Landscape

Steaming vents
Spouting geysers
Boiling hot springs

Resulting from the ever-shifting dynamics of active geothermal properties, numerous volcanic particularities are visible all along the designated trail, like miniature geysers, bowl-shaped bubbling pools, and colorful hot spring run-off channels. Porcelain Basin offers much to contemplate!

“The albino basin gets its porcelain color from siliceous sinter, a mineral that has been deposited by centuries of thermal activity.” – Seth Smigelski

Through which
Hot sulfurous
Gases emerge

Illuminated by the sun on a cold winter morning, steam emits from the planet’s crust. The mind’s awareness shares in the passage of nature.

“There is time because there are happenings, and apart from happenings there is nothing.” – Alfred North Whitehead

Barren area
Billowing sand dune
Processes of denudation

Inhospitable places provide a sense of something intimate in the unsympathetic. Feeling intimacy augments meaning attributed to existence.

“The immense desert, empty as a bird’s wing, inspired him with promise.” – Mike Bond

During peak
Afternoon heat
Surface intensified

Sand is composed of tiny rock fragments, including quartz, feldspar, gypsum, basalt, and calcite, with a scattering of shell shards sometimes included. As the summer day progresses, sand receives solar energy via the process of radiation. Temperatures as high as 150°F can be attained, sufficient to inflict third-degree burns.

“People have blistered up and had to go to the hospital because of the burns on their feet.” – Gary Felsh

Narrative imagination
Hermeneutic circle
World of action

In general, understanding of each individual part is established by reference to the whole, while understanding as a whole is established by reference to individual parts.

“What is decisive is not to get out of the circle but to come into it the right way.” – Martin Heidegger

Involving extent
Process changes
Static description

Dynamic forces progress at various rates. The underlying drivers of existence are the same in every instance.

“The world as we have created it is a process of our thinking. It cannot be changed without changing our thinking.” – Albert Einstein

Dune field
Ascending interval
Equilibrium height

An extensive, asymmetrical, fluctuating hill lacking vegetation, Jockey’s Ridge is the largest active sand dune in the eastern United States. The desert-like conditions can be quite severe.

“The winds blow from the northeast during the winter and from the southwest during the summer, so the sand is constantly blown back and forth, preventing it from blowing away entirely.” – Robin Hallac

Time passes
As it happens
Transfiguration

Sand drift variation emphasizes that somethings change rapidly. Associated unpredictably makes planning difficult even when accounting for instability. The way things are is not the way things will be.

“Time takes it all, whether you want it to or not.” – Stephen King

Secluded beach
Gentle currents
Saltwater lagoon

Many miles of open water stretch between the Outer Banks barrier islands and the mainland, causing the Italian explorer Giovanni da Verrazzano on his 1524 voyage to mistake the Sound for the Pacific Ocean.

“A soundside experience differs from the ocean in wave action, water depths and currents.” – Molly Harrison

All the swells
Uniquely identified
Summer brilliance

The essential nature of sand indicates the dynamic nature of change. Present moments are single stationary frames of a continuous shift from one state to another another. Transformation defines existence.

“Sand not only flows, but this very flow is the sand.” – Kobo Abe