Monday, January 19, 2015

Bixby Bridge

You Can't See a Dream

January 18, 2015



I was thinking of doing a series on Pacific Coast bridges in my other blog and realized I don't have any photos of Bixby Bridge in my collection, so I decided I needed to fix that before proceeding with that series.  I set out to rectify that yesterday.

Great Egret & Brandt's Cormorant -- Pacific Grove, CA
Great Egret
I got off to a late start, arriving in Pacific Grove around 3:00 in the afternoon.  I'd have time to drive along the bay and hit the butterfly sanctuary before heading down to Bixby Bridge, which is about fifteen miles South of Carmel.  Fog was kind of settling in over the town as I arrived.  It wasn't enough to make the pictures particularly moody, unfortunately.

 Pacific Grove, CA
The butterfly sanctuary turned out to be a bummer for a couple of reasons.  First, there weren't many many butterflies there.  Monsanto has been a pretty good job of killing them off with its Round Up weed killer.  Monarchs are fussy little things that feed almost exclusively on milkweed, which Round Up is very effectively killing off across the country.  As of last year, the butterfly numbers were down ninety percent from twenty years ago.  This year's count is 16,300, which I think is up from last year but still very far below the six figure counts of the past.

Monarchs -- Monarch Butterfly Sanctuary, Pacific Grove, CA
The second bummer was that I broke my 250mm lens.  Well, it still kind of works.  My tripod fell over while I was setting up for a shot earlier in the day and discovered in the grove that the auto focus no longer works on that lens.  It's the cheaper of my two lenses so if one was going to break I'm glad it was that one.  There's some comfort there, I guess.  I could have done without that, though.

 Black-tailed Deer -- Monarch Butterfly Sanctuary, Pacific Grove, CA
After visiting the butterfly grove, I headed down to Bixby Bridge.

Big Sur, CA
How many bridges have songs written about them?  More than I'm aware of, I suspect.  Death Cab for Cutie's "Bixby Canyon Bridge" is one of my favorites of theirs.  It tells something of a story, the writer's disappointment with not finding the soul of Jack Kerouac beneath the bridge.  Sometimes we build things up and can't help but be disappointed when we encounter the reality of these things.


Bixby Bridge, Big Sur, CA
Bixby Bridge, Big Sur, CA
Rainbow Beach, Big Sur, CA




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