“Listen to the silence inside the illusion of
the world.”
~ Jack Kerouac
~1922 ~ 1969
A
flare of a “mad orange sunset” illuminates a beautiful field in the surreal,
where you can listen to the silence inside the illusion of the world.
I
created this image by blending my shot “Flares Of A Mad Orange Sunset” with
background texture by Jai Johnson for artistic effect.
Sunflares
sparked an abstract beauty around a mad orange sunset on July 5, 2021 along the
Ironton Rail Trail, which loops more than nine miles through Whitehall
Township, the Borough of Coplay and North Whitehall Township, Pennsylvania.
Looking
more like the moon than the sun and shining with a wild beauty, the sun held
court in a hazy, milky sky.
The
orange haze in the evening sky was likely the result of wildlife smoke in
southern Canada affecting conditions very high in the atmosphere.
The Ironton Railroad was a
shortline railroad in Lehigh County. Originally built in 1861 to haul iron ore
and limestone to blast furnaces along the Lehigh River, traffic later shifted
to carrying Portland Cement when local iron mining declined in the early 20th
century. Much of the railroad had already been abandoned when it became part of
Conrail in 1976, and the last of its trackage was removed in 1984.
In 1996, Whitehall Township
purchased 9.2 miles of the right-of-way from Conrail, transforming it into the
Ironton Rail Trail.