Plane views

Here are some photos out the window of my flight home from California the week before last…

Snow on the north sides of mountains, but not on the south sides (view is from the south towards the north):

Same thing here:

And again…

And again… it would appear that our route from Reno to Minneapolis had us routed over the northern hemisphere!

Variation on the same theme: light-colored sand deposits only on one side of the mountains (in this case, the leeward side of the mountains in the prevailing winds):

Same thing again: sand on the leeward side only:

Snowy range somewhere over northern Nevada…

Zooming in to the northwestern corner of that same range, to some curious scoop-shapes in the ridge… I guess these might be little north-facing cirques?

Little erosional remnants of some resistant unit, making little mesas of cap rock:

“Bathtub rings”: old shorelines of a lake that used to be a bit fuller than it is today:

Edge of the “lake” itself, now a salt flat (playa):

Out over the playa, looking north at more ancient shorelines etched into the landscape:

Interesting — there’s a weird series of tadpole-shaped features on the playa surface: springs of some sort? They’re all in a line, so perhaps there’s a fault beneath acting as a plumbing system for water to make it to the surface?

Here’s a neat-looking drainage:

Meandering river with cut-off meander loops (oxbow lakes and the dry equivalent thereof):

Same thing, from a slightly different perspective and wider field of view. Can you spot the two man-made lakes that overprint the natural fluvial pattern?

More to come in this series… I took a lot of photos on this flight…