The Great Lava Of My Life

I have known about Ijen volcano in Indonesia since sometime in the 1990's while watching a documentary on television such as NOVA or Savage Earth. What was not revealed to me at that time about this volcano was its odd and spectacular nocturnal fire which I only discovered earlier tonight via an email from my sister-by-another-mother, Linsis, who had posted it on her online geology group. As it turns out this volcano produces sulphurous shimmering violet-blue flames atop the lava's surface giving it an otherworldly appearance. This is hands-down my favorite lava on Earth. Yes, there are more varieties of appearances of it than most people realize. Below are four photographs and two videos of this rare phenomenon that occurs only one other place on Earth. The first is in English at bottom and the second is in French but also well-worth watching. Since it has not embed code you may view it HERE.  

Photo by Olivier Grunewald

Photo by Thorsten Boeckel

Photo by Martin Rietze

Photo by Olivier Grunewald

Picture of the Day - Leonid Fountain

Here is the beautiful fountain in front of the wine cave at Broken Earth Winery where I was working tonight doing mostly parking of people and helping them get back to their cars after dark and after drinking wine at the Paso Robles Chamber of Commerce's "Puttin' On The Ritz" 1920's Gala. This image was taken with my older iPhone which has a dirty lens hence the image quality. Photo by Kim Patrick Noyes (all rights reserved).

Quote of the Day - Thomas Wolfe

While looking up the specific wording of the title of Thomas Wolfe's classic "You Can't Go Home Again" (which title was a Quote of the Day here last year) I found the following hauntingly wistful, profoundly true, and masterfully-composed line from that novel as spoken by the character "Webber":

"You can't go back home to your family, back home to your childhood ... back home to a young man's dreams of glory and of fame ... back home to places in the country, back home to the old forms and systems of things which once seemed everlasting but which are changing all the time – back home to the escapes of Time and Memory."

My First Valencia Peak Ascent

Today I carpooled with my buddy Blake Burgess down to Montana De Oro State Park perched along the coast of San Luis Obispo County between the south end of Estero Bay and the Irish Hills and just north of Diablo Canyon Nuclear Power Plant and just south of Morro Bay and Los Osos-Baywood. This was hardly my first time at this park but before today I had never hiked up into the Irish Hills let along Valencia Peak. Coastal stratus clouds were forming as moist marine air was passing from the ocean onto the landmass so we were in a cloud most of the time we were on the mountain and the entire time we were on the peak's top. I'm without a camera at present so I used my iPhone to take these low-quality images so at least you can see what I saw in general. Due to the coastal stratus I was unable capture decent images of Valencia Peak itself. I felt like pinching myself today being in such an amazingly gorgeous place in such splendid weather for this time of year made all the more precious by the inclement wintry weather of late across much of the rest of North America.

View looking northward up the coast with Morro Rock and Morro Bay visible in the distance as well as a fair amount of Estero Bay in the background and Montana De Oro State Park in the foreground.

View looking west-southwest from the first slope on this hike.

View looking southward down the coast towards Point Buchon. All images by Kim Patrick Noyes (all rights reserved).

Volcanoes' Deadliest & Scariest Attack

This image was captured this past day in Indonesia and it shows the currently erupting Mount Sinabung casting down its flanks a volcanoe's most dangerous and deadly form of attack: pyroclastic flow.
Image courtesy of Sutanta Aditya / AFP - Getty Images.

Picture of the Day - First Great Sunset Of 2014

This iPhone image did not come out as sharp as I hoped but this was nonetheless a a breathtakingly beautiful and also unexpectedly beautiful sunset earlier tonight from the countryside west of Paso Robles.
Image by Kim Patrick Noyes (all rights reserved)

CAL FIRE's 2013 Fire Season

This comes across as a bit self-congratulatory but it is rather interesting and certainly a useful summary of the California's 2013 fire season from the CAL FIRE perspective.