Jon Searles' photos with the keyword: Jested

This shot is roughly from the summit for Jested, but the apparent reflections in the photo indicate we were still on the gondola at this point.

This is on the cable car looking in the opposite direction from the previous shot.

I took this from Horni Hanychov, looking up the cable run to the Hotel Jested.

Here's an interior shot of the station, with one of the gondolas waiting for departure. This was #2, which took us to the summit.

This is the cable gondola station at the base of Jested. Notice the Ceske Drahy station sign.

This is a cameraphone shot that I got during my most recent visit to Jested in the Jizersky Hory (mountains) in Liberecky Kraj. Most tourist guides count the Hotel Jested as a Liberec hotel, but the catch is that it's on the summit of Jested, the tallest mountain in the area at 1,012 metres. I've always thought that the Hotel Jested is the strangest looking hotel that I've ever seen, although it could have been imagined by a cartoonist for the Jetsons. It is possible to drive up to it, hike up to it, or take the cable car, which while not a railway is operated by Ceske Drahy.

Here's another version of the previous shot that has been edited for maximum contrast and saturation short of making it look like a painting. For some reason, shots from the video camera get vignetting when you crank the contrast up, and I have no idea why that is.

Completed in 1968, this futuristic looking hotel resembling an antenna is also exactly that, a television tower. It was also featured in the Czech film "Grand Hotel." I've tried to photograph it many times, but I've almost always been too far away, even though I've visited Liberec twice. This time I tried getting the shot with a video camera that had a still function. The resolution on the camera was awful, worse than my cameraphone, but the reason I wanted to try it was that it had a 25X digital zoom. Actually, it had a 700X digital zoom, but beyond 25X the resolution was so low that it was pointless. After uploading the .jpg to my Mac, I still had to edit the image for higher contrast because the cloud cover had played more of a role than I had foreseen.