A week ago, I joined a friend for a snowshoe adventure. I am not fond of snowshoeing but living in a place with a long winter, a person needs lots of ways to get out and enjoy the snow. I managed to trip myself up more than once and I was quite tired when we were done but still, it was so lovely and a great day to be out. Now the highway is closed and we won’t see this area again til next May or June.
Sky was off on her own adventure so Willow and I shared some lovely walks last weekend.
Heavy wet snow mixed with rain is falling as I write this. Not the kind of fluffy stuff that brings joy but cold and very wet and sure to melt soon. November.
My last campground in California was aptly named Aspen. We were past the peak of fall colors but it was still quite beautiful. A creek ran by our campsite (Willow was ecstatic) and then along the edge of a big meadow. At sunset, the girls and I took a long walk along the creek and I managed to capture a few images.
Before we left on our October road trip, Mary learned about the rare foxtail pine trees that are found in the southern Sierra mountains. They can live for over 2000 years! There is another subspecies that lives in the Klamath range in northern California. She found a location not far from where we were camping and made a GPS route on her phone for us to follow to find these unusual trees. We drove up a long (paved) road high in the mountains and once again we were around 10,000 feet! From there we had to drop down a steep road bank and then cross a meadow with a lovely meandering stream and then climb the steep ridge on the other side. The ridge was made up of pumice-like ground up granite and boulders. Not great walking, for sure. As we started up it, we commented on the lodgepole pines – so different from the lodgepoles in the Cascades and Rockies. Instead of being skinny trees growing in dense forests, these were open grown and large and had some character to them. I turned around and I saw a tree with much different bark! There it was! The elusive foxtail pine! We had barely climbed the ridge at all! As we looked some more, we could see they were everywhere! We continued to walk higher and higher, seeing more foxtails and fewer lodgepoles. After we’d had our fill, we returned to the meadow and then back up to the road where we found there were foxtails everywhere! We had been so determined to get to our starting point that we had not even looked around! It was a great adventure.
We got up early for sunrise, looking west at the Sierras and also east to the Great Basin. We had a long walk in the younger bristlecone pine trees and we stayed outside in the dark to photograph the Milky Way over the Sierras. We were high enough in the White Mountains that we could see the light pollution of southern California spilling over the Sierras and my milky way disappeared into some low clouds. Still beautiful.
My Everyday Photos 