26 October 2013     photo by earthling smck

 - and from below, in all that forested land seen from above, it looks like this -

Bay View

26 October 2013       photo by smck©

The 'Bay View' of the title is the name of a long existing little community several miles north of North East - in this photo barely visible as a light smudge at the center top of the distant hills - and is so named because some early homes there when farming had cleared many of the trees had views of the Chesapeake Bay from a couple well chosen locations.

Elk River

26 October 2013     photo by smck©

This is a view of Elk River in the distance - Once I learn how to adjust focus manually I think I can get a more detailed photo of the sailboats etc there.

Looking toward Havre de Grace

26 October 2013      photos by smck©

In this view of the head of the Chesapeake Bay the Susquehanna River, beyond the neck of land protruding from the right, is flowing from the left past the town of Havre de Grace while the closer water this side of the neck is the Northeast River (a little known bit of trivia is that at one time the Northeast was planned to be called The Shannon).  As you can see by the photos the forest cover is still predominantly green but autumn is bringing in the reds and yellows slowly on Maples, Gum, and Sumac - for whatever reason most of the Oak though losing a fair amount of leafage is losing it in brown leaves - probably from attrition due to lack of rain.  The smallish cove from the Northeast side above is known as Cara Cove (and on some older maps as 'Carrot Cove).

North East Isles

26 October 2013       photo by smck©

 On the out-skirts of the small town of North East is a new (relatively speaking) community called North East Isles located at what I knew of as a kid as "out to the Arundel" and where my father as a young man worked as a laborer loading railroad cars with gravel dredged from the Northeast River.  The gravel cars road on a large trestle track that extended a hundred feet or more into the river so that the barged material could be off loaded.  Here I and other kids would go to dive off the then unused  loading pier and swim in the fairly deep waters.  No road led in there for a long time and one walked the main railroad track to the work switch to the river.  My father always warned me never to go there both because of the danger of drowning trapped in underwater coils of rusting cable and because this was a hang-out for boozing neer-do-wells but all we ever saw was the odd fisherman casting from the shore and giving us annoying looks for scaring away the fish.  In the photo above the condominiums are facing directly into the river which is screened from view here by the forest of tree tops on the Elk Neck Peninsula.