These are photos from around the bike trail in the Upper Newport Bay Nature Preserve. They were taken around 7 AM on Wednesday, March 5 2008 by Jason Modisette. Click on the pictures for full resolution (and then click again, at least if you're using Firefox).
This is the park entrance, off of Irvine Ave.
Some Authority has been reshaping the bay with this dredge for the last six months. The bay maybe looks better now, hard to say. My favorite part was when they drove a tractor out onto an island that had been newly built of dredged mud, and it sank.
The dredge is barely visible off in the distance.
Here's a closer shot from the other side of the dredge. Those red flowers in the foreground aren't flowers, they're flags. I don't know why.
This is an Irvine office park at the northern end of the bay. The road is Jamboree. Pretty!
Ducks; cliff dwellers in the background. Both are relatively tsunami-proof.
This marina is near the mouth of the bay. Just out of frame to the left is a Very Nice trailer park. We are not trailer trash, we are trache du trailleur. That scrub in the foreground is not scrub, thank you very much, it is carefully imported and tended fire-retardant native California vegetation.
This is the view that almost killed me. One morning a few weeks earlier the air was clear due to a recent rain, so the mountains in the background (which are just barely visible here if you think hard) were being all majestic at me, and instead of concentrating on a difficult high-speed 90-degree turn that was just past this point on the trail I watched the mountains. I didn't make the turn; I ran off the trail at high speed into the scrub, err, fire-retardant native Californa vegetation. I am afraid I plowed right through a couple of bushes, but they were surprisingly springy and I managed to stay up.
