Just before beginning my internship with United by Blue, I took the opportunity to travel in California with my family.
As many know, driving through the California hills is an incredibly beautiful experience. What I expected to be a simple scenic drive to Los Angeles turned into much more when I realized we were driving through San Gorgonio Pass Wind Farms; it completely took my breath away. And surprisingly enough, it wasn’t the scenic landscape that made my jaw drop, it was the fields of wind turbines spinning atop it. You can see how cool it looks from space with NASA’s satellite view of the mills at NASA' Earth Observatory.
This California wind farm consists of over 3,200 wind turbines seeing that the region is known to have some of the strongest winds in the country. Literally miles and miles (90 to be exact) of landscape completely covered by these grand, abstract, figures is hard to believe, and even though I saw it with my own eyes, I had trouble believing it. Photographer Fritz Mueller focuses on energy sources, and does a great job capturing the beauty of this farms along Route 10.
I’ve seen wind turbines before, of course, but never on such a large scale. What struck me most about these structures was how they are so commonly labeled as ugly or disruptive, but the only thing I could think when standing below these massive turbines was about how beautiful and powerful they were. Beautiful in terms of the physical and atheistic beauty, but also beautiful in what these wind mills are doing in terms of clean energy, innovation, and growth.
Taking that moment to consider beauty discovered in the strange and obscure brought me back to UBB and our goal to uncover or redefine beauty through the unexpected. Sometimes the unexpected at UBB can be reinventing “ugly”, for example by painting an old crate or rusted mooring ball to create something beautiful. And while the relationship between an enormous $300,000 windmill and a washed up old crate may be hard for the naked eye to see, I can’t help but look at these out casted objects and ponder the value in the learning to view our world with a different lens, looking for ideas and inspiration in the unexpected.
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