TheSouthSide
Kite Aerial Photography. The south side of Spencer Butte.
A wonderful sky island of botanical diversity at the south end of the Willamette Valley. At just over 2000 feet it sits in colder air than the surrounding valley. The north and east side are cold and wet, but the south side gets a lot of sunshine and evaporative stress. Some serpentine endemics make their only non-serpentine home here.
This perspective looks down strike along the parallel basaltic intrusions that make up Spencer Butte. The intrusions are actually sills -- which makes the dip here unusually steep for the Eugene Formation. This, and many of the other topographic highs in the valley (and coast range) are actually shallow intrusions or volcanic flows sitting amongst softer and more abundant Eocene, Oligocene, and Miocene marine sediments. Smaller intrusions also make great water falls. Larger intrusions are commonly prospected as sources of building stones and many are currently in use by private companies and the forest service.
I'm pretty happy with this shot (and coming panoramas) as it's fairly hard to get a feel for these parallel intrusions on the ground. The outcrops are rubbly and structure is a larger scale than budding geologists generally can take in from the ground. However, it would have been nice to have exposure bracketing for the fog.
View to the north. My wife and I are further down the ridge to the east and out of the shot. The wind was east north east and wonderfully stable. A couple of friends are in the picture for scale.
The butte is part of the Eugene ridge trail system. There are 4 different routes to reach the summit. The shortest goes up the west side and gains 1000 feet in 1/2 mile.
A somewhat fanciful story concerning the naming of the butte revolves around a Hudson Bay Company trapper in the early 1800's. The story has become quite elaborate and varied -- but inevitably involves indians and a dead trapper filled with arrows. The alternative and slightly more boring story is that the butte was named by a military survey party in 1845 after the then secretary of war, John C. Spencer. The army played a fairly important role in blazing trails and roads in the Oregon Territory prior to statehood. Most of the Oregon natives died of disease before the trappers even made it to the area and confrontations were quite rare.
TheSouthSide
Kite Aerial Photography. The south side of Spencer Butte.
A wonderful sky island of botanical diversity at the south end of the Willamette Valley. At just over 2000 feet it sits in colder air than the surrounding valley. The north and east side are cold and wet, but the south side gets a lot of sunshine and evaporative stress. Some serpentine endemics make their only non-serpentine home here.
This perspective looks down strike along the parallel basaltic intrusions that make up Spencer Butte. The intrusions are actually sills -- which makes the dip here unusually steep for the Eugene Formation. This, and many of the other topographic highs in the valley (and coast range) are actually shallow intrusions or volcanic flows sitting amongst softer and more abundant Eocene, Oligocene, and Miocene marine sediments. Smaller intrusions also make great water falls. Larger intrusions are commonly prospected as sources of building stones and many are currently in use by private companies and the forest service.
I'm pretty happy with this shot (and coming panoramas) as it's fairly hard to get a feel for these parallel intrusions on the ground. The outcrops are rubbly and structure is a larger scale than budding geologists generally can take in from the ground. However, it would have been nice to have exposure bracketing for the fog.
View to the north. My wife and I are further down the ridge to the east and out of the shot. The wind was east north east and wonderfully stable. A couple of friends are in the picture for scale.
The butte is part of the Eugene ridge trail system. There are 4 different routes to reach the summit. The shortest goes up the west side and gains 1000 feet in 1/2 mile.
A somewhat fanciful story concerning the naming of the butte revolves around a Hudson Bay Company trapper in the early 1800's. The story has become quite elaborate and varied -- but inevitably involves indians and a dead trapper filled with arrows. The alternative and slightly more boring story is that the butte was named by a military survey party in 1845 after the then secretary of war, John C. Spencer. The army played a fairly important role in blazing trails and roads in the Oregon Territory prior to statehood. Most of the Oregon natives died of disease before the trappers even made it to the area and confrontations were quite rare.