Mt Pisgah in May

 Wednesday evening we herded The Child into the car for a forced march hike around Mt. Pisgah Arboretum. 











I'm trying to think when we went there last, but all I can come up with is that it must have been before The Big Snow, because there were a few more freshly downed trees and limbs (at the time, the arboretum was closed for two weeks while crews went around making sure the trails were safe).








The sun slowly set as we walked various trails.  The Child said that he wanted a mostly flat hike, so we went to the swamp bridge, and the wetlands art installation, and the river banks.










I like the swamp bridge, because there's often dragonflies or fish to see.  Tonight there were ducks hiding in the lillies.  In the grass beneath the bridge a bunny was foraging.







Afterward, we went up (hah! a trick!  we had to climb up!) to the incense cedars, which smelled the most wonderful I've ever smelled them. 







We ended up in a meadow about a fifth of the way up the slope of Mt. Pisgah; I remember one Winter-solstice-like time about ten years ago, taking a picture of one particular oak while it was shrouded in fog with a wan sun casting beams through its branches.   Today it was high white clouds with raptors in a blue sky.






Cow parsnip.  Related to the carrot.

The Willamette River.  There were raptors of some sort flying up above, but they were too far away to photograph.  The swifts over the river flew too fast.  Oh well.

Mark said these felt like scritching a cat's ear, and I've forgotten their name.

Um... a pretty purple flower!

Wild Mountain Rose.  It looked like something out of a fairy tale.

Shadows and Light

This morning I have the house to myself, and I'm working on a story set on Tau Ceti.  It really needs to be a character-driven plot, since it's primarily a relationship story (instead of being a milieu, mystery, or status-quo story).  I wrote the original Very Rough Draft a few months ago, and I'm seeing the parts where I started to lapse into "Tolkien Hiking Porn for Space Station Tech Enthusiasts."  The mantra to repeat has been, "Advance the plot, reveal character."

On a completely different note, here's some photos from last weekend, when it was much less foggy.


I'd recently seen some back-lit photos of plants Pat Kight did, so during the Mt. Pisgah hike I was on the lookout for light shining through leaves.

 I like the contrast between the pale lime lichen and the orange leaves.

 Western Oregon trees have to support a lot of lichen.

 Some times the lichen is so thick, it's hard to know where a tree ends and the lichen begins.

 The sun came out about a third of the way through our hike.  The earlier rain gave everything a silvered sheen.  My camera is not capturing the brilliant greens everywhere.

The only macro-lens shot I took.  I would have taken more, but that would have required a hike about six hours long instead of two.

Power Lines and Briars

 The other day as we were hiking Mt Pisgah, we came across the power lines.  They dominate the trail, and this time around we were in the right place at the right time so that the lines gleamed golden with sunlight.

The combination of looking through the viewfinder, which doesn't use the same optics as the camera lens (I didn't want to drain batteries with the LCD screen) and trying to shade the lens with my hand to cut down on sun flare meant that I took a lot of shots in the hope that one or two might work.

There were briers growing along the trail, and some of the branches framed the lines -- it seemed like a cool compare-and-contrast and I liked the idea of thorns and high voltage lines. 

Writing:  About an hour's worth of re-working and tweaking a scene.

Mt. Pisgah Trees

The other day we took a hike on Mt. Pisgah.  For once I wore too many layers.  It was about 50F out, and we managed to miss getting rained on.  I think it's been something like two years since I've been last (I'll have to look that one up).

I like taking pictures of the trees, and as we're only about a month after the Winter Solstice, most of the afternoon is filled with magic light.  Also, although we missed getting rained on, there was a lot of mist in the air, which made photos gauzy and almost too bright at the same time.

Early on on the hike it's easy to point and click at every tree.  In any case, I managed to not take too many of the same sorts of pictures I always take (and not slow the hike down too much).

We went through the Incense Cedar trail first, then worked out way up.  I like walking through the cedar grove because the lighting is dramatic and mysterious.

Three trees growing together near their bases looked like conspiring spirits, and as I snapped their photo, I recalled the line from MacBeth:  "The weird sisters, hand-in-hand / posters of the sea and land..."

Writing:  I'm re-working a short science fiction story which was originally a photo prompt story with spooky toy animals.  Got about forty-five minute's worth on it this morning.  I'm hoping to get it into Queers Destroy Science Fiction, and it needs a stronger voice.

Working out:  Wednesday (a week since I last went to the gym) I managed to keep the cal/hour at about 770, and got 180 calories in about 16 minutes (which apparently is good).  I was trying to think about the science fiction story, but it was difficult to work out what I wanted to do and keep my rate up.   I managed to get in a full routine with the free weights (dumbbells, pec flies, weighted lunge, lat pull, triceps pull, and two other free-weight things I don't know the names of...)

First Hike of Mt. Pisgah for 2011

We went hiking today at Mt. Pisgah Arboretum. We set out around 1 PM; it was a little above freezing -- so the mud puddles in the shade were frozen and the ones in the sun were mushy.


One of the things I noticed was what Mark called the fruiting body on this teeny-tiny lichen. For scale, the green thing that looks like a vine in this picture is actually a strand of moss.





The sun was out and shining through the ferns which were growing on the oaks (so yes; I was able to stand while taking this photo).




At the end of the hike was the obligatory art shot.