Tulip Watch 2022

Going back to before I moved from Ann Arbor for a quick look at how the tulips fared this year. As I’ve mentioned before, someone who had the apartment before me planted tulips at some point. Without me doing anything at all, they keep coming back each year, and may possibly be spreading, or it could just have been a good year for them this year. Sometimes they get eaten by deer before having a chance to bloom, or last year they were unceremoniously mowed down shortly after blooming (I rescued the less mangled flowers, stuck them in a jam jar, and brought them into the apartment), but this year I had just under two dozen tulips bloom.

I took my telephoto lens out for a spin on a few separate evenings to take advantage of the shallow depth of field on the lens and the softer light of the declining sun. Without getting into an optics discussion, given a particular focal distance, a lens with a longer focal length has a shallower depth of field. For example, if you’re taking a photo of a flower two meters away with a Canon Rebel T6, at an aperture of f/5.6, an 18 mm wide angle lens has a depth of field (DOF) of 4.63 meters (0.79 m in front/3.84 m behind), a 55 mm focal length has a DOF of 0.28 m, and a 250 mm focal length has a DOF of just 0.01 m. Of course, the wider the focal length the more you have in the picture besides the flower, but generally speaking, using a longer focal length decreases the depth of field and increases the separation between your subject and its background. That said, here are the tulips.

Most of this year's tulip crop

Cuyahoga Valley National Park

On our long drive back east, we passed right by Cuyahoga Valley National Park in Ohio, so we had to make a quick stop for a hike. The Cuyahoga Valley is located between Cleveland and Akron and the Cuyahoga River is famous for, among other things, catching on fire. This happened at least 13 times, and the June 22, 1969 fire helped to bolster the beginnings of the American environmental movement. In 1974, the Cuyahoga Valley was designated a National Recreation Area, then on October 11, 2000, was made a national park.

Boston Mill Visitor Center

We didn’t have much time at Cuyahoga, and the one hike that you do if you only have time for one hike at Cuyahoga is the Ledges Trail, which is what we did. If the parking lot at Brandywine Falls wasn’t closed, we might have also tried to sneak in a glance at a waterfall, but that wasn’t in the cards for this visit. The Ledges Trail is a 1.8 mile loop that circles a plateau of rock formations. The trail network around the Ledges Trail also includes several cut-through trails and side trails that connect to other areas of the park. The trail is primarily dirt and rock, with rock steps in several places. Along the way, you walk at the bottom of and between rock cliffs that are fun to explore but difficult to fully capture in photos.

Ledges Trail

The trail passes by a cave, but to protect the bats there from white-nose syndrome, caused by the white fungus Pseudogymnoascus destructans that can decimate bat populations, the entrance was barred. There’s also an overlook, the Ledges Overlook, that didn’t seem to be overlooking anything of much significance. Especially in late spring and summer with the trees filled with leaves, you mostly just see a lot of trees with leaves. The rest of the trail makes up for It, however. And as we were nearing the end of the trail, we spotted a barred owl, out in the evening, our first time seeing an owl in the wild.

Barred owl

Cuyahoga Valley National Park is slightly unusual in that it can almost be described as an urban national park, with 4 million people living within a half hour drive of the park. Parts of the park either abut and/or are managed by Cleveland Metroparks, Summit Metro Parks, or private owners. Besides the ledges, it contains waterfalls, wetlands, ravines, forests, and more. The Cuyahoga Valley Scenic Railroad goes through the park and offers scenic railroad rides throughout the year. There is no fee to enter the park, though we still made a quick stop at the Boston Visitor Center to talk to the park ranger, and pick up a map and stamp. There’s plenty we didn’t get to see in the park, so we might be back if we’re ever in the area, though I also still have about 400 (of 423) National Park Sites and hundreds and thousands of state and local parks to visit.

Notre Dame

Because of transportation scheduling, instead of dropping my brother and his girlfriend back off in Kalamazoo, we made a further detour to South Bend, Indiana for them to catch a train there. On our way south from Glen Arbor, we first made a stop at the Point Betsie Lighthouse. It was closed, but we weren’t trying to take a tour anyway, so we got a few photos and moved on. We reached South Bend in the late afternoon, with some time to look around Notre Dame.

 

Point Betsie Lighthouse

Notre Dame was founded in 1842 and covers 1,261 acres in Notre Dame, IN outside of South Bend. As of fall 2020, they had a total enrollment of 12,700 students, split 8,700 and 4,000 between undergraduates and graduate students. The school was not officially coed until 1972, though women had received (mostly religious) degrees from Notre Dame since 1917. Their sports teams compete in the Atlantic Coast Conference (ACC) except for football (unaffiliated) and men’s ice hockey (Big Ten).

The major landmarks on the Notre Dame campus are probably the football stadium, the Basilica, and Touchdown Jesus (actually called the Word of Life). We did not go into the football stadium, the Basilica was closed on the afternoon we were there, and we did get to see Touchdown Jesus. After walking around for a while (and passing by the ChemE building), we went into the Duncan Student Center, next to the stadium. This was a really nice building with dining options, study spaces, a climbing wall, and a track and gym. I’m still kind of mad at Michigan for closing their climbing wall right before I started there and planning to build a new one after I left. We had an early dinner, then had to drop my brother and his girlfriend off at the train.

 

Basilica

Because we wanted to see the inside of the Basilica, we returned to Notre Dame the next morning before leaving Indiana to head back to Ann Arbor. It was an impressive building, filled with statuary, murals, stained glass windows, and an organ. Since we were on campus, we also stopped by the Snite Museum of Art. The museum was pretty typical of a university art museum – not huge, but they had a decent variety of paintings, sculptures, painted plates, gilded cups, etc. ranging from 16th century European oil paintings of earls and counts to modern art.

 

Touchdown Jesus

Notre Dame has a pleasant campus, though it seemed rather abandoned, even for summer (graduation was the week before, so the undergrads might not have returned for summer activities yet and the grad students were probably locked in the basement). Everything was also fairly well contained, with grassy quads, tree-lined paths, and few road crossings to get run over at. There was what looked like a nice commercial block with restaurants, shopping, and lodging just south of campus, though we didn’t walk there. Otherwise, the surrounding area seemed to lack the natural areas and hiking trails of Ithaca and the larger variety of restaurants, stores, theaters, etc. of a bigger city like Ann Arbor. I’m not sure I would have wanted to go to college there, but campus was nice for a visit.

The ChemE building