Let there be lighthouses!: July 2011

Wednesday, July 27, 2011

Lighthouse Races

Awhile back I posted some road races that Mike and I might be interested in running one day because of their affiliation with lighthouses. Today will be the second installment of lighthouse races around the country, however, these are not just simple road races (not that road races are simple!).

I happened to notice, while browsing a blog about running, that recently the second annual Nubble Light Challenge took place. Nubble Lighthouse (otherwise known as Cape Neddick Lighthouse) is one of the lighthouses that Mike and I saw this past Christmas (post coming soon!). The Nubble Light Challenge is a 2.4 mile swim that features racing around the lighthouse.

Source

It appears that at approximately the half way mark of the race is where you swim through "the gut" which provides you the opportunity to stare up at the Nubble.

Mike and I were both competitive swimmers growing up and even did a little bit of Masters swimming for awhile. I could see us participating in this challenge sometime in the future, of course we would need to train first and buy wetsuits! Each swimmer needs to have a kayak escort (hint, hint mom and dad) and the website for the race featured a video that took you through the course from the perspective of someone kayaking.

While the water is freezing (hence the need for the wetsuits) I can only imagine how the swimmers in the next photo must have felt when they swam by the Nubble. I would have been breathing a lot just to get as many glimpses of it as I could!

Photo from the Nubble Light Challenge's Facebook page

We will keep this race in mind for the future. In order to qualify for the event you need to prove that you can swim a mile in thirty-five minutes or less, which is definitely do-able for us! It would be nice to get back in the pool again, plus it could lead to us doing one of the next races.

The next two races that I found are triathlons. Mike has mentioned, even though he may just be joking, that he would want to do an Ironman triathlon and these races would be a great way to gain experience and exposure to that type of race.

The first is the Montauk Point Lighthouse Triathlon in Montauk Point, New York. This is a sprint triathlon (.5 mile swim, 14 mile bike, 3.1 mile run) that ends at the top of Turtle Hill where the lighthouse resides. In three previous posts we talked about how we visited Montauk Point Lighthouse in September.

The second is the Ludington Lighthouse Triathlon in Ludington, Michigan. There are two distance options for this triathlon, the first is 1000m swim, 40K bike, 10K run and the second is 500m swim, 20K bike and 5K run. We haven't been to the Ludington North Pierhead Lighthouse yet but I'm sure we will someday!

There you have it, some more interesting races around the United States! I hope that one day we will be able to say that we have done some of these.

Monday, July 25, 2011

Buffalo Lighthouses

In the last post I mentioned that we saw three lighthouses one fall day last year. I already shared the first two with you and now I will share the third one. But wait, doesn't this post say Buffalo "lighthouses"? I will get to that later.

Our drive from Grand Island to Buffalo to find the Buffalo Main Lighthouse wasn't the easiest, we ended up going in the wrong direction at one point, but we managed to find it eventually. The lighthouse is located on Coast Guard property and when we went to visit the lighthouse we needed to be escorted to it. That will be changing soon though because there is currently work being done that will allow the lighthouse to be visited without a Coast Guard escort for the first time since September 11, 2001. This article contains more information.

The Buffalo Main Lighthouse was completed in 1833 and remained active until 1914. As is common with many deactivated lighthouses, it was scheduled to be demolished in the 1960's but a group of protesters saved this historic lighthouse.

One condition of being able to visit the lighthouse and take photos of it was that we were only able to take photos of it looking at the water. We weren't allowed to take any photos of it looking at the Coast Guard base. One of the beginning phases of making the lighthouse accessible to the public again is that it will be accessible by water taxi. It would be nice to see the lighthouse from the water and capture some different perspectives of this structure.

One side note about our Coast Guard escort, he was from Maine! It was nice to have something in common with the complete stranger walking with us to see the lighthouse.

Now, the lighthouse is deactivated and I have vaguely mentioned something about other lighthouses in this post and the previous post. Do you remember the first photograph of the Buffalo Main Lighthouse? It actually has a sneak peek of another lighthouse in Buffalo. Let's take a look at that photo again.

See that white bottle-shaped thing (with the nicely added arrow pointing to it)? It is actually another lighthouse. Including this one, there are three lighthouses in the immediate vicinity of the Buffalo Main Lighthouse. The first one is the Buffalo North Breakwater Lighthouse.

Here are the other two lighthouses.

They are the Buffalo Intake Crib Lighthouse and the Buffalo Harbor Lighthouse, respectively. These three aren't as aesthetically pleasing, but they are lighthouses so they needed to be mentioned!

So there you have it, those are some of the Buffalo lighthouses. There are two other lighthouses that have "Buffalo" in their name, one we have seen and one we haven't seen yet.

The next post will be the final post about lighthouses that we saw in the fall.

EDIT: Your lovely author of this post has overlooked one final lighthouse of Buffalo Harbor that we saw on this trip. That lighthouse is the Horseshoe Reef Lighthouse, and here it is.

I know, I know, it doesn't look like much (like the other ones out in the middle of the harbor here), even when you follow the LighthouseFriend's link to get a closer look you can see all that's left is the stone foundation, iron framework, and lantern room. Due to its decrepit condition the Horseshoe Reef Lighthouse has been placed on a watch-list for threatened lighthouse receiving the worst possible score.

Thursday, July 21, 2011

Fall Lighthouses

Mike and I tried to get photos of lighthouses with some fall foliage but none of them were exactly perfect. Maybe this fall we will be able to get better photos. During the fall we saw a lot of lighthouses, including a lot of the lighthouses in previous posts, and one day we wanted to take a trip to the Buffalo area to see three (well technically more than three) lighthouses.

I'm going to share with you two of the lighthouses that we saw on this fall day in October, another post will be dedicated solely to the third lighthouse.

Our day started out pretty early because if I remember correctly Mike had to work that night at his previous part-time job, so we had a time limit on how long we could stay in Buffalo. The first lighthouse that we saw is actually closer to Niagara Falls than Buffalo and is located in Old Fort Niagara State Historic Site.

This is Fort Niagara Lighthouse and the trees behind it would have made for amazing fall colors but they were just starting to change.

The Lighthouse Friend's page (linked above) about Fort Niagara Lighthouse has a lot of historical information about how the ownership of the fort has changed a few times over the years. In addition, there have been numerous other lighthouses in the area prior to the current structure, one time a tornado even caused damage to some of the buildings associated with a previous lighthouse.

The current lighthouse was erected in 1871. It was originally 50 feet tall, but has since grown 11 feet, and is made of limestone.

Mike's infamous shot

Old Fort Niagara has numerous events throughout the year and at the time that we went there was a sign on the lighthouse advertising the "haunted fortress". I don't think that the lighthouse was part of the tour, though.

Our day wasn't over and we headed off to the second lighthouse, the Grand Island Front Range. The lighthouse is located on the Buffalo Launch Club's grounds and even though we aren't members there we were able to snap a few shots of this lighthouse.

This lighthouse was not originally located on Grand Island nor called Grand Island Front Range. In 1917 this wooden lighthouse was established as the Niagara Range Rear Lighthouse. In 1931 it was moved to its present location on Grand Island.

A few years ago the lighthouse was restored and painted to match the Launch Club's colors. While this is not one of the most remarkable lighthouses that we have visited, it does have its own charm. It was worth making the trip to see this lighthouse!

Coming up will be a post about the third and final (sort of) lighthouse of this day trip.

Tuesday, July 19, 2011

Fire Island Lighthouse (NYC Part 6)

Sitting to the south of Long Island's main-land is a tiny strip of land, similar to North Carolina's Outer Banks. The majority of this strip of land is known as Fire Island. The current 168 foot tower spans up out of the Robert Moses State Park also within the Fire Island National Seashore. The lighthouse was definitely an integral part of our NYC/Long Island trip as it is New York's tallest and one of the most impressive. As you cross over the Robert Moses Causeway and park in the parking lot that leads to the lighthouse walking trail you can see the lighthouse for miles on either side.

Walking along the trail getting closer to the lighthouse affords several great views and photo opportunities.

You may notice in the lower left hand corner of the last picture a building under construction. At the time we were there they were building this structure in order to house the original first-order Fresnel lens as it was set to be returned from where it was being kept in a museum in Philadelphia. And of course there was this sign making visitors aware.

The lighthouse used that lens up until 1933 when it was replaced by the one at the decommissioned Shinnecock Lighthouse, then in 1952 a more modern Crouse-Hinds beacon consisting of two lights stacked on top of the other was installed (pictured to the right). It has been said that the Fire Island Lighthouse was (and still is) the most important beacon for transatlantic ships, as it is basically the only thing marking Long Island's southern shore. Therefore it is usually the first marker that ships see as they approach New York from "across the pond."

Finally we made it to the home stretch of the trail leading to the lighthouse and I of course had to take my famed shot of the lantern room and we captured another great shot displaying the tower and keeper's residence.

You may or may not recognize the keeper's residence from somewhere, well most likely you don't but in the movie "Men in Black II" the lighthouse's bi-level keeper's quarters was used as the post office where Agent K went back to work in Truro, MA. Truthfully, I had seen this movie several times before I learned from LighthouseFriends' list of U.S. and Canadian Lighthouses that appear in movies, that it actually was this lighthouse.

When we made it to the site all we could do was be in awe of how high the tower actually was and unfortunately we got there too late to be able to climb it. But we were still able to get these great photos and go inside and see some of the displays.

As for one final note, while we were there we walked along the back of the keeper's residence/tower and saw this.

Looks like the lighthouse carries wedding ceremonies on its grounds. We definitely dropped the ball on this one, not like we would have traveled all the way to Long Island for our wedding but it still is an awesome idea (especially for the "Western NY Lighthouse Lovers"). Oh well, we'll just have to keep that idea in our back pockets...