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.