This was the first of four places I had not seen on previous Alaska cruises in 2001 and 2005.
The
Hubbard Glacier is North America's largest tidewater glacier. It flows 120
kilometres from Kluane National Park in the Yukon Territory of Canada through Wrangell-St. Elias
National Park in Alaska. It is 11 kilometres wide and over 100 metres
above the waterline at its terminal face.
When we returned from our drive up the Klondike Highway to Fraser BC, we stopped at the north end of Skagway. There, a short hike up through the Gold Rush Cemetery brought us to a lovely little waterfall, Lower Reid Falls.
The waterfall is named after Frank H. Reid, the ‘good guy’ (by most accounts), in an historic gunfight in 1898. He shot the other participant, or ‘bad guy,’ a con man named Jefferson Randolf (Soapy) Smith, in “self-defence,” in the back (see what I’m doing here?) Reid’s grave has an elaborate headstone, but Smith’s (just outside of the perimeter of the cemetery) tersely states his name, date of death and age, not even hinting at his side of the gunfight story.
Many of the graves are surrounded by intricately-carved fencing and sport colourful stories about the occupants’ advertised and actual occupations and circumstances of death.
This asymmetric single-pylon cable-stayed bridge is an impressive
example of earthquake engineering. It spans the Moore Creek Gorge which flows
along an active seismic fault line on the Klondike Highway about 27 km north of
Skagway. To minimize potential bridge damage from earthquake movements along
the fault line, the bridge was cantilevered, with anchors only at the south
end.
Before the bridge was built in 1976, Whitehorse YT was only
accessible from Skagway by the White Pass and Yukon Route railroad. Over the
decades, heavy ore truck traffic weakened the bridge, and in 2019 it was
replaced. The 1976 cable-stayed bridge was repurposed as a pedestrian viewpoint
and historic site.
I have been to Skagway twice before and have painted State St. several times, most recently in 2019. It looked much the same, with two cruise ships docked at the end of the main street on this year’s cruise.
I’ll continue ‘Sketching an Alaska Cruise’ this Sunday. For today, here’s a quick mid-year review (yes, the year is in fact half over!) of how I’m coming along with my plans for 1150 Words, as set out at the beginning of this year.
Paint Every Mountain: I finished and published this book about hiking and painting in mountains all over the world.
Creative Archaeology: I have continued to build
the series ‘Time Travel with a Bag of Crayons’ equipped with the same plein
air painting kit I used for ‘Paint Every Mountain.’ The series, now in chronological order, will
include some of the photos and sketches I accumulated in past
archaeology-related travel with the Art Gallery of Greater Victoria and the travel
study program at the University of Victoria.
Predictive Analytics This has evolved into a series of essays and illustrations of the increasingly drastic climate effects of the Anthropocene.
Our second port of call was Juneau, and a shore excursion to the Mendenhall Glacier.
I was much more successful in “quickly capturing the essence” of this landscape, thanks to the Mendenhall Glacier Visitor Center provided by the US Forest Service.
The sheltered, perfectly located
presentation area took in the entire glacier and even included the top of spectacular
Nugget Falls to the right of the glacier toe.
(I altered the perspective slightly to reflect the viewing angle from the upper
part of the Visitor Center but, unlike my Ketchikan composition, only one
viewpoint was required to see all the components of Mendenhall Glacier.)
The presentation area even
included a long lectern-like table to hold notepads and sketchbooks!
In my book, ‘Paint Every Mountain’ I include some tips on quickly capturing the essence of a landscape with a few colourful ‘shapes’ using an easily carried painting kit ─ a bag of crayons.
I don’t always follow these ‘essence’ tips, myself ─ especially when I encounter a landscape with as many intriguing details and peculiarities as we found in Ketchikan AK, the first port of call on our recent cruise.
Only partly cloudy the day we were there, Ketchikan is normally so wet
that its annual rainfall is recorded in feet (about 13 of them)! The main
street through town is set on pillars in the sea at the base of the lush
mountainside. Side streets are so steep some are not ‘streets’ at all, but wooden staircases snaking up the rain-forested slopes. And Creek Street is in fact
a creek, with moss-covered bridges and houses, artists’ studios and shops
cantilevered over the torrent.
For years I have tried
to see and paint things differently, shifting away from realism toward abstraction. Often the painting fights back, and I find
myself adding picky details to what should have been the finished product.
I realized that’s what
had happened here when I compared previous versions I had painted of roughly
the same view.
This much-photographed
scene was named ‘The Million Dollar View’ about a hundred years ago by the
marketing department of the Canadian Pacific Railway, as it was the view from
the (then CPR-owned) Banff Springs Hotel.
Sometimes pictures of the Million Dollar View included the hotel itself,
as in the painting below ─ one of the (slightly) more abstract ones I referred
to above.
Some time soon I am going to try painting pairs of greeting cards, one representational and one more abstract, at the
same time. Using the same colours. Maybe.
Bow Valley
Watercolour
©1991
Charlene Brown
Here’s another view that didn’t quite fit into the multi-viewpoint painting of the Plain of Six Glaciers I mentioned last week. On the extreme
left of Climbing to Victoria Glacier, as well as the painting I wrote about last week, the ‘claws’ at the north end of Mt. Lefroy can
be seen.
I must admit, even after hiking up to the glaciers a few times and seeing Mt. Lefroy from various angles, I hadn’t noticed this formation until my attention was drawn to it by the $1,667,500. sale of a Lawren Harris sketch that I wrote about in 2014.
My semi-successful project to paint Christmas cards last year ─ only six turned out, and another was Photoshopped into an acceptable jpeg suitable for getting prints made ̶ used up my supply of blank watercolour cards.
I decided to buy another six-pack and try painting Other Occasion, Congratulations, Get Well or whatever-came-along cards. Turns out they don’t sell six-packs or even ten-packs anymore. I had to buy a set of 50!
The painting I used on my April 7 blogpost was the first painted card from this enormous supply, and is actually quite a bit smaller than it appears on the screen.
The greeting
card painting above, Abbott’s Pass, shows one of the many individual Google
Street Views I painted prior to combining several (not including this one) into
a multi-viewpoint picture of the Plain of Six Glaciers. I’ll write about another one that didn’t ‘make
the cut’ next week.
BNEF Pioneers is a program that identifies "game-changing innovations with the potential to accelerate global decarbonization and halt climate change.”
In 2024 the program focused on the following three areas, and other projects were allowed to apply in a Wild Card category:
· Helping the deployment of clean energyOf the 240 companies from around the world that applied to be considered, 11 were selected to receive awards this year.
I thought I was keeping up pretty well with climate change mitigation research ̶ reading online, and in newspapers and magazines ̶ and have written a book, Inventing the Future (shown above), as well as several blog posts on related topics.
However, when I tried guessing what specific research would be included before reading the Daily Difference article, I barely came close on only four of them (identified with asterisks in the outline below).
Although I agree with the aims of the first, second, and fourth of these project categories, I remain somewhat dubious about the objectives of the third.
1. Deployment of clean energy:
2. Decarbonizing the construction industry:
3. Creating alternative fuels:
4. Wild Cards – outside these categories:
Climate change and decarbonization research is a much wider field than I imagined. And it’s growing exponentially!
A Canada/UKstudy published in Nature Food, a peer-reviewed online journal covering research, reviews and comment on all aspects of food production, processing, distribution and consumption, outlined the environmental and nutritional benefits of reducing consumption of red meats (significant) and dairy products (not so much).
They found that replacing half of the red meat in the average Canadian diet with
plant proteins would shrink an individual’s food-related carbon footprint by a
striking 25%. But replacing half the dairy products with plant alternatives only
erased 5% of dietary emissions.
The relatively small size of the environmental gains for dairy substitutes were put into perspective when they were weighed against some of the nutritional losses which would result from such a shift.
The most striking figure was that a 50% dairy
replacement would lead to a 14% increase in the number of people experiencing a
calcium deficit in Canada—an ingredient that is critical for the growth of
healthy muscles and bones.
The study
produced much more detail, and many more measurements, ratios, and percentages,
but I am only mentioning the most easily interpreted results ̶ coincidentally, the results which lead to
dietary recommendations I agree with. To a certain extent, I'm already following these recommendations in an effort to reduce my own carbon footprint. It’s not difficult to eat red
meat less frequently, but I’d hate to try to live without cheese.
I’ve used the
painting of Mt. Meager to illustrate this post because it seems to be my only
painting that includes livestock. They started out as horses (by no
mean a significant part of the Canadian diet) but for now they are going to be
cattle.
Plain of Six Glaciers above Lake Louise
Watercolour, crayon and computer
©2024 Charlene Brown
In the late 1950s when I was in high school, it was our custom to hike
to the Plain of Six Glaciers after work on the August long weekend – a distance
of about 5 km with an elevation gain of about 500 m. After camping overnight on
the Plain of Six Glaciers, we would continue up a much steeper, more rugged
trail along the crest of a moraine to a ‘corn snow’ slope at the north end of
Victoria Glacier. Carrying our ski equipment!
Most of us had only enough stamina for one or two careful runs down the slope, stopping well short of the precipitous drop-off for which Mt. Victoria is famous. The (barely) skiable part of the glacier is on the right edge of the painting above.
To my amazement, I recently discovered that the trail can be found on Google Street View – I can’t believe somebody got a Google camera up there!
Have a look at this link or this one Swivel the camera at each location and you’ll see a few of the many shots I used to produce the telescoped and manipulated composition above.
Middle Spring on Sulphur Mountain
watercolour and ink
©1992 Charlene Brown
A month ago I used a recent painting of the Middle Spring to illustrate a blog post about a hypothetical self-sustaining CO2 removal loop.
The painting on the left, of the same location, was done back in the day when I used to limit myself to one viewpoint. I prefer the 2024 version -- and paintings with more content, in general.
These additional viewpoints can be achieved by rotating your field of vision or moving to a slightly different vantage point. Or both.
In my latest book, Paint Every Mountain, I devote a whole chapter to ‘Moving Around, Combining and Superimposing for a Better Composition’ and next week I'll write about the ultimate multi-viewpoint presentation.
It used to be that harbour-to-harbour flights from Victoria to Vancouver were routed directly over the terminal at YVR and across Point Grey about three kilometres east of the University of British Columbia.
But floatplanes are now required to fly over water as much as possible. This safer route serendipitously results in a much more interesting view of UBC, whereby much of the campus, the downtown core of Vancouver, and Mount Baker can all be lined up in one reference photo.
Well, three photos,
actually, shot in rapid succession, because one of the airplane’s propellors, which was
right beside me, cut out a slice of each shot.
Back in 2020 when we couldn’t go anywhere or do anything, I wasn’t getting out to paint much. So, I wrote a series of blog posts expanding on the Christmas letters I had written and illustrated since 1990.
In 2000 our activities had included a two-month
Grand Tour of Europe ̶ resulting in a longish Christmas letter that year.
Here is a thumbnail illustration of that letter
A couple of months ago, I decided to write a
two-part version of that Grand Tour on Medium, an online publication that
actually pays writers and illustrators for stories.
The second part was a little short of paintings, so I added Chateau Hautefort to
the mix.
Here's my description of our day there:
In the second week of June, we were in the Périgord region of France, where we toured the Chateau Hautefort. The estate was a real treat — acres of Cedars of Lebanon and geometric and filigree-sculptured boxwood. We probably should have stayed outside in that wonderful garden. But it was threatening rain most of the time we were there, so in we went. The inside was mainly spiral staircases and furniture they didn’t encourage you to sit on. But you do get a nice look at the geometry of the gardens from the tops of the turrets.
Another proposed combination of technologies may result in a synergistic cost saving by creating a self-sustaining loop. CO2 removed from the atmosphere by Direct Air Capture (DAC) is stored in deep, hot aquifers. Heat brought to the surface could then be used to power the DAC process. Thus the excess CO2 itself could reduce the high cost of removing it from the atmosphere.
Like the nearby geothermal source I wrote about eight years ago, however, this particular hot spring would not be a
suitable location for such a self-sustaining loop.
I’ve been to this medieval walled city, where 'skyscrapers' were invented, twice. The first time was in 1988 when I was visiting my sister during a print-making workshop she was attending in Florence. She was learning to make monotypes such as San Gimignano, above, which I love, so I have made this one exception to my watercolour-and-crayon procedure for illustrations in my Time Travel book.
I’d never heard of San Gimignano, but she promised me that the 800-year-old ‘skyscrapers’ – apparently built by rival families trying to out-do each other over a period of years beginning in 1199 – were definitely worth seeing, and it was easy to get there on a local bus. She was right on both counts and we had a great day, with the place practically to ourselves.
Here I am recovering from the effort
Torres del Paine National Park is a hiker’s paradise – its most famous hike being the demanding W Trek up and down the park’s valleys to see its most famous sights.
If I ever do get to this magical place, I am unlikely to try the entire 50 kilometre length of this route – which takes the shape of a “W.” Hence the name.
I missed my chance to fly into Torres del Paine when I was on a cruise to South America and Antarctica in 2002 – mainly because this particular 6-hour shore excursion cost almost $1000! With no guarantee of a landing when you got there!
Instead I computer-painted an outline of several mountains in the range combined with a star chart from the Southern Sky astronomy lesson we’d had on-board our darkened ship earlier in the cruise.
Bankhead, a ghost town near Lake Minnewanka in Banff National Park, was a coal mining town that flourished at the turn of the twentieth century.
Little remains but some building foundations, the steps up to the Catholic church and part of the mine train shown in this painting.
Bankhead, as
it was in 1910
computer painting
©2005 Charlene Brown
Great Hypostyle Hall, Karnak Temple, Egypt
watercolour and crayon
©2024 Charlene Brown
The Karnak Temple is located in the ancient city of Thebes (now called Luxor) in Egypt. It is thought to be the largest temple complex ever constructed anywhere in the world.
The Hypostyle Hall was built by Pharaoh
Seti I and his son Rameses II. The columns represent the primeval papyrus
swamp in which Atum, a self-created deity, arose from the waters of Nun at the
beginning of creation.
The Karnak Temple was one of the many
Eqyptian archaeological sites we visited as part of the University of Victoria
travel study program in 2008. I wrote
about several of these fantastic places when I started this blog the following
year, but for some reason the only mention of Karnak was in this blog post and it was pretty brief.
This sound, on the west coast of the South Island of New Zealand, is one of roughly 90 places to have been given a dual name as part a 1998 Treaty of Waitangi settlement recognizing the significance of the fiord to both Māori and non-indigenous (primarily European-descended) New Zealanders. This name consists of both the Māori and European names used together as a single name, instead of as interchangeable alternate names.
North of Glenorchy, Otago
Watercolour, crayon and CP
©2011 Charlene Brown
This extinct volcano, which rises to 727 metres, is the highest peak on Bora Bora, a small island northwest of Tahiti in French Polynesia.
I’d like to see some other mountainous islands in French Polynesia and I’ve found that most South Pacific cruises feature some combination of these and (conveniently) sail out of another Bucket List destination I'll talk about next week – New Zealand
It’s a long way from French Polynesia and in fact belongs to Chile. So now I’m trying to figure out how to combine it with places in Chile which are also on my Bucket List
Although the crocus, and dozens of other bulbs are up and shrubs and trees are starting to blossom here in Victoria, this painting is not showing the current conditions at the Banff Springs Golf Course.
I painted it several weeks ago in the dead of winter simply because I needed some Springtime in the Rockies that day. In fact, crocus don’t usually get through the snow until late April, sometimes May, in Banff
The National Centers for Environmental Information in the American National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration provides environmental data, products, and services covering the depths of the ocean to the surface of the sun.
NOAA Chief Scientist Dr. Sarah Kapnick said that the findings of their 2023 climate analysis were astounding. “Not only was 2023 the warmest year in NOAA’s 174-year climate record — it was the warmest by far.”
The impacts of climate change are happening here and now, like extreme weather events that are becoming more frequent and more severe. There were many extreme weather events in 2023, along with record-low sea ice coverage and catastrophic wildfires. In Canada, 45.7 million acres burned, 2.6 times the previous record.
One of the confounding factors making forecasting the future more difficult, which I wrote about three years ago is the phenomenon of tipping points. These are actions of a complex system which has become unstable.
Are we reaching a tipping point in global heating?
Read Decimation doesn’t begin to describe what happened in Lytton.
Or have we already tipped?
1. Hotter, longer heatwaves: The intense heatwaves that hit southern Europe and the southern US and Mexico in July 2023 would have been "virtually impossible" without human-caused climate change. And these events are no longer rare. If global warming reaches 2C above the pre-industrial period these events are expected to happen every two to five years.
As well as happening more frequently, heatwaves are becoming longer and more intense in many places.
This can happen as a result of heat domes, which are areas of high pressure where hot air is pushed down and trapped in place, causing temperatures to soar over large areas. One theory suggests higher temperatures in the Arctic (which has warmed more than four times faster than the global average) are causing the jet stream to slow, increasing the likelihood of heat domes.
Climate change has made droughts at least 100 times more likely.
3. More fuel for wildfires: Climate change is making the weather conditions needed for wildfires to spread more likely. Extreme and long-lasting heat draws more and more moisture out of the ground and vegetation. These tinder-dry conditions provide fuel for fires, which can spread at an incredible speed, particularly if winds are strong.
Rising temperatures may also increase the likelihood of lightning in the world's northernmost forests, increasing the risk of fires. Canada experienced by far its worst wildfire season on record in 2023, with around 18 million hectares (45 million acres) burned.
Climate change more than doubled the likelihood of the extreme "fire weather" conditions in eastern Canada that allowed the fires to spread, Extreme wildfires are projected to become more frequent and intense in future across the globe. This is due to the combined effects of shifting land use and climate change.
4. More extreme rain: For every 1C rise in average temperature, the atmosphere can hold about 7% more moisture. The heavy rainfall was made as much as 50 times more likely by climate change, Globally, the frequency and intensity of heavy rainfall events has increased over most land regions due to human activity. And heavy precipitation will generally become more frequent and intense with further warming,
*Outline of an article by Mark Poynting and Esme Stallard, BBC News Climate & Science
The circular economy represents a shift from a 'take-make-waste' linear economy to an economic system based on the reuse and regeneration of materials or products, especially as a means of continuing production in a sustainable or environmentally friendly way, minimizing waste.
Doughnut economics extends this transformation to encompass a double shift – from a linear economy to a regenerative and distributed economy that looks at sustainable development across a number of different vectors.
First published in 2012
in an Oxfam report by Kate Raworth, The Doughnut is a guide for human
prosperity in the 21st century, with the aim of meeting the needs of all people
within the means of the living planet.
The Doughnut consists of two concentric rings: a social foundation, to ensure that no one is left falling short on life’s essentials, and an ecological ceiling, to ensure that humanity does not collectively overshoot the planetary boundaries that protect Earth's life-supporting systems. Between these two sets of boundaries lies a doughnut-shaped space that is both ecologically safe and socially just: a space in which humanity can thrive.
