Wednesday, 12 January 2011

Photos from my Schnaels Valley trip last September and again in October

Back in early September I took a week off of a busy schedule attending academic geology conferences and short courses to attend the Second Annual European Textile Forum—a conference designed for both academics and living history enthusiasts who are interested in historic textiles. As a long-time participant in historical recreation events who loves hand-sewing and is fascinated with ways in which fabric and other textiles are created I really enjoyed the chance to meet and mingle with others who also love the subject. As with the textile forum of the year before, I reveled in living in a historic setting—this time we were at the Archeoparc in the Neolithic, surrounded with tools found with Otzi, the Ice Man.

However, for me the wonderful people met and the sharing of information on any number of textile arts was only part of the joy in the week; the rest of the joy was the setting itself. The Senales valley is a place of beauty, and it was fun to get out and look at bit at the rocks. I so enjoyed my week there that I returned again in October when my mother was visiting and did some more exploring. Here are some of the highlights of the geology I saw in my explorations of this valley in the Italian Alps.

One of the cute little farms in the lower part of the valley:


And the near-by outcrop:



The view above the Archeoparc historical buildings:

The church just downhill from the park (and some nice outcrop to the left):








Much of the rock of the part of the valley where we were staying is a lovely fine-grained schist:







In places the locals use the rock to form part of their storage sheds:

In other parts of the hiking trail up the valley it is just a pretty part of the landscape:


Not far uphill from the Archeoparc there is a damn which holds back a cute mountain lake, though I'm told that there are people who are still annoyed about losing their family farms when it was put in.

The schist gets coarser as one works one's way further uphill towards the ski resort:






In places there are some lovely quartz boudins:



I saw some pretty clear contacts:













In October there was already some decent snow on the peaks; I wonder how it looks now?

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