winter pics-winter thoughts

Thesis Prep Document

Thesis Prep Document available, click here

National Roads + Trails

Through it was only a footpath, MacKaye characterized the proposal [The Appalachian Trail] as a "transportation project," because by its placement, the trail inverted the conventional hierarchy of transportation and development infrastructure.

An infrastructure of land or "super national" forest & a network of compact communities & industries would crystallize around the footpath to replace the suburbs. “The interstate geological formation of the Appalachian ridge would function as a kind of public utility or reservoir of natural resources, organizing transportation and hydroelectric networks while locating industry and community”

- Keller Easterling, Organization Space: Landscape, Highways, and Houses in America

gobble gobble-scott state park - KS

Landscape - Wind

Landscape - Dust Bowl

The Ogallala Aquifer underlies the heart of the Dust Bowl landscape. Catastrophic dust storms have subsided since the advent of irrigation technology and modern farming practices, yet dust bowl level droughts frequent the region still today. Without access to the irrigation from the aquifer cultivated top soil has little reason to stay put. In Oasis State Park, near Clovis New Mexico, blown top soil has settled due to sporadic trees and a lack of cultivation to create a entirely unique and foreign dune ecology.

Landscape - Sandplains

The Sand Hills of Nebraska is a region where the largest expanse of wind-blown sand deposits and dune topography in the Western Hemisphere (about 20,000 sq miles, USGS). The region supports mixed-grass prairie to take root in the shifting sand and stabilizing the dunes. Within these and hills, both ephemeral and permanent lakes and meadows occur between dunes where ground water is at or near the land surface. The World Wide Fund for Nature designated the Sand Hills as an ecoregion and according to their assessment as much as 85% of the land is intact natural habitat primarily due to the lack of cultivated agriculture and range cattle are managed in order to preserve the stability of the dunes. Throughout the High Plains dune sand soils are important recharge areas for the aquifer and the dune sand of the expansive Sand Hills specifically provides about 80% of the recharge for the aquifer. Consequently Nebraska has about 65% of the aquifer’s water (USGS publication).