday just west of Kent is represented in Panoramio with the following image....

At Kent, Mark left the Interstate 10 and headed south on the 118 facing a long climb from about 1300 to 1900m through the Davis Mountains before a descent into Fort Davis. As the map (right) shows, this is probably the last bit of high relief which Mark will have to encounter in Texas before the much lower terrain of the centre and east.

The mountains of west Texas act as a barrier to the the inland passage of moist air from the Gulf of Mexico and so, as Mark heads further east, not only with the relief be 'kinder' but the climate will become noticeably wetter and the natural vegetation will lose its desert characteristics. At present Mark is in an area where average annual precipitation is around 300mm. Within a couple of days, when he is nearing San Antonio, it will be 800mm and a further day or two beyond that it will be 1200mm.
Shortly after leaving Kent, Mark passed this long (apparently black)feature which no amount of investigation has been able to identify. I am not often 'stumped' but I have no idea what this is so any suggestions would be gratfully received! It measures 1.89km long if that is any help.

Posted 16.01.08 - Many thanks to 'Marsh' (see comments) who has solved the mystery of the black line. It's a runway!http://www.onesky.com/airports/Texas/Rancho_Del_Cielo.html

The morning climb yesterday took Mark to an altitude of 1900m in the Davis Mountains where the summit is crowned by another astronomical observatory to add to the several we've encountered along Mark's route. This oblique view captured from Google Earth gives a good impression of the location of the McDonald Observatory. A few days ago we discussed 'location factors' for an observatory and here on Mount Locke the themes of clear air, high ratio of cloudless nights and distance from concentrations of artificial lights are doubtless repeated.
Here, one of the telescopes which, if you click the image, will link to the visitor information pages of the McDonald Observatory website and below a view taken from the observatory looking south giving a good impression of the terrain.Is it my imagination or is the landscape getting greener?!

Beyond Mt Locke, the route decsends to Fort Davis which probably has more historical than geographical interest. The local chamber of commerce website has a lovely image and logo on its homepage which emphasises the clarity of the skies! (Click image to link.)And though it pains me to say it, the history is wonderful and involves the essential ingredients of any Western film - cowboys, cavalry, Apaches, Comanches and stagecoaches! There is a good account here and some wonderful images of the old Fort Davis in Flickr.

The Artemis web diary yesterday described the 'wilderness' feel of this part of Texas - mainly the impression of very few settlements - and certainly for the remainder of the day yesterday there were a lot of ranches like the one below and not much else in the way of large settlements.

It is definitely not my imagination - it is getting greener.

End of day yesterday for Mark was just beyond the town of Alpine.... gateway to Big Bend country but that's a story for another day!

Almost in Kent....

2008-01-13T13:04:00.001Z

I have decided that there are three kinds of Geo Blogging days. The best ones are when you zoom in on the GPS tracker and instantly two or three geographical themes identify themselves. Next come the days when you zoom in and don't know where to start - the big cities have presented me with that kind of quandry and I've usually resolved it by providing a few links or, as I did yesterday in El Paso, by exploring one theme. Finally there are the days like today when I open up, zoom in and wonder what I'm going to talk about! There were a couple of days like that in the Nullarbor, at least one in Balochistan, a few amidst the interminable fields and one-horse towns of outback New South Wales and today looked like being another one..........After leaving the irrigated valley of the Rio Grande and heading east (good direction!) on the Interstate 10, the route shows a few steep climbs, a lot of desert and very few settlements. It took, therefore, a bit of searching to unleash the geographical potential but in the spirit of 'geography is everywhere' , here's what I have found.....

From the air the terrain looks very unpromising yet it is not entirely barren and the vegetation cover, though sparse, is worth some discussion. This part of west Texas lies within (if only just) the eastern limits of the Chihuahuan desert. We mentioned the Chihuahuan desert a couple of days ago in this posting but apart from stating that it is a WWF recognised ecoregion, we did not give much consideration to the vegetation cover which is one the aspects which makes it unique.

This is typical Chihuahuan desert scenery - fewer cacti than the Sonoran and more drought resisting shrubs which include species such as creosote bush, mesquite, acacia and succulents like the agave and yucca(below).

Mark's route yesterday took him through many miles of scenery like this with only a few small settlements as staging posts along the way. First was Sierra Blanca, a railroad junction where the Southern Pacific and Texas and Pacific lines meet.

In common with many of the small settlements in these parts, Ranch Road seems to be a common address and may be indicative of the main land use in the vicinity! Sierra Blanca has another claim to fame (or perhaps notoriety). You can read the full story here but basically, land just three miles from Sierra Blanca receives regular dumping of sewage sludge from New York, delivered weekly by train!

20 miles beyond Sierra Blanca is a tiny ranching community called Allamoore which has yet another curious, if not geographical, claim to fame having been named after the postmistress, a Mrs Alla Moore who ran a post office there at the end of the 19th century. The fact that it also features in the list of Texan ghost towns is probably indicative of its fortunes in the intervening years. In happier times, there was some local employment in a nearby talc mine and rock crushing plant (the latter at appropriately named Crusher).

Another 10 miles east took Mark to Van Horn - decribed on the municipal website in the following terms "Van Horn, Texas, Crossroads of the Texas Mountain Trail, was part of the Old Spanish Trail through Texas. Van Horn ties South and West Texas together in history and geography. It rose out of the fundamental need for water in the Desert West. When the American highway system was built, the town became a welcome stop on Interstate 10 for travelers. Today, Van Horn is the seat of Culberson County government. "

This view of the main street in Van Horn gives a good indication of life in the town

....as does a foray into the pages of the local rag (click on the image to link)

However, in the spirit of 'claims to fame' Van Horn turns out to be another place with a secret. In the near future it could become a centre for space tourism! On Friday, November 10, 2006, Jeff Bezos, founder and CEO of amazon.com , acquired 290,000 acres (1,200 km²) of land 40 km North of Van Horn to house his fledgling space tourism company, Blue Origin. The Wall Street Journal reported that Blue Origin may start operations as early as 2010, aiming for 52 launches per year from the Van Horn, Texas facility. Read all about it here.

The day's cycle ended for Mark between Van Horn and Kent with the anticipated meeting with BBC cameraman David Peate recounted on the Artemis web diary. Very close to where Mark camped last night I spotted this spillway for carrying surface run-off under the highway - a reminder that it may be desert but there are times of year when even deserts get rain and when they do, it can be heavy!

Tex Mex!

2008-01-12T10:15:00.000Z

Yesterday, Mark headed down the Rio Grande valley from Las Cruces, crossing the Texan border at the town of Anthony before continuing south to about 15 miles beyond the border city of El Paso.

I find images like the one on the left fascinating - I think they are an amazing testimony to the power of rivers to breathe life into deserts. Of course, it's not for the first time that we have seen this feature along Mark's route. Remember the mighty Indus in Pakistan described in this posting back in October and the Colorado just a week ago in California described here.

Closer in you get an even better impression of just how much land use in the valley south of Las Cruces depends on the presence of the Rio Grande. Without the river, farming and settlement would be impossible on this scale
Here, cultivation is almost a year round activity and so intensive that it is highly productive despite its restricted area. Here, a description of farming in the area.... Part of agriculture's economic stability in the Mesilla Valley comes from a long growing season that's helped by mild winters and low humidity.
"We basically start harvesting in April with lettuce and end in January with pecans. We just go all year long. There's no downtime. We're harvesting hay at least five times a year, sometimes six." The climate helps support a diverse industry that includes a cornucopia of crops, as well as ranches, greenhouses and dairies. "We are by far the most diverse area in the state and we've got to be one of the most diverse in the nation next to the Pacific Coast states." Major crops include alfalfa, chile, cotton, corn silage for dairies and a number of fresh-market vegetables like cabbage, lettuce and onions.

The Texan border is at Anthony, approximately half way between Las Cruces and El Paso. We will have plenty of time to explore Texas over the next few days as Mark travels through the state so we can settle for a map and just a couple of facts in the meantime!

Texas is the largest of the contiguous (joined up) states of the USA i.e. Alaska is larger and it has the second largest population (after California).

The next major settlement along Mark's route yesterday was El Paso which sits right on the Mexican/United States border across the Rio Grande from Juarez. A blog is just not somewhere that you can do justice to cities but the Wikipedia link, as always. provides ample background reading if you feel so inclined. However, we can't pass through El Paso without giving some thought to its role as a border crossing point. The migration of Mexicans to the USA (legal and illegal) is a case study which is often taught in geography classrooms and El Paso is very much a focal point of cross border movement. Here, for example, is one of the border crossings between El Paso and Juarez....

And the bridge over the Rio Grande between the two settlements which is permanently clogged with migrants who cross the border daily to work in higher paid employment in the USA.....

As I was following Mark's route through El Paso yesterday, I 'snapped' the following screenshots - taken just a few hundred metres apart but on different sides of the border. (The vehicles are roughly the same size so the photos are taken from approximately the same elevation) They probably help explain why so many Mexicans want to migrate.....

Here, El Paso...

....and here, Juarez.

Between El Paso and Juarez only a few hundred metres separate a country with a GNI per capita of $7300 from a country with a GNI per capita of $43,360. There cannot be many borders in the world where levels of economic development differ so much on either side. Little wonder that so many people want to cross it!

East to the Rio Grande

2008-01-11T13:05:00.000Z

After the 'excitement' of the Continental Divide , there was not much on the route east to Las Cruces which Mark followed yesterday, which really caught my geographical eye.... until I zoomed in closer. The first settlement of any significant size on yesterday's route was Deming, which, despite its size (14,500 pop) is apparently devoid of bike shops!

Originally founded as an agricultural community in 1881, Deming today has a population of around 14,500. Half a world away is Forfar, a former agricultural market town and county town of Angus in Scotland. It also has a population of around 14500 but it dates from the 12th century. The contrast in street patterns between the two settlements couldn't be more striking ....

Here, Deming, a settlement which has enjoyed the luxury of planning since its foundation - streets in a rigid grid iron pattern like many other similar settlements in this part of the USA.

..and for contrast, the centre of Forfar which has grown outwards from its Medieval core over 900 years with little help from the planners except towards the outskirts. But I digress....

According to Wikipedia 'farming became a mainstay of the Deming economy when the centrifugal pump and rural electrification became realities in the 1940s . Much of the flat land around Deming is highly fertile, with abundant ground water at shallow depth hence the significance of pumping for irrigation. The growing season is long and sunny. Staple crops such and cotton, sorgam, and alfalfa have been partly replaced by wine grapes and pecan orchards since the 1970s. Ranching is also fairly extensive around Deming'. However, to imagine that Deming is simply an agricultural community would be a great understatement. According to the municipal website, it is an 'Enterprise Community', a fact which its mayor is very much at pains to point out in the promotional video which you can link to from here.

Wikipedia also notes that Deming is in the Chihuahuan Desert - a desert which straddles the US/Mexican border. In this NASA image, the boundary of the Chihuahua desert ecoregion as defined by WWF is shown. The Chihuahuan Desert is higher in altitude than the Sonoran desert to the west, mostly varying from 600 m to 1,675 m (1,970-5,500 feet) in altitude. As a result, it tends to have a slightly milder climate in the summer (though usually daytime June temperatures are in the range of 35 to 40 °C, or 95 to 104 °F). Winter weather varies from relatively mild to quite cold depending on altitude and the ferocity of northerly winds. Rainfall is somewhat more abundant than most of the Sonoran desert. However it is still less than 10 inches (254 mm) per year, with much of the rain falling during the late summer. Snowfall is scant except at the higher elevations.

To the east of Deming the Interstate 10 continues through the desert until it reaches the valley of the Rio Grande and again, as we have seen countless times on Mark's journeying through deserts, the availability of irrigation water transforms the desert, here into a lush green ribbon ......... which supports intensive farming and the settlement of Las Cruces. Approaching the valley , Mark would have enjoyed glorious views of las Cruces against the backdrop of the Organ Mountains. The valley of the Rio Grande at las Cruces is known as the Mesilla Valley and is particularly noted for the production of pecans. Indeed, the largest pecan orchard in the world, a part of which is shown here, is located just south west of Las Cruces. The last time we saw trees arrayed like that was in Malaysia and they were oil palms! However, just in case you are curious (as i was) to know what pecans look like from the ground, here is a Flickr image of pecan trees near Las Cruces And finally.... if Las Cruces is the global centre of pecan production, can you remember where the pistachio centre of the world is? (Mark has been there too!)

All downhill from now on?

2008-01-10T11:05:00.000Z

Here is a puzzle to start today's posting.....Mark camped last night very close to that spot. In terms of the physical geography of North America it is very significant. I also think that psychologically it could be significant for Mark. So I will leave you to ponder it while we have a look at the route that took him there yesterday......
it was a day where he joined the Interstate 10 and travelled east across the Arizona/New Mexico border to his 'significant' overnight stop between Lordsburg and Deming.

Approaching the New Mexico border along the Interstate 10, the importance of desert rivers for irrigation and farming is again clearly visible. The river here is a small tributary of the Gila River (described in yesterday's posting) and it eventually joins the Gila downriver of the Coolidge dam (again referred to in yesterday's posting). San Simon is the last settlement in Arizona on the Interstate 10 before the border with New Mexico and is located in this valley. Some photographs and a little of its history can be seen here . This source includes reference to the fact that cotton used to be grown on quite a large scale around San Simon supplying a local cotton mill and providing local employment. Low cotton prices in the late 1990s forced a reduction in cotton acreage and as a result, the cotton gin closed.
Beyond San Simon the Interstate 10 rises to a plateau andthe New Mexico border . Approaching the border Mark would have seen the sign of welcome below ('borrowed' from the Panoramio layer in Google Earth)

....and just beyond the border there is a real ghost town called Stein's pass ! The story of this railroad town is linked to the history of the railroad and, in particular, to the change of power from steam to diesel. It is an interesting story which you can read by following the link above and also this one which offers the following..... Steins Pass today has a population of two. At its high point in 1919, the surrounding area supported more than 1,000 residents. By then , the town had a boarding house, two bordellos, a dance hall, several stores, saloons, and a hotel. But, for those early pioneers, life was tough in the desert region, as there was no source of water and it had to be brought into the area on the train, selling as high as $1.00 per barrel.

A very short distance east of Steins Pass is a small area of desert salt flats - a feature which we have become quite familiar with at places along Mark's route particularly in Iran and Australia.

Which brings us to the subject of the puzzle which I posed at the beginning of this posting? Last night Mark camped close to this location....

It was dark when he got there and he may well have missed the sign! It reads 'Continental Divide, Elevation 4585ft'. The Continental Divide is a line drawn down the Rockies marking the highest point between the rivers flowing west and the rivers flowing east and south . The technical name for this is a watershed. The line of the Continental Divide through the USA is shown on this map. There is plenty to read about it here but for Mark its significance is that from here its all downhill to the Mississippi!

Irrigation observations..

2008-01-09T09:43:00.000Z

With the bad weather behind him, Mark made good progress yesterday and finished the day heading for the Interstate 10 and the border with NewMexico. At this point it is probably worth taking a wider view again and putting his current location into a broader context. ...
Mark is now crossing the southern end of the Rockies, the mountain range which dominates the physical geography of the western half of the United States. Technically, they are 'young' (65-100 million years old) folded mountains which are crumpling up as the Pacific Plate collides with the North American Plate. The Rockies reach their highest altitide (just over 4000m) in the state of Colorado. In Arizona, the Rockies produce the highest relief in the east of the state at Bald Peak (3400m). Mark's route through the mountains, however, takes him south of this and for much of yesterday exploited the lower ground of the Gila River valley. The Gila valley stands out clearly from the air as an irrigated line in the arid surrounding mountains. The river Gila is a 1000km long tributary of the Colorado River and it should be one of the largest desert rivers in the world. However, abstraction of water for irrigation and municipal use turns it into a largely dry river, particularly west of Phoenix. Incredibly , before it was 'managed', it was 350m wide at its widest and 12 deep at its deepest and was navigable almost to the New Mexico border! However, for much of its length today, it looks like this...

Climbing out of Globe yesterday morning Mark passed close by one of the major water management schemes on the Gila River - the Coolidge Dam. In this image the Gila river flows east to west and is joined from the north by the San Francisco tributary shortly before entering the lake formed hehind the dam constructed at its western end. (The image is slightly deceptive, as at first you are tempted to imagine that the water flow is in the opposite direction i.e. that the lake provides the water to irrigate the land to the east). The dam, seen above in an Flickr image, holds back the waters of the San Carlos lake which are periodically released along this channel to provide irrigation water downstream towards Phoenix. This part of Arizona receives only in the region of 150 - 200mm of rain annually, which, combined with high rates of evaporation would make cultivation impossible without irrigation. The green 'ribbons' on the maps above reveal the importance of abstracted river water for the communities beside the stretch of the Gila river along which Mark cycled yesterday. So what crops are cultivated here? Well, it would appear that they include winter lettuce, cotton (trivia fact... Arizona produces enough cotton annually to make a pair of jeans of every US resident!) , melons of all kind and also a range of vegetables including spinach, broccoli and cauliflower.
South of the Gila valley, the land rises steeply to the summit of Mt Graham, location of the Mount Graham International Observatory . Constructed in 1988 , Mount Graham was selected from a survey of 280 potential mountain sites on the basis of astronomical considerations such as clear skies, low light pollution, low atmospheric water vapor, and ease of access. In geography, we often consider location factors but it is generally in the context of settlement or industry. Location factors for an astronomical observatory make a change! The location of the observatory is, however, a source of considerable controversy particularly with regard to local Apache claims to the land.
Finally, just a few kms west of Marks' campsite last night, some now familiar 'spots' - circular areas of pivot irrigation which we have seen in many places along Mark's route from Iran to USA . They certainly make an interesting pattern of land use when viewed from the air.

Meteorology mattered a lot!

2008-01-08T20:19:00.000Z

I was relieved to read the web diary today and to discover that there was a good reason for the apparently short journey yesterday...The GPS tracker appeared to be saying that Mark only cycled the 30 kms or so yesterday from Sunday evening's campsite east of Superior to the outskirts of Globe, had reached there by 9am and not cycled further. The web diary entry for yesterday explains all and it would appear that meteorology really did matter ! Mark had no option by to take a rest day and sit out the cold, wet, stormy weather.

So what geography is there in yesterday's 30 km stretch? Well, given the weather conditions, Mark was very unlikely to have been feeling on top of the world when he reached Top of the World and he certainly would not have enjoyed scenery like this which is the approach to that enigmatically named settlement on a good day....A slightly oblique view on Google Earth reveals Top of the World to be nothing more than a collection single storey buildings. To be honest, it's hard to imagine what might sustain a community like this. The Wikipedia link suggests a history as a staging post on a mule trail and a short time as an army camp in the 1870s. Following that, a large cattle ranch developed at the location. Despite much searching, this is the best image I could find of Top of the World...

It, and several others of scenery along this stretch of Highway 60, can be viewed here.

The remainder of Mark's short journey yesterday took him to Miami (Arizona!) and then the outskirts of Globe. As the GPS tracker map above shows, there is some significant activity in the hills to the north of both settlements.

Both Miami and Globe owe their existence to copper mining and it still accounts for the largest number of jobs in Miami. According to the 2002 annual report of the Arizona State Mine Inspector, Phelps Dodge mining company employed nearly 600 at its Miami operations, including 330 at the smelter (below) and 187 at the mine (above)...

Copper mining in Arizona dates from the early years of the 20th century and today it remains a very important element of the Arizona econony accounting for 65% of all copper production in the US. The industry was closely linked to the birth and development of the of the electrical age and ther is an interesting account of its history here.

And finally, as this is a relatively short posting today (and I am a secret Harley Davidson fan!) , here's some video footage of Highway 60 in the vicinity of Miami/Globe.

Gold Canyon to Devil's Canyon

2008-01-07T15:49:00.000Z

There is perhaps just a touch of tedium in the web diary's recounting of Mark's journey through Phoenix yesterday ..."Still cycling through huge sprawling Phoenix - 44 miles of suburb so far and 15 miles still to go. Stop/start all the time with traffic lights make it slow going.By my reckoning it took Mark about 6 hours to negotiate this sprawling metropolis and even then there were still some outlying suburbs to get through. What he would not have been able to see (far less appreciate) are the wonderful street patterns which an aerial view permits. Here are a sample of a few random parts of Phoenix.....

It is probably worth mentioning that street patterns are something which tell you a great deal about the period during which an area was laid out. In the UK, because the centres of most of our cities date from the Medieval period (long before the idea of urban planning had even been born and when little consideration was given to aesthetics or transportation) the associated street patterns tend to be ones of irregular, short streets - often completely unsuited to the demands of modern city centre life. Later, as cities grew during the Industrial Revolution years, the regular grid iron pattern of straight streets intersecting at right angles became the norm. Only in the 20th century have we seen geometric and imaginative layouts such as those found all over Phoenix..... but then Phoenix didn't exist in the Middles Ages nor even in the 19th century!

Mark was clearly delighted to get clear of Phoenix and he doubtless had little time to spot this community on his left as he left the edge of the city. ....

This is 'Gold Canyon' - a community centred around a golf resort with several golf courses with their green manicured fairways standing out prominently in the surrounding desert. Click on the image below to link to the details of the golf resort .....

and here to read the community website or here for the 'golf retirement community' website which states "You will never meet a stranger at Gold Canyon. New friends are awaiting your arrival. Every Roberts Resort Community surrounds you with the feel of small-town living, along with inspiring activities and recreational facilities. All of the communities recreational activities are centrally located in a 20,000 sq foot club house. With the magnificent Superstition Mountains as your backdrop, you can play a round of golf, paint a masterpiece, enjoy a game of tennis, relax pool side or get involved in all the many clubs and crafts available at Gold Canyon. Isn’t it time you started enjoying the good life?"

What I'd like to know is how much water does it take to keep those green bits like that?! And in an area which receives less than 100mm of rainfall per annum, where does this water come from?

Once past the last 'outposts' of Phoenix at Apache Junction and Gold Canyon (this stretch of road is apparently called 'the Valley of the Sun'), Mark's route headed out into the desert again...

....climbing first through the featureless Gonzales pass at 2651ft and then down towards Superior. At some point on that stretch of US Highway 60, Mark will have had this view of the road and Picketpost mountain which lies just to the south. Just a few miles west of Superior and lying at the foot of Picketpost Mountain is the Boyce Thompson Arboretum which is maintained by the University of Arizona. The image comes from a selection in the Panoramio layer in Google Earth .
Moving on to Superior..... I loved this description . It is probably a little unkind but it does give a flavour of the place. You can read the whole article here.

Superior, AZ must be an original "don't-blink-or-you'll-miss-it" place. They claim a population of around 3,000. That might be accurate if dogs and roosters (both of which are plentiful and allowed to roam free) are included. Superior looks to have been built during hard-times and it has been going downhill since. But visually, Superior is located in the middle of some of the best scenery in the southwest. Superior, actually started in 1882 as the town of Hastings, was located about three miles west of the town's present location. Hastings was basically a "tent town" supporting the Silver King Mine. When the mine "played out" in the 1890's, the town quite literally picked up and moved to its present location to support the Superior Copper Mine. The town was originally laid out with two streets. Main Street climbs up the hillside to Magma Street, the second street, which leads to a mine entrance. By 1902, a Post Office was established and the town was "on-the-map."

The image above, called 'Downtown Superior' says it all really and comes from this website which has many more images of this stretch of the US Highway 60.

East of Superior the road rises through Devil's Canyon which would have been a challenging conclusion to yesterday's stage.

Meteorology matters again.... then on to Phoenix

2008-01-06T07:17:00.001Z

This time 'matters' are verb not noun! It would seem that Mark just managed to escape one of the worst winter storms of the year so far - if not for several years - in California.

According to Trans World News on Thursday California is being hit be a series of storms and it’s being called the worst weather the state has had in years. The storm may bring hurricane like winds, mudslides and possible snow. Bay Area weather is expected to get nasty today with coastal flooding and high winds. Officials were handing out free sandbags to help residents brace for the storm.
A second storm, much larger than Thursday’s, will sweep through areas including San Francisco and Sacramento and will last until Saturday night when another storm will hit that will last through Monday. The Sacramento Airport has grounded all flights due to the weather conditions.

Southern California regions will be prone to mudslides and flash floods. The Sierra area can expect blizzard like conditions. Residents are urged not to drive when the storm hits. “There will be blizzard like conditions, and transportation will be very limited in colder areas, at 7,000 feet and above,” said chief director of the Office of Emergency Services Frank McCarton.

And here, a report from the Daily Telegraph with accompanying photo

Mark missed the worst of the weather by just a couple of days. However, his 'close shave' reminds me of how important the weather is for him - remember those head winds in Australia and the tropical rains of Malaysia and Thailand? I have therefore had a look for a source of good weather information for the USA and have found the National Weather Service site . There is nothing about the US weather - past, present and immediate future - you won't find there! Here, for example, is a map showing the expected weather for the western US today. ... and thankfully it looks pretty calm for Mark...Every so often is is a good idea to remind ourselves of exactly where Mark is in relation to a larger map so here is where he was at the end of play yesterday .

Yesterday's route followed a series of ridges and valleys through the Sonoran desert to the city of Phoenix. The landscape is classic 'western' desert scenery and is often described as 'basin and range' topography. This refers to the series of elongate mountain ranges alternating with broad flat, deserts in between. the relief is the consequence of major crustal movements in the region. As the Pacific Plate moves north relative to the North American Plate, the crust has stretched and cracked producing a whole series of fault lines along which portions of the crust have either been uplifted to form the 'ranges' or downthrown to form the 'basins'. Below, a Flickr image, from close to Wengen (on Mark's route) illustrates this type of scenery well.

It also shows that icon of the Sonoran desert - the Saguaro cactus! there is some excellent reading on the Saguaro here in Wikipedia and also in this website about the desert lands of the USA. Below is a good video explaining very clearly how the saguaro adapts to its desert environment..The towns along Mark's route yesterday - Wengen, Golden, Aguila , Wickenburg, Wittenberg and Beardsley - present as charmingly 'one horse'. Most have their roots in the 'wild west', some with a short history of gold mining and many seem to be just holding on today! Click on the banner below to link to the website of the town of Wickenburg..

...and I always think there is nothing like the local newspaper for gaining a flavour of a place.Click on the title to link to the current front page news stories in Wickenburg! And below, an aerial shot just to show that it's not all saloon bars and stage coaches!

From Wickenburg Mark would have had long gentle descent to Phoenix, which judging from its suburban approaches and the planned expansion evident here, is slowly creeping out into the desert. Phoenix, with a population of 1.5 million is the fifth largest city in the US - and the hottest!

The early economy of Phoenix was primarily agricultural, dependent mainly on cotton and citrus farming made possible by the upriver damming of the Salt River on which it is located. In the last two decades, the economy has diversified as rapidly as the population has grown. As the state capital of Arizona many residents in the area are employed by the government. Arizona State University has alo enhanced the area's population through education and its growing research capabilities. Numerous high-tech and telecommunications companies have also recently relocated to the area. Due to the warm climate in winter, Phoenix benefits greatly from seasonal tourism and recreation, and has a particularly vibrant golf industry! Like all big cities, it is impossible to do justice to Phoenix in a blog. There is, however, a lot of good information here .

"Goodbye California"

2008-01-05T08:42:00.000Z

With few cities to act as landmarks along the way in this part of the United States , it is probably as well to start with an overview of the route.... The 4th january took Mark from Imperial valley, California, across the Chocolate Mountains (honestly!), down into the irrigated valley of the Colorado where he crossed into Arizona and from there eastward up into the Sonoran desert in the direction of Phoenix.

The web diary from yesterday recounts an 'adrenalin rush' in the desert "Stopped 10 minutes ago for 15min break - desert in all directions. Only a couple of guys were testing full size beach buggy with full suspension like in the Paris Dakar Rally. Started to film them, and just like in India when filming first elephant, the guys came over and offered a ride in the buggy. Taking time out anyway - so why not! Climbed in through the window, mesh on, helmet on then took off for 10 minutes. Air bourne for half the time - flew off one sand dune, landed half way up the next and flew off again. Proper race speed of 85mph over massive sand dunes like walls - buggy landing on its side and somehow taking off again! Laughed all the way, and got back onto the bike with heart rate sitting at 120 without pushing a pedal!"

Mark is almost certainly describing the great sand dune ridge known as the Algodones which lie to the east of Imperial valley and seen clearly here in this NASA image (north to the left). Also on the image is the All American Canal bringing irrigation water from the Colorado to the Imperial valley farmland.

Some further searching on Flickr produced this image of the dunes and below, from You Tube, a small sample of dune buggies in this very area.....

And here.... Glamis Beach , a small settlement on the eastern edge of the Algodones dunes which Mark would have passed through en route to the Chocolate Mountains ....

... and here, the wonderful Chocolate Mountains (which I had never heard of until today but will not now forget!). These images and many more excellent ones which illustrate this part of Mark's route are available on the University of California , Santa Barbara, Department of Geography website and can be accessed here.

Beyond the Chocolate Mountains, Mark would have descended into the irrigated valley of the Colorado river which, like Imperial Valley, stands out clearly from its desert environs on aerial imagery. The river is literally the life blood of the area since with annual precipitation in Blythe of less than 100mm, any form of cultivation would be impossible without irrigation. To the north the river is dammed in many locations, most spectacularly at the Hoover Dam, and these dams control the flow of water in the river throughout the year ensuring a sufficient supply for both this area and the abstraction of water for farming in Imperial valley. The image below shows the city of Blythe.

... and here the River Colorado near to Blythe. Mark crossed the river just to the east of Blythe and at that point crossed into the state of Arizona..

...at the same point also moving ahead one hour bringing him to GMTminus 7hours.

If you follow the link, you can read a great deal about Arizona but here are a few bits of trivia which I found interesting. Arizona, despite being largely hash desert is the fastest growing state by population in the USA. It is one of the 'Four Corner' states (the others being Utah, Nevada and New Mexico which have a common point of intersection on their state boundary, this being the only place in the US where four states touch). The final bit of trivia is that the largest private employer in the state is Wal Mart!

East of the Colorado river, Mark's route took him past this spot near Ehrenberg and past Quartzite

before heading out into the Sonoran Desert . But that is perhaps a story for another day!

"Down Mexico Way"

2008-01-04T09:19:00.001Z

This has got to be one of the most geographically interesting camp sites of Mark's journey! (Remember that although the GPS is showing 4am this morning, this represents sundown on the 3rd for Mark). We will come back to the campsite later......

The route which brought Mark to this point is also full of geographical interest..After leaving San Diego, the Inter State 8 climbs up through the Laguna Mountains (referred to in yesterday's posting) to a height of around 2000m. Part of today's journey through the mountains took Mark through the Cleveland National Forest, the most southerly national forest in the USA. According to the forest website "The Cleveland National Forest is a very special place in southern California. The forest is a haven for wildlife and plants. The wild shrub and tree-covered mountains are remnants of a landscape that at one time covered most of southern California. With the settling of missions, towns, cities, and suburbs, populated areas now surround the mountains. Natural areas for plants and animals have become smaller and smaller, and in some cases, have disappeared." Mark may have seen evidence of severe wildfires (associated with the Santa Ana winds described in this posting )which frequently sweep the area - some as recently as last year. The Cleveland forest was also the location of the Cedar Fire, the largest wildfire in California history which devastated 720 sq miles of the forest in 2003. A good general impression of the scenery of the Laguna Mountains can be gleaned from the image above and from the following borrowed from the Panoramio layer in Google Earth. Mark will certainly have cycled across this viaduct at some point yesterday.Climatically, the mountains to the east of San Diego are hugely significant as they act as a barrier to the inland penetration of oceanic influences. Any moisture which on-shore winds may bring to the south of California is trapped to the west of the mountains. This, added to the fact that the prevailing winds in this region are north easterlies (and hence dry as they are coming from the heart of the continent) means that there is desert to the east of the mountains.

The altitude of the mountains does have its benefits, however, as I spotted when I looked more closely at this strange pattern which was visible from the air. This is a 2 mile line of 25 wind turbines (and their shadows!)

Some investigation reveals them to be the Tecate Divide wind farm with the largest capacity wind turbines in the USA. They also represent the first large-scale commercial wind farm on Indian lands in the US. The tribe will collect fees on a 20-year lease, plus royalties from electricity sales to San Diego Gas & Electric.

Travelling east and descending from the mountains, Mark would have passed within a couple of kms of the heavily protected Mexican border and into the very arid environment of the Colorado desert to the east (shown below within the dotted yellow line). ... which, understandably is very sparsely populated except where there has been reason to settle as here in the enigmatically titled 'Plaster City'

...whose sole reason for being is a large gypsum quarry...

The last part of yesterday's route took Mark across the Imperial valley - the striking area of irrigated and intensively farmed land which lies south of the Salton sea in the Colorado desert. Considering that this area receives less than 75mm of rain per annum (desert dry is anything less than 250mm), cultivation in the Imperial valley is all the more amazing. The intensive and highly productive farming is entirely based on irrigation which come from the All American Canal dug from the Colorado river in the 1930s and early 40s. It is the largest irrigation canal in the world. The Salton Sea occupies a point over 200m below sea level and only came into being as the result of a man-made environmental disaster that occurred between 1905 and 1907 , when improper management of irrigation routes from the Colorado River caused the river to flow unchecked into the Salton Sink for some two years. Today, its presence is largely maintained by agricultural and irrigation run-off. It is highly saline and polluted with agricultural chemicals. There was an interesting article in National Geographic about the Salton Sea and its environs which you can read here.

Mark's route yesterday took him across the 30km wide expanse of irrigated land, through the town of El Centro which lies at its heart...

...which brings us back to where we started ..

....where an irrigation canal marks the edge of the desert and the difference between desert and productive farmed land can be measured in just a few metres!

Heading east

2008-01-03T07:55:00.000Z

There was something very reassuring about switching on my computer today and finding that Mark is now heading east again! Since Melbourne the dominant direction of travel (apart from the air flight) has either been north or south. While it has clocked up the miles, it hasn't taken him longitudinally nearer the finish line. Maybe it's just me but I sense that the right angled bend at San Diego is quite significant......and it is taking him into some really interesting territory.

However, there's the south Californian coast to 'tie up' first....

Shortly after leaving San Clemente yesterday heading south on the San Diego Freeway, Mark cycled past this large 'installation' which is the San Onofre Nuclear Power Station. It is unlikely that Mark will have seen more than these tops of the two reactor towers but if you follow the link, there is a very informative web site about the power station...

USA produces about 20% of its electricity from nuclear power (as compared to UK's 24% and France's 75%). California , which has two nuclear power plants producing 19% of the state's energy requirements, is thus in line with USA national nuclear power output. If you are interested in global patterns of nuclear power production, there is a good description at this link : Nuclear power in the world today .

The question, of course, in the context of San Onofre is why there? The answer is a) far enough away from both LA and San Diego in the case of an 'incident' and b) access to the ocean for water for the cooling process. It is the need for water which explains why, although there are many much more remote areas in California, the nuclear power plant has to be at the coast.

Location...location.... it's what human geography is all about and it again explains the next feature of land use in this part of southern California which Mark encountered yesterday on this the last major undeveloped portion of coastline between LA and San Diego. This is the 506 sq km of the US Marine Corp Base Camp at Pendleton. If you follow the link, you can read about the history of the area and of the conversion of former ranchland in 1942 into a base to train Marines for service in WW2. The area has diverse relief and, most importantly, 17 miles of coastline for amphibious sea-to-shore training.

Quite apart from its military role, Camp Pendleton has undoubtedly helped to preserve this section of the Californian coast from development.

South of Camp Pendleton the coastline is continuously built up with ocean front settlements spread out for some 50 kms north of San Diego. Only where the shallow estuaries of sluggish rivers reach the coast - such as here between Solana Beach and Encinitas -is there any respite from urban sprawl. Most of these areas, such as the San Elijo Lagoon above are recognised as havens of nature amidst the encroaching development and are fiercely protected.

The remainder of the journey yesterday was spent negotiating San Diego , doing the 'left hand down' turn and beginning the climb east out of the city into the Laguna Mountains. These mountains form part of the northern end of the Peninsular Ranges which extend from the extreme SW of the United States into Mexico's Baja California peninsula. After overnighting on the outskirts of San Diego, the next challenge is a climb through these mountains (rising to about 2000m) and a descent into the Colorado Desert. But that is a story for another day.......

In the meantime, here's a flavour of San Diego with some nice Bon Jovi music to go with it....

Meteorological Matters...

2008-01-02T12:49:00.001Z

The first of January saw Mark negotiate LA and head southeast past Long Beach in the direction of San Diego reaching the town of San Clemente by nightfall. It is impossible to do justice to the geography of this sprawling urban area in a blog and so I have decided instead to select a theme suggested by a comment in the web diary yesterday....

"Mark was fighting a big head wind as we have Santa Ana winds blowing today".

Santa Ana winds are often referred to in the context of wildfires in California but until this morning I knew very little else about them. However, a bit of research has produced the following.....

The Santa Ana winds blow seasonally in south California (from autumn through to spring) with a peak in December/January. They originate in the Great Basin (desert) between the Sierra Nevada and the Rockies reaching the Pacific coast in the vicinity of Los Angeles. They are typically very blustery, dry and warm (accounting for the high temperatures Mark noted yesterday ) but may be problematic for the coastal area they cross. As recently as two days ago they were making news in the region. Click here and here to read some newspaper coverage.

Like the Fohn in Europe or the Chinook in the Prairies of Canada, the Santa Ana winds are katabatic. This means that they are descending winds. High pressure forms over the Great Basin at this time of year as cool temperatures cause air to sink. As the air subsides towards the surface of the earth, its humidity drops and then drops again as the air moves outwards from the centre of high pressure down towards the coast. The speed of the wind often increases as it is channelled through gaps in the coastal hills.

The Santa Ana winds are grounded in local legend and literature. In Raymond Chandler's story Red Wind, the title being one of the offshore wind's many nicknames, the Santa Anas were introduced as "those hot dry winds that come down through the mountain passes and curl your hair and make your nerves jump and your skin itch. On nights like that every booze party ends in a fight. Meek little wives feel the edge of the carving knife and study their husbands' necks. Anything can happen." Scary stuff!

In October and November 2007 wildfires fanned by Santa Ana winds caused huge devastation throughout southern California.

The NASA image above shows the plumes of smoke from those fires being blown westwards towards the ocean by the winds. Click the image to read about those fires.

The good news for Mark, according to this report, is that the Santa Ana winds seem set to abate in the near future.

The second 'meteorological matter' of this posting is fog...... not that Mark has encountered any but the Google Earth imagery of the stretch of coastline he has just negotiated clearly shows a bank of fog lying just offshore. Fog is very common on the Californian coast - especially in summer and it is not dissimilar to the haar which frequently spoils nice summer days on the east coast of Scotland! Basically, warm air rises over the hot land and humid air from the sea is drawn in to replace it. However, just off shore, a cold ocean current wells up to the surface of the Pacific. As the warm, moist air crosses it, it condenses giving rise to fog..... like this image of the Californian coast from Flickr...

Ooh... L.A. L.A.!

2008-01-01T19:10:00.000Z

The last day of 2007 saw Mark cycle from Santa Barbara to Los Angeles along the stretch of transverse coastline described yesterday with many glorious beaches to his right and mountains rising steeply from the coast to his left. East of Santa Barbara and to the north of the Pacific Coast Highway, the Santa Ynez mountains come close to the ocean squeezing settlement and communications into a narrow coastal plain. Much of the high ground is covered in "chaparral" - a scrubby drought resistant vegetation (similar to the 'maquis' of Mediterranean Europe) which is very prone to the wildfires which frequently threaten the Californian coastal communities.

Where the coastal plain broadens, such as here at Carpenteria just east of Santa Barbara, there sems to be an immediate 'scramble' for land with settlemment and agriculture cramming into the available hectares. Much of the farmed land is under glass which may seem strange given the climate of the area. However, as in many parts of southern Europe, greenhouses not only extend the growing season into the cooler winter months but also help to conserve water by controlling the loss of moisture through evaporation. The nature of the intensive farming in the region is well described here by the Carpenteria Chamber of Commerce.

Avocados make a significant contribution to the agricultural economy of the region and are the inspiration for a major festival held in Carpenteria each year (click poster to link) where, amongst many events, there is the inevitable search for the largest avocado!

A short distance beyond Carpentaria, Mark passed through the small settlement of La Cochita which hit headlines around the world two years ago because of a mudslide which claimed the lives of several people...

The view below of La Conchita from the ocean shows how steeply the land rises from the coast.... The steep slopes, combined with 15 days of heavy winter rain and an underlying impermeable clay and shale layer, combined to produce the slide. The top layer of soil became so saturated that the slope 'failed' and sent millions of tons of mud, soil and vegetation onto the settlement below. An impression of the ferocity of the slide can be gained from this dramatic piece of amateur footage....

Safely past la Conchita, Mark's journey towards LA will have had only one stretch where the mountain backdrop receded some distance from the coast. ...

This is the Oxnard plain, built up by alluvial deposits from the Santa Clara river which reaches the coast at this point. The high quality soils and favourable climate combine to produce one of the most fertile agricultural areas in the world. The plain is particularly noted for strawberries which (like the avocados of Carpenteria!) inspire their own festival -the annual California Strawberry Festival!

Between Oxnard and Los Angeles the mountains once again close in on the ocean and the Pacific Coast Highway clings to a narrow strip of land which often perches just above the ocean but here and there is fringed by beautiful beaches .. and homes to the rich and famous at locations such as Malibu below......

...where Mark would have cycled past Cher's front gate(right) and the front gates of countless other stars who live in 'gated' communities in Malibu.

The last day of the year brought Mark to Los Angeles where it would seem that they were waiting for him!