The Appalachian Trail, part one

dead root
Originally uploaded by Jason Grote.

So you're going to get a fragmented, piecemeal version of the Appalachian Trail story, mostly due to the fact that I don't have enough bandwidth space at Flickr to upload all of the photos (and partially because you, the reader, will be viewing these entries in reverse-chronological order).

Yesterday Lorraine and I went hiking on the Appalachian Trail with our friends Sheila and Sophocles. These are some of the photo highlights.

You're looking at a dead tree root that I probably would not have noticed, except that Sheila (who is in the lower left-hand corner, photographing a millipede) stoppped and took some close-ups of it. We wound up with lots of pictures of the same things, but Sheila is generally a much better photographer than I am; interestingly, though, even on my good pics (such as this one), we have markedly different perspectives. Her photos of the root were extreme close-ups, aesthetically pleasing and full of interesting details but difficult to make out what it's a picture of. Whereas I, obviously, went for the starburst you see to the right.

It probably says something about both of our respective work, but I don't want to think too much it.