A Beautiful Brooding Carrizo Plain

Ten years ago this month I took these images of Winter weather setting onto a brown, dry Carrizo Plain. This was probably the first significant rain of the season out there given how brown the grasses were at the time. This place is very special to me and I have visited it innumerable times throughout the course of two decades and all times of year and in all types of weather. This place is usually rather solitary and disquietingly quiet for the uninitiated. It is also gifted with multiple personality disorder as it has a broad range of many different faces to an extent one would not think possible for such a seemingly plain plain to the untrained eye and mind. Indeed, to the untrained eye the place seems rather barren and lifeless but that is far from true. I can attest to the power of this place as a place of prayer and contemplation and meditation. Much history both human and geologic going back many thousands of years in the former case and many millions of years in the latter case has unfolded here.
For the record, the San Andreas Fault Zone appears in each of these images.

A scarp of the San Andreas Fault is highlighted by sunlight.

Ominous darkness shrouds the Temblor Range.

The Carrizo Plain generates some of the best skyscapes anywhere on the Central Coast.

Soda Lake is dry most of the year but when it is not it is an important cog in the Pacific Flyway.

A subtle rainbow seems to paint an illuminated Temblor Range as darkness shrouds Soda Lake.

All photos by Kim Patrick Noyes (all rights reserved)