I just spent several days at the North American Cartographic Information Society 2011 meeting in Madison, WI, so I’m sorta geeking out on cartography and geography right now. It was an awesome conference, and reminded me why I love cartography and geography.

On the flight out I actually worked on a talk I gave on Monday, but on the way home I was able to spend some time looking out the window of the plane (which is one of my favorite activities). I love checking out landforms, and got some kinda cool pictures, including these of the Cascades and Central Washington.

The picture to the right is a coulee that was formed in the Missoula Floods at the end of the last ice age. It’s amazing to see these formations from the air, where the scale of the processes that created them are evident.

Below is a picture of the White Bluffs on the Columbia River. This area is the northern boundary of the lands that the Umatilla Tribes ceded to the US Federal Government in the treaty of 1855. The area south of the bluffs is the Hanford Nuclear Reservation, which houses several mothballed nuclear facilities employed for the creation of atomic weapons (one of which is evident in the lower left-hand corner of the photo).

There are more of these photos, as well as others I’ve taken over the past through years in the photo gallery of this site.