AlishaV's Blog

This is the original picture that I photo-shopped to make the other fantasy land one. I cropped it into a square, lightened it, and then added more saturation to bring out the colors. I think it turned out a bit different but also still had the same feeling as the original picture, that sense of place that is Trona Pinnacles. The Trona Pinnacles are tufa or carbonate spires near Death Valley in the California desert. They were created underwater 10,000 to 100,000 years ago, when the Panamint Valley and Death Valley were filled with ice age lakes. They are now high and dry though. Check out The Trona Pinnacles for more information about their formation and location as well as a film clip from a Lost in Space episode that was filmed at Trona Pinnacles. Also, I want to apologize about the last items I posted. When I linked those pictures from Flickr to the blog I had no idea that it was sending out blog posts for each one. I'm so sorry about filling up your in-boxes with several mess...

This was a boring shot of the Trona Pinnacles, carbonate towers near Trona, California that are similar to those at Mono Lake. It was early morning, but a bit past the best time to take a picture so the area was really heavily shadowed with many bright spots. I played with the picture using photo-editing software and brought out that natural glow that was hidden by the glare. I liked the picture a bit, but wasn't really into it until I set it as my desktop background for a while. The different tones the picture takes on as the computer boots up, then warms, then as it gets turned off, makes the picture turn from earliest dawn to sunset at various points and I've just fallen in love with the variations.

This is a picture from our trip to Gem-O-Rama in Trona, California last October. These people are scrubbing Hanksite crystals free of the mud they grew in using a saltwater/brine solution. This is one of the best places to get crystals and see geology, as long as you don't mind getting really messy. The crystals grow underground amidst the mineral-laden mud, and to get these specific crystals they scoop big piles of the mud up and let people dig through them. It's kind of crazy. See more info on it on my page about the event: Gem-O-Rama in Trona, California

I've been really busy lately. Ever since I went to Gem-O-Rama in 2007 and came back with some great mineral specimens, I've been having a problem. Everyone wanted in on the whole Gem-O-Rama thing! They wanted to know all about what it was, where it was, and how they could do it. So, I had to keep telling people how to go and do it and sending people my photographs so they could see what it was like. That just didn't seem like enough to give people an idea of what it was really like though. Then, this last September I found a site that let me describe how to do Gem-O-Rama to everyone in the world that was interested. So, I wrote an article. Then it seemed like that wasn't enough, so I wrote another one, and another. Now, I've got a bunch of articles on how to do Gem-O-Rama as well as several other topics. Check them out here: http://www.ehow.com/members/AlishaV-articles.html . I've gotten addicted to article writing and so have been doing it constantly lately. T...