Snowstorm on Timpanogos

It was about 27 or 28 degrees outside and I was just starting to shovel some snow off our steep driveway when I looked at this gorgeous view of the top of Mount Timpanogos. I had to run in and get my camera so I could take this shot before the clouds closed in and it started to snow again. Lovely time of the day to be out and about. I really do like snow.

Western Desert Mountains of Utah

One of the most interesting things about living along the Wasatch Front is that all of the towns and people are plastered along the western edge of the mountains from Nephi to Logan. If you drive west, within a few minutes you will leave Utah Valley and cross over into the western deserts. This area is characterized by huge valleys with hardly any development and just a few roads. The roads are mainly dirt with one or two exceptions. This is called the Basin and Range Province. The huge flat valleys are in between long north/south lines of hills and mountains. The valleys or basins are usually treeless and are covered in a sea of sage brush. It is one of my favorite places because of the vast open areas and the fact that there are so few people. Not that I would like to live there, but it is appealing in its emptiness.

At Home

Everywhere I go there are scenes that tell a story. The furniture in this image correspond to the type of chairs and tables that were prevalent when I was much younger. Usually, they were single pieces handed down from a grandparent. We have a table very similar to this one in our home today that came from a grandparent. I still have several hurricane lamps similar to the one in photo. These items are old enough to be considered part of a museum.

Corona around the Moon

This is a photo of the moon shortly after it rose over the mountains to the east. There is a scattering of high clouds that were moving rapidly from the right to the left in the photo. The colors in the corona were quite distinct. You can also see some faint moondogs, light effects at right angles. These appear as faint purplish spots at the 12:00, 3:00, 6:00 and 9:00 positions around the moon. There is also a faint double corona effect.

Self Portrait in Reflection

I was walking by the Harmon Building on the Brigham Young University campus and decided to take a self portrait. I guess I am indicating that the world is very big and I am a very small part of it. It also shows how present the mountains are in this world of the Utah Valley. We had an interesting conversation about the mountains. One of my daughters said she could never figure out why it was called Utah Valley because she could not see the mountains on the west side. Well, there are mountains to the west, but they are not nearly as imposing as the Wasatch Front to the east. Provo is in a valley, in fact, the entire area is called the Great Basin because there is no river drainage outside of the valleys. All of the water flows ultimately into the Great Salt Lake.

Frost

The last few days have been both very cold and very warm. We have had highs close to the 60s and lows in the 20s. This one morning the temperature dropped into the mid-20s and the ground was frozen and I noticed that frost had decorated the Vinca outside my window. I took a quick photo or two, but this was the only one that came out showing the frost. I am going to watch more closely in the future, perhaps we will see some more of the work of this fierce artificer.

Timp Sunset

I am usually up in the morning when it is still pitch dark so I do get to see a lot of sunrises. Unfortunately, I am usually busy in the evenings and miss most of the sunsets. This was one of the exceptions. We were driving back home and I could see the last of the sun on the high mountains to the east. But I got home in time to pull out the camera and take a shot of the mountain from my front yard. The color faded within two or three minutes of this photo.

Hay Rake

This is a horse drawn hay rake. I often see old, abandoned farm equipment such as this permanently parked on the side of the road. There are dozens of different models of this type of equipment and determining the identity of the manufacturer without access to the equipment is difficult. This particular hay rake is sometimes referred to as a horse drawn bull or  rake.

The Needles

This is the visible edge of the Needles Section of Canyonlands National Park. If you want to explore this area further, you will have to walk or go by 4-wheel drive vehicle. The needles are formed by differential weathering caused by erosion due to mechanical abrasion and freezing water in cracks. These sandstone formations are constantly changing, but at a rate that is so slow, that most changes are not visible during a lifetime. It is not unusual to see rocks fall or break away, especially if you spend a lot of time in the sandstone.

Canyonlands: The Needles Section

The Needles Section of Canyonlands National Park, Utah is all but inaccessible except for 4-wheel drive, high clearance vehicles. Canyonlands National Park is divided into three distinct areas by the Colorado and Green Rivers. I am most familiar with the section called the Island in the Sky which is adjacent to Dead Horse Point State Park, The other section called, the Maze, is even more remote. I have driven a thousands of miles on the back roads of Arizona and Utah. There are few places I could not get to in Arizona with my 2-wheel drive truck, but there are lots of places in Utah that really do require 4-wheel drive vehicles.

Canyonlands Sunrise

This is another one of those photos that needs to be viewed in a larger size to see the detail in the wood. You cannot find a more scenic area in the world that compares to Arizona and Utah. No wonder there are traffic jams getting into Arches National Park. But you don't have to go to Arches to see fabulous landscapes.

Slick Rock Rocks

Here is the big question. How did these large sandstone boulders get on top of this section of slick rock? I guess you might speculate that these particular boulders just happen to be slightly more resistant to erosion than the huge expanse of slick rock but that just raises another series of questions as to why the slick rock erodes to an almost level surface. If you are walking on this sandstone, it is not really "slick." It is actually quite rough and easy to walk on. It might be slick in wet weather or if it were covered in ice, but that begs the issue.

The Last of the Sunset

The days are shorter and shorter so it seems that the sunsets are coming around faster each day. Sometimes the light is almost gone when the last of the color is still in the clouds. I liked the very pastel look of this cloud and tried to capture it before the last of the light was gone. Not only are the days getting shorter, but it is colder, so if I run outside to take a photo without a coat, I soon decide that it wasn't a very good idea.

Flying Over the Y

My wife and I stood outside near our home a while ago and watched a hang glider circle overhead. I realized that he or she was going to pass right over the very visible Y on the side of Y Mount and I waited to take the shot until both the glider and the Y were together. It was a beautiful clear day, but late in the afternoon and I am sure that the glider pilot was bundled up because of the cold. The Y is a giant painted symbol of the very close Brigham Young University which is often referred to as the "Y."

Fall Leaves in Transition

Just before the snow began to fall and before the owner of these beautiful leaves could rake them up, I captured this evening shot of the leaves under a huge maple tree. Within a short time, they had all been piled up and were on their way to becoming compost. Sometimes extraordinary events are the most transitory.

Snowfall Out My Window

The first major snowfall of the winter of 2015-2016 finally showed up in mid-November. Snow accumulations were not very significant this early in the morning, but it was scheduled to continue all day. The little Maple tree that had such beautiful Fall leaves looks pretty cold and sad in the snow. The vinca menor never loses its bright green color, all through the winter. The trees that have yet to lose their leaves, may also lose some branches. It looks like travel will be interesting today.

The Fallen

The last of the leaves are now falling to the ground outside my window. The background is vinca minor also known as Periwinkle or sometimes Myrtle. This vinca minor plant grows rapidly all over the hillside next to our house. The tree that dropped these leaves is most likely a Sugar Maple. It was probably planted here since it is not a native to the Wasatch Front.

The Last of the Leaves

I have one lone tree out my window that still has Fall leaves. They won't last. The weather is changing and it was in the 20s last night. All of the leaves will soon be dropping to the ground. This is the hillside that starts about ten feet from the foundation of our house. It is the pre-historic bench or beach of the huge Lake Bonneville that filled all these Utah valleys thousands of years ago. It consists of huge pile of dirt and rocks but the trees grow very well and when the leaves fall, we can see the houses perched above us on the level part of the bench. I will miss the cheerful color of this small tree, but I will soon see new leaves in the Spring.

Leaf Lines

Some people have crop circles and there are strange drawings in the deserts of Arizona and Peru, but we have leaf lines. These suddenly appeared as the leaves dropped from the trees in our front yard. They stayed for a while until they were all raked up but reappeared as soon as more leaves fell.

Snow Frosting

This late Fall weather has been warm and sunny and cold and snowy. We keep expecting a lasting snow fall on the mountains but the days have warmed up into the 50s and 60s and all the snow disappears. The last of the leaves are just now turning yellow and red. Some have already fallen and the trees are bare. Watching the seasons change seems to make time pass more quickly. In the low desert, the changes are more subtle and the contrast is between warm and hot. We spent quite a bit of time out buying up cold weather clothes this year. It isn't certain we will need to use some of them. We keep getting record heat.

Mountain Snow

The last few days we have had rain and rain mixed with snow. For the first time this season, the mountains have been covered with snow. We even had a skiff of snow cover the lawns and some of the rooftops. The temperatures dropped to almost freezing so it was touch and go whether or not the roads would start freezing and the snow would start sticking to the roads. The clouds were so low that the mountains were hardly visible but when the weather cleared up, they were coated with snow. Then it got warm quickly and most of the snow in the lower elevations melted. The snow level stayed at about 8000 or so feet up the mountains. We live so far up the side of the mountain that it was snowing when I left the house and by the time I drove for two minutes down the hill the snow had stopped and the sky was almost clear. This morning all the snow around our house had melted except for the persistent cold area next to the mountain the is in perpetual shade this time of year.

Really Rough Country

When we look at this terrain, we always worry about about the weather. Almost any time it looks like this is not the time to go hiking. This is doubly true when the weather is threatening with rain. The rocks are almost an abstract. This whole landscape looks surreal. Yes, this is a real photo which I took while standing beside my car on a dirt road in Canyonlands National Park.

Canyonlands Sunrise

With a clear view of the horizon, I took a sequence of shots of the sunrise over Canyonlands National Park. Every one of the images came out substantially different. The light was changing constantly. I kept shooting until all vestiges of the color in the sky had faded.

A Slick Rock View

This is an image you will likely want to click on and view in a larger format. The term slick rock refers to sections of the area where the ground is solid rock and nothing but lichen grows. It is not uniformly slick however, there are always cracks and such where trees and other plants can grow.

Ghost Hands

These outlines of painted hands in Canyonlands National Park are a common element in rock art. This type of rock art is usually a negative image of the hand, that is, the paint shows the hand blocking the paint. These are unusual because the hands are colored and also shown in "ghost" images with internal details as if the hands were transparent. This type of painting has also been called x-ray painting.

Rock Art

Ancient rock painting is distinctive from petroglyphs. Petroglyphs are carved into the rock surface. Rock painting is far less permanent and quite rare compared to the number of preserved petroglyphs. The conditions that will preserve the very fragile painted images over hundreds and sometimes thousands of years are usually confined to caves or protected rock overhangs. You can see the moisture seeping into this overhang as is evident from the ferns and moss growing in the cracks. The paintings are faint but evident from the reddish colored substance used as paint.

Early Morning View of the Needles

Canyonlands National Park is divided into three large areas by the confluence of the Green River and the Colorado River. The southeast section of the Park is called the Needles District and these are the Needles. As you can see, the country is extremely rough and there are only a very few roads accessible without a dedicated 4-wheel drive vehicle with very high road clearance and a very low gear ratio. Even hiking on foot is a challenge since there are no "direct" routes as you can probably guess from the image above. By the way, this is wonderful playground for a bunch of older children, you just have to be very careful that no one gets lost.

Canyonlands

This image says it all. There is probably no other place on earth that has the color and variety of the Canyonlands. High snow mountains and other dramatic landscapes are beautiful, but for some reason the sandstone and colors of the canyons speak to my soul.

Sunrise

I generally get up well before sunrise. While camping in Canyonlands National Park, I wandered off into the desert until I had a good view of the horizon. As the sun came up, I was fascinated with the colors and the way the light changed from minute to minute. It is hard to get a feeling for the sun in this situation because it tends to blow out the camera's sensors. But the resulting colors for the rest of the image compensate for the part of the image that is overexposed by the sun. I could have cropped the image to remove the overexposed portion, but I thought that there needed to be a feeling for the impact the sun itself has on the image.

The Coming Storm

I had an unusual opportunity recently. I was waiting out in the middle of the desert for a couple of hours with nothing to do but wait. I had no Internet connection so I was not able to be absorbed in my usual activities. So, as I sat there waiting, I took a series of photos of my surroundings as the light failed and night came on. This was one of the photos. It is a radical departure from most of my landscapes because by this time of the evening, I would have already given up on the light and stopped taking photos. But with little else to do, this is what I saw.

Damselfly in Canyonlands

This is a Damselfly but I have yet to identify the exact species. This photo was taken in the early morning in Canyonlands National Park in Southern Utah. The bulging eyes, wings and enlarged tail all point to a damselfly rather than a dragonfly.