Via the great curators at This is Colossal, a jaw-dropping video of the a giant rope swing, looped over Corona Arch in Moab, Utah. The video was shot by Salt Lake’s Devin Graham.
If you’re interested in more, check out Devin’s equally entertaining “making of” video here.
Still not enough? This 280m freefall in Kjerag, Norway (in the Southwest) ought to do the trick. With a total freefall of 360m (1181 feet), it’s dizzying to watch let alone leap off a cliff and try!
I may be biased - after all my Hipmunk avatar does have me holding chopsticks - but for me the best fruit there is takes the form of a purple tomato-esque treat with a green leafy stem. Mangosteens are originally thought be from the Moluccas (those same Indonesian islands as cloves, mace and nutmeg) and are now found throughout Southeast Asia.
I’m back in Thailand and one of the first things I did was eat as many of these as I could handle:
So what do they taste like?
I describe it as a cross between a lychee and an apricot. Other, like F.W. Burbidge who tried the fruit in 1880, though that it tastes “…something like that of the finest nectarine, but with a dash of strawberry and pineapple added.”
While the mangosteen isn’t widely found in (or imported to) North America, it’s easy to locate in Southeast Asia from February through May. For those visiting the region, it’s something you shouldn’t miss!
I must confess that I never cared about snowflakes too much … until I read an article about the uniqueness of each crystal. So I took my gear to the balcony and made some “field stacks“. And yes … if you are able to have a closer look, these fractal shapes are pretty fascinating. Each snowflake is a small geometric miracle.
Though I’ve been travelling around the world for the last 4 years, I am the first to admit that I’ve seen only one small part of what my country’s national parks and those of the United States have to offer. With such vast spaces and varied landscapes, months of discovery are needed to see them all. Take, for example, these 3000 ft tall Vermillion Cliffs in Arizona, shot by photographer Richard Barnes:
It’s hard to believe that a national monument girded by towering cliffs—their color burning through the spectrum as the day advances—could be so little known. Yet few people have heard of the place, apart from one or two of its famous features. One reason is that Vermilion Cliffs National Monument is upstaged by its neighbors, which include some of the most famous national parks and monuments in the United States: Grand Canyon, Zion, Bryce Canyon, and more.
Adding it to the bucket list, stat!
For those in the region, note that there are few marked trails and rangers found in the bigger National Parks, so it’s quite an undertaking to visit, and one where preemptive planning is necessary. Additional info, maps and camping sites for the adventure-seekers among you Hipmunks can be found on the Arizona Bureau of Land Management’s site.
I came across Evan Drolet Cook’s “Places I Haven’t Been” map this week and wanted to share it here.
So much of our online world is showing what we’ve done that we sometimes lose sight of the other side of the coin, the things we still want to see and do. This tongue-in-cheek map, is the perfect visual companion to those thoughts.
When I first saw the map, I thought of the bulletin board I put together before I left on my round-the-world trip, pinning all the places I’d already seen prior to the longer-term travels. Perhaps I ought to have pinned the places I wanted to go, or the sites that enticed me instead - it would have been a far more inspiring map.
Some of the most evocative travel photography is the kind that makes you see something normal in a totally different light. Take the photo below, a bird’s eye view of Baja California desert in Mexico, taken by Adriana Franco:
Hard to believe that this is a desert image and not a delicate hand-painted canvas of furrowed branches and trees. We all know that nature is beautiful, but sometimes it’s a surprise to see it shifted into an unexpected form.
In what has been lauded as one of the more incredible photos of our planet ever released, NASA has issued a staggeringly high-definition photo of Earth from space. The photo was taken by the new Suomi NPP satellite, launched in late October of 2011. Here’s a smaller version:
Pretty incredible, right?
This photo is a composite image of several swaths of the Earth’s surface, all from January 4, 2012. Here’s the giant 8000x8000 version - gorgeous.
For a comparison of how much imaging technology has improved over the years, here’s the 1972 version of the same photo:
Quite a difference. Looking forward to seeing what other images come out of the satellite’s rotation.
After months of travel through Asia, the Middle East and North Africa, I spent the last few months in England with my brother and his friends. It was great to relax and enjoy the holidays with family, but it also gave a perspective of the country that I didn’t have before. There’s something offputting about returning to a comfortable place after being abroad, but it is also wonderful to see it in a different light.
Here are some photos from my winter months in the UK.
I stumbled on this bright, ethereal photos from under the sea and had to share them here. Alexander Semenov is a biologist who now does a gorgeous job of photographing what he spent so long studying.
Exhibit A:
Semenov notes that he got into underwater photography by accident:
When I first began to experiment with sea life photography I tried shooting small invertebrates for fun with my own old camera and without any professional lights or lenses. I collected the invertebrates under water and then I’ve shot them in the lab. After two or three months of failure after failure I ended up with a few good pictures, which I’ve showed to the crew. It has inspired us to buy a semi-professional camera complete with underwater housing and strobes. Thus I’ve spent the following field season trying to shoot the same creatures, but this time in their environment. It was much more difficult, and I spent another two months without any significant results. But when you’re working at something every day, you inevitably get a lot of experience. Eventually I began to get interesting photos — one or two from each dive. Now after four years of practice I get a few good shots almost every time I dive but I still have a lot of things that need to be mastered in underwater photography.
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