Moon Over The Mountain

Day 44: You have to understand that in the Pacific Northwest, you don't usually get opportunities to view celestial events or, for that matter, to observe a blue sky, so when this spectacular combination presented itself through my living room window, I grabbed the camera without thinking twice. Plunging through a tangle of chest-high snowberry bushes intermixed with dry blackberry vines, I picked up a few thorns en route to a position which avoided power lines, poles, fence posts and a significantly ugly display of political statement mounted on a truck parked mid-pasture, and managed to make it in and out of the maze without tripping on the frost-slick ground. It was at great hazard to life and limb that I made this photograph for you when I could just as easily have generated it with open-source AI. Apparently, there's a lot of that going on right now. It will never happen here. I promise you that.

But No Aurora

Day 275: For the first time in at least 15 years, I was away from home overnight, sitting in a parking lot at 6000' with my botany partners Joe and Sharon in the hopes of witnessing the aurora borealis. To make a long story short, it failed to appear, but we were rewarded with a spectacular display of alpenglow at sunrise from Sunrise. Yes, you read that right, and there were a ton of people who had come to Sunrise Point with the same vain expectations. After full light, we began the botanical portion of the expedition, collecting herbarium specimens for two species, checked our Mystery Plant for flowers (none) and locating an uncommon/rare orchid. Once our tasks were done, they dropped me off at home where I am now trying to make amends with a little Boy who is rather upset at having been left alone.