Tag: nature

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A Vista Fit for Making Memories

Memorial Vista (Memorial Point on Lake Tahoe, Incline Village, Nevada)
“Memorial Vista”
Memorial Point on Lake Tahoe, Incline Village, Nevada

Snowy evergreen forests and jumbles of massive boulders meet with the placid waters of Lake Tahoe at Nevada’s Memorial Point. Dreamy, snow-capped mountains loom on the far shore, their precipitous slopes and jagged profiles plainly visible even at a distance of 20 miles.

For somebody such as myself, born and raised in Connecticut, the vast panorama of open water and mountain scenery offered by Lake Tahoe is truly otherworldly and enchanting. If the scenery isn’t amazing enough, it’s also numerically impressive on several metrics. At an elevation of more than 6,000 feet and with a surface area of 190 square miles, there is no other alpine lake so large in the entire nation. And remarkably, Lake Tahoe’s greatest depth approaches 1/3 of a mile, making it the second deepest lake in the country (just behind Crater Lake at 1,900 feet deep).

New Englanders accustomed to seeing their local lakes vanish beneath sheets of ice each year will surely be interested to discover that Lake Tahoe doesn’t freeze over, despite temperatures reminiscent of Northeastern winters and an average snowfall of 125 inches each season. How is that possible? Well, it’s complicated actually, but the abridged explanation is that the lake’s extreme depths help it to retain the heat stored up in its waters over the warmer months. Even in the coldest of winters, the main body of Lake Tahoe rarely ever drops lower than 40° F.

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All Things Connecticut New Print Releases The American Northeast

The Lights at West Hartford

Christmas Lights at West Hartford, 2017 (Christmas Tree at West Hartford Town Hall, West Hartford, Connecticut)
“Christmas Lights at West Hartford, 2017”
Christmas Tree at West Hartford Town Hall, West Hartford, Connecticut

A little bit of Christmas spirit seems in order this weekend and the fine tree out front of West Hartford’s Town Hall certainly does the trick. Though this particular piece prompts me to draw attention to an element of some landscapes that perhaps the casual observer rarely notices.

Power lines tend to be strung up without any regard to how they impact aesthetics. I get it; it’s about practicality and we all need electricity and cable. But sometimes you get a scene like this where visual appeal isn’t marred by a thousand draped wires and it offers insight into why it might be useful to put a bit of extra thought into exactly where we hang lines. I’ve tussled with a number of different landscapes across Connecticut that are negatively impacted by the presence of a poorly-positioned power line. Oftentimes the aesthetics could’ve been preserved if the line had simply been run on the other side of the road, for example.

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All Things Connecticut New Print Releases The American Northeast

Bradley Point and a Beat Hero

Savin Dawning (Bradley Point Park, West Haven, Connecticut)
“Savin Dawning”
Bradley Point Park, West Haven, Connecticut

Beach grasses are deathly still with snow at their stems and frigid winter air creeping forth from Long Island Sound. But the incendiary spectacle upon the horizon, where the sun is just beginning to shine forth through the clouds, offers at least the prospect of some warmth come late morning.

Connecticut’s municipal beaches are usually not exceptionally well-known in the state outside of their host town or county, but owing to hundreds of years of recorded history along the coast, almost all of them were the backdrop for at least a couple interesting stories.

Southwest Ledge from Afar (Southwest Ledge Light, New Haven, Connecticut)
“Southwest Ledge from Afar”
Southwest Ledge Lighthouse as seen from the shores of Bradley Point Park, New Haven, Connecticut

Bradley Point, for example, was for a short time the home of famous Beat poet and novelist Jack Kerouac. His father had moved the family from Massachusetts to West Haven, Connecticut after securing work. Though their first dwelling in the city proved deplorably unfit, they finally settled on renting a cottage on the West Haven shoreline at Bradley Point. Biographer Paul Maher says of Kerouac’s time there that “he swam in the Sound, labored over his writings, and prepared for his sophomore year of college while his mother worked hard to make her new house a home.”

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All Things Connecticut New Print Releases The American Northeast

Eightmile Crossing

Eightmile Crossing (Covered Bridge at Southford Falls State Park, Southbury & Oxford, Connecticut)
“Eightmile Crossing”
Covered bridge at Southford Falls State Park, Southbury & Oxford, Connecticut

Even as woodlands along Eightmile Brook grow increasingly bare by late October, the river gorge remains lively as ever with exuberant cascades singing away in the shadow of a covered bridge above.

Although dozens of covered bridges could be found throughout Connecticut during the 19th-century, most have long since been lost to floods, fires, wear and tear and changing technology that had rendered the venerable timber bridges largely obsolete more than a century ago. Only three covered bridges built before 1900 are left in Connecticut these days, each of which has become a beloved icon in its host town. But while historical covered bridges may be few and far between in Connecticut, there’s also a handful of covered bridges dotting the state which were built later, from the 1950s and onward.

Unlike their antique forebears, these relatively new covered bridges were never really intended to be trafficked crossings, but rather carefully crafted replicas that recall New England’s early days. Take the covered bridge in “Eightmile Crossing”, for example: although it uses the authentic Burr Arch truss design patented in 1817, it wasn’t actually built over Southford Falls until 1972.

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All Things Connecticut New Print Releases The American Northeast

A Golden View of the Silver City

Daybreak at Chauncey Cliffs (Chauncey Peak, Giuffrida Park, Meriden, Connecticut)
“Daybreak at Chauncey Cliffs”
Chauncey Peak at Giuffrida Park, Meriden, Connecticut

Gusting winds rock a cluster of cedars dauntlessly perched atop an ancient traprock cliff in the Metacomet Range. In the valley below, the outskirts of Meriden are eased from their twilight slumber as dawn banishes a blanket of morning fog.

Originally known as Meriden Farm when it was settled by hard-scrabble pioneers from the Connecticut Colony in the mid-1600s, Meriden has managed over the intervening centuries to swell from a remote, agrarian outpost to a city of more than 60,000. Industry flourished there during the Gilded Age and beyond, especially in the form of silver manufacturing, earning Meriden the nickname “Silver City”. The handle persists to this day, even long after the old factories were shuttered.

But if The Silver City isn’t really notable for its silver any longer, it’s certainly a veritable gold mine of municipal parkland. Almost 18% of Meriden’s landscape is contained within city parks and, as the literature explains, “no other city in New England can match that percentage!” Central among those parks are Meriden’s traprock ridges, characterized by precipitous cliffs which tower over the surrounding valleys and dominate the city’s horizon. I produced “Daybreak at Chauncey Cliffs” from the summit of the 700-foot Chauncey Peak which rises from woodlands in the northeastern reaches of the city.

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All Things Connecticut New Print Releases The American Northeast

A Serpent Awakened

A Serpent Awakened (Gorge Cascade Falls, Sleeping Giant State Park, Hamden, Connecticut)
“A Serpent Awakened”
Gorge Cascade Falls, Sleeping Giant State Park, Hamden, Connecticut

In the autumn forests of Hamden along the flank of the Sleeping Giant hills, a cascading stream boils fiercely with whitewater as it surges around a bend at the bottom of a leaf-scattered gorge.

When a client asked me last year about Gorge Cascade Falls, a mingling of waterfalls and cascades along a nameless brook at Sleeping Giant State Park, I gave my honest answer: Sleeping Giant is an incredible state park for its extensive trails and mountaintop vistas, but it’s just not a waterfall destination.

I still stand by that assessment, as the stream is starved for water most of the year and the “falls” can nearly dry up during summertime droughts. But in those rare cases when, for example, an October Nor’easter dumps 5 inches of rain in a day, even this little kitten of a waterfall enjoys a few days of roaring like a lion.

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All Things Connecticut New Print Releases The American Northeast

Wigwam Blue

Wigwam Blue (Wigwam Reservoir, Thomaston, Connecticut)
“Wigwam Blue”
Wigwam Reservoir, Thomaston, Connecticut

A grove of pines stand shrouded with morning mist on the tranquil shores of Wigwam Reservoir, their towering trunks inverted in a mirror-like reflection upon the still water below.

While the Greater Hartford region and its thirst for water spawned such magnificent creations as the Barkhamsted Reservoir, several other cities elsewhere in Connecticut were similarly tasked around the turn of the 19th century with determining how they would bring sufficient water to their burgeoning populations. Waterbury, for example, is supplied by a system of five generous reservoirs, the first of which was Wigwam Reservoir up north in Thomaston on a tributary of the Naugatuck River.

Construction of Wigwam Reservoir began in 1893 with the clearing of land and preliminary dam work. A pipeline measuring three feet in diameter was routed about 10 miles to Waterbury the next year and, by 1896, water was flowing. It wasn’t until 1901 that the dam was finally built up to its full height, inundating the hundred-acre basin of Wigwam Reservoir with more than 700 million gallons of water.

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All Things Connecticut New Print Releases The American Northeast

Remembering Alice

Woodland Remembrance (Alice Newton Street Memorial Park, Woodbridge, Connecticut)
“Woodland Remembrance”
Alice Newton Street Memorial Park, Woodbridge, Connecticut

In my newly-released piece, “Woodland Remembrance”, sunlight pierces the forest canopy in the heart of Woodbridge, transforming the understory into a blissfully verdant landscape fit for a fairytale.

Although Connecticut began building its state park system in the mid-1910s and town-owned parks had existed far earlier, nature preserves owned for the public good outside the realm of government were generally a slightly later phenomenon.

The Woodbridge Park Association, operating independently of Woodbridge’s town government, was among the earliest organizations in Connecticut to acquire and manage preserved land on a not-for-profit basis. The Association got its start back in 1928 when it was founded in order to fulfill the vision of philanphropist Newton Street who had decided to forever preserve over 80 acres of land in memory of his mother, Alice Street. The result, featured in this latest piece of mine, was the Alice Newton Street Memorial Park.

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All Things Connecticut New Print Releases The American Northeast

Naugatuck Eternal

Naugatuck Eternal (Naugatuck River, Thomaston, Connecticut)
“Naugatuck Eternal”
Naugatuck River, Thomaston, Connecticut
© 2017 J. G. Coleman

Coursing mightily after weeks of springtime rainfall, the Naugatuck River churns up wisps of whitewater as it snakes through mist-engulfed woodlands.

Over the course of a 39-mile journey from its headwaters in Northwestern Connecticut to its confluence with the Housatonic, the Naugatuck River descends more than 500 feet. Such fast-moving waters proved a boon for early industry, turning waterwheels and turbines that powered dozens of bustling factories during the 18th and 19th centuries. Of course, with that appropriation as a power source also came severe ecological decline.

Dams obstructed fish travel and decimated the fishery while factories channeled a foul stew of sewage and waste chemicals into the river on a daily basis right up until the 1960s. Mercifully, new regulations enacted in the 1970s ushered in a rejuvenating era for the Naugatuck characterized by dramatically improved water quality. Furthermore, five old dams have been removed entirely since 1999, reopening great lengths of the river to be traveled freely by rebounding fish populations.

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New Print Releases The American Northeast

152 Years and Counting

Randall Crossing at Lyndon (Randall Covered Bridge over the East Branch of the Passumpsic River, Lyndon, Vermont)
“Randall Crossing at Lyndon”
Randall Covered Bridge (a.ka. Old Burrington Bridge) over the East Branch Passumpsic River, Lyndon, Vermont
© 2016 J. G. Coleman

Having spent more than a century and a half amidst the countryside of northeastern Vermont, the time-worn Randall Covered Bridge feels almost as natural a part of the scenery as the surrounding woodlands or the rushing waters of the Passumpsic’s East Branch below.

Randall Covered Bridge is truly a relic from a different era, its rough-hewn timbers assembled the same year that the Civil War came to a close at Appomattox some 600 miles to the south. Records don’t identify whoever was contracted to build the bridge, but the especially wide roof and open sides follow a distinctive pattern endemic to the township and surrounding area.

When the rigors of time and the unforgiving heft of automobiles finally rendered old Randall Bridge obsolete in the 1960s, the people of Lyndon had the foresight to keep the aged timber bridge intact. So, despite having been bypassed decades ago by a modern concrete crossing just 20 feet upstream, Randall Bridge quietly enjoys its 152nd anniversary this year. And with much care and a smidgeon of luck, it’ll be there for generations to come.

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All Things Connecticut New Print Releases The American Northeast

Bouquet by the Water’s Edge

"Bouquet by the Water's Edge" (West Hartford Reservoir Trails, West Hartford, Connecticut)
“Bouquet by the Water’s Edge”
West Hartford Reservoir Trails, West Hartford, Connecticut
© 2016 J. G. Coleman

Writing in the 1890s for his book Poems of New England, J. H. Earle kicked off “A Summer Hour” with a few soothing lines:

Great the joy there is in silence
When the mind is free,
For then we here with nature talk,
And all seems in glee.

Especially when summer breezes
Waft the teeming earth,
And all landscapes seem to flourish
In nature’s glad birth.

Earle probably didn’t spend much time with early cameras, but I’m fairly certain that modern landscape photography taps in to the very same vein of inspiration from which he crafted his poetry.

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All Things Connecticut New Print Releases The American Northeast

The Clarks and The Creek

Clark Creek flits about in riffles and cascades as it snakes through old Tylerville en route to the Connecticut River. Springtime woodlands immerse the falls in shadow as soothing murmurs of tumbling water rise into the canopy.

Clark's Stairway (Clark Creek Falls on Clark Creek, Haddam, Connecticut)
“Clark’s Stairway”
Clark Creek Falls on Clark Creek, Haddam, Connecticut
© 2016 J. G. Coleman

Sometimes a simple babbling brook can, through tangential association, lead us unexpectedly into topics of great historical importance. For example, one historian recalled in 1900 that “the Clarks of… Clark’s Creek in Tylverville are descended from Major John Clark… who is named as one of the patentees in the Charter of Charles II to Connecticut in 1662.” Sure, at face value that may seem to be an obscure reference, but it’s difficult to overstate the importance of that founding document to which the name of Clark Creek can be circuitously traced.

Tylerville Cascades (Clark Creek Falls on Clark Creek, Haddam, Connecticut)
“Tylerville Cascades”
Clark Creek Falls on Clark Creek, Haddam, Connecticut
© 2016 J. G. Coleman

The Charter of 1662 gave legal blessing to the Connecticut Colony in the eyes of the English monarchy, ensuring an impressive measure of self-governance for what had previously amounted to little more than a loosely-associated series of Puritan settlements south of Massachusetts. Upon granting that early charter, it’s likely that Charles II couldn’t have imagined that Connecticut and its sibling colonies would be back just about a century later, demanding a far greater degree of self-governance that would change everything.

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