I’m not quite sure why, but these mushrooms look quite delectable to me!  Their shiny and smooth texture reminds me of a gummi candy of some sort, and the color is sort of like this gummi peach rings.  I’m sure someone out there makes gummis in the shape of mushrooms, and they very well may look like these!  This fungi caught my eye during our trip to the Adirondacks in October while enjoying a short hike through the wet woods.  For all I know, these particular mushrooms could be edible and quite delicious…of course, if you happen to see these, I wouldn’t recommend trying them without researching a bit more, because they could just as equally be toxic!

All it takes is a bit of trickling water, some nicely placed boulders covered with yellow-green moss, and some haphazardly fallen leaves to create a scenic fall photo.  This was one of many small cascades in the area of Rutherford Falls in High Point State Park that I came upon on a hike this past fall, and although it certainly wasn’t as tall as the main falls, I enjoyed this little one just as much.

After a wet and dreary day here in New Jersey, I thought I would post a sunny sunrise photo from our trip a few years ago to the Great Smoky Mountains of Tennessee (and North Carolina…they shouldn’t be excluded!).  This was unfortunately the only sunrise we saw on our trip…as the following days were largely overcast and/or rainy, but we still had a great time in the Smokies.

The Earth sure is one fast rotator!  At the equator, the Earth rotates at a speed greater than 1000 miles per hour…although this speed decreases to practically 0 miles per hour at the poles.  It is this fast rotation that allowed me to open the camera shutter for 12 minutes on a clear, summer night and capture the streaks of starry light in the photo above.  This long exposure also allowed me to capture a section of the Milky Way galaxy as a couple bands of cloud-like fogginess behind the star trails.

Glacier National Park is chock full of beauty…all you have to do is open your eyes to experience nature at its finest.  In the photo above, the bluish-green water of McDonald Creek steals the spotlight as it churns through the rocks with a backdrop of conifers.  The color of the water is due to accumulations of very fine clay-sized particles that are produced by glaciers upstream (also called glacial flour).

Okay, so this certainly wasn’t any sort of official photoshoot…we had actually just stopped on a dirt pulloff to take some photos of the snowy mountains around us…but still, don’t you feel like going out and buying this car after seeing it in this scenic Yukon photo?  This Chevy Equinox was our trusty rental vehicle during my last trip to the Yukon that made it possible for us to dig snowpits and do science, and it made for some nice driving around the Yukon.

Oh, and the reason it looks so shiny and spotless is because we had just picked this one up in the city of Whitehorse before heading into the mountains…so we probably started dirtying up the car only a bit further down the road from here (for comparison, check out this scenic shot taken a week later that includes a nice accumulation of mud and dust {photo #514}).

Hannah and Madison are two of the awesomest nieces ever, and they love to have fun.  Put them together, and this attached-at-the-hip dynamic duo becomes a laughing and playing force of complete silliness.  This was certainly the case on a family trip to the New Jersey shore for a day that included getting pummeled by waves together, looking for shells together, and being buried in sand by Michael and myself (that was our turn to have some fun!).  After a long day, these two were still giddy during a walk on the boardwalk when I snapped the embracing photo above.

Aren’t they great?!