Horizons #1 or #2

"Horizon #1" Martin County, Texas

"Horizon #2" Ector County, Texas

This morning I'm trying to wrap my mind around the vastness of this area. These two horizons tell part of the story that I'm trying to understand. It's a story about the immense space of West Texas.

Every other Saturday my friend Donna and I have been getting together to go on photo safaris. One weekend, she comes down here and we tromp around my area, currently going over to Martin County. And the other weekend, I drive up there and we tromp around her area, currently going over to Bailey County. Although the counties are separated by 200 miles, both are part of West Texas, an area that encompasses roughly 200 by 500 miles -- a whopping 100,000 square miles.

Although originally we were just out scouting around for photo opportunities, we ended up gravitating toward and now repeatedly returning to these two counties. I think part of the appeal is the sparse population of especially these two. In all of Martin County's 916 square miles, there are less than 5,000 people. And Bailey is similar, with 827 square miles and less than 7,000 people. Compare that with Ector County, where I live, with a similar size of 901 square miles, and a population of about 121,000 (100,000 of that being the population in the city of Odessa.)

These days, in the United States and elsewhere, a city of a hundred thousand people is hardly remarkable, yet that's more than twenty times the whole population of the vast areas we've been photographing. In addition, consider also that Dallas County in North Central Texas is 908 square miles and has a population of over 2 million.

This morning I'm pondering just how big is 900 square miles. Case in point, Donna and I wake early, get on the road before dawn, and yet by the time we return home at dusk, we have rarely put more than 100 miles on the odometer. To date, we've seen no more than a small corner of either of our pet counties. (Mind you, in spite of the day's low mileage, we each return home with several hundred pictures on our camera cards.)

I've been wondering lately if we might ever see "all" of these counties. If we were to plot, say, a 900 square mile county into nine 10 X 10 mile blocks, just traversing that grid would take us 8 hours to drive the 240 miles of road. That calculation, of course, is allowing time for picture-taking -- one stop per hour to shoot for a half hour, a rigidly strict time allotment for us. And yet, even if we were ever so methodical, I wouldn't consider that exercise qualifying as seeing all of the county, because what we would see flying outside our windshield would be only the edges of any given one hundred square miles of landscape.

My goodness.

Today's Have Camera Will Shoot suggestion of "More Horizons" was by Bev at Heavenly Body. And rightly so. A theme of her blog is frequently her own unique horizons as seen in her corner of the planet, the old city of Hull in England, populated at least since the 12th century. And if you can stand just a tad more Math (or "Maths" as Bev would say), Hull is 27.6 square miles with a population just under 250,000. Hull is part of the larger "local government district" (akin to our "counties" I would guess) of East Riding of Yorkshire, 958 square miles with a population of almost 590,000.

Photo info --
Picture # 1 This picture was taken with Donna's camera. My batteries ran out and she let me borrow hers. The cool thing is now with her new camera we use the same camera cards and I was able to slip my card in her camera to take a picture.

Picture # 2 This is the first picture taken of the day, at very early sunrise, with frost on the ground. We had made it a mere 10 miles from home before our first photo stop.