Juan Melli

37 posts

What the Glacier Left

On August 13, 1961, Casey Kays hiked to Sunfish Pond for a family picnic and fell in love with a mountaintop lake he did not yet know had been sold to power companies. That first visit would pull a Warren County working man into New Jersey’s defining conservation fight.
The rocky northern shoreline of Sunfish Pond, with fall color reflected in the clear mountain water.

Dam Nation

The urge to tame and control what is natural and wild has been a through-line in the history of American conservation battles.
Sunfish Pond

Section 04: Long Cove to Mt. Ivy

A summerlike morning on Long Path Section 4, from Long Cove to Mount Ivy, brought quarried Palisades cliffs, dozens of vultures near the Tilcon Haverstraw Quarry, a climb to High Tor, views over the Hudson Valley, and the final visible curve of the Palisades ridge before it disappears below the surface.
View from High Tor of Haverstraw

Section 03: Nyack to Long Cove

Section 3 is all about Hook Mountain, the hands-down highlight of the stretch. After a quick start through suburban edges, the trail climbs to a ridgeline with sweeping Hudson River views and dramatic cliffside stretches before dropping back down to Route 9W.
Hook Mountain cliffs

Five Days in Death Valley

Covering about 3.4 million acres, Death Valley is the largest national park in the continental United States. We spent five days there and saw a lot — a temporary return of an ancient lake, sculpted badlands, sand dunes, and volcanic hills streaked with color, along with a ghost town, abandoned mines, and the Racetrack Playa, where rocks move across the surface on their own.
Dantes View sunrise