Update! Update! - 'Nome has been undergoing some long overdue housekeeping! I've got a new look but the content is the same. Still ironing out the kinks and working on new bells and whistles. If you have any suggestions, both positive and negative, drop me a note. Cheers!
On with the story...
A little over a year ago, I boarded yet another mode of transportation, this time an aeroplane, for what was rapidly becoming a new routine – tailor job applications to highlight transferable skills, visit a new city and university, come home, repeat. This time I negotiated 8 days on the ground to explore once the interviews, both formal and otherwise, were concluded.
This gnome knows very little about the East Coast of the US – its home to NYC and Washington DC and Ivy League halls, right? With the spring snowdrops just pushing through I headed south and west to discover “The Finger Lakes.”
Central/Upstate New York was underwater nearly 400 million years ago. As local mountains eroded and silt accumulated, the foundations of the Finger Lakes were laid. Ice age glaciers came and went leaving the lakes and waterfalls to be carved by melt-water creeks cascading into the basins left behind. Today, although slightly less violent, these creeks (and copious winter snows/melts) actively shape the region. I toddled around to see a few and walk still frozen trails one overcast Saturday last March.
Buttermilk Falls borrows it name from a local creek as it flows into Cayuga Lake (the longest of the Finger Lakes). I often have a giggle, as nature is conveniently fenced-in due to the litigation prone citizenry.
Watkins Glen is one of the most famous state parks in the area located on Seneca Lake (the deepest of the Finger Lakes). Owned by industrialist George Watkins, the falls were originally dammed to power millstones and a sawmill. Upon Watkins death, the glen was opened as a resort in 1863 prior to becoming the regions first state park in 1906.
Winding my way back up the western shores of Cayuga Lake, I stopped at Taughannock (Algonquin for “in the trees”) Falls – the tallest free-falling waterfall, at 215 feet, in the northeast. Not as voluminous as Niagara, but pretty in an industrial shale mining sort of way.
On a personal note: In my experience, there is no shortage of gray days in Upstate New York, or snow in the winter, for that matter. It makes photography challenging on its best days and wastes hours on colour correction manipulations post shoot. I hope you enjoy these taster images. There are about half a dozen more languishing on my desktop. I just can’t bring myself to correct at the moment but will get them into a Flickr album soon. =)
