I took these photos Wednsday in the late morning as I was preparing to head on out to drive to Telluride with an associate. I’m going to post a series of images from a thunderstorm that we watched last weekend at the end of our hike and saw a new storm starting to form right in front of my office.
During about a 20 minute conversation I watched this baby grow what I think was an additional 10,000 vertical feet. I never got to see the end result as this one drifted to the east in the hours that followed.
Note the anvil top on the storm. That is generally caused when the updrafts stop and the upper level winds blow the clouds off in a uniform direction. Directly in front of the anvil is another branch of the storm that continued to grow but was surpassed by another slightly behind it.
A slightly larger panorama of the skyline. You can see a larger image here if you like.
These images were all shot with my “carry in the car camera,” an old Olympus 4000 which was a replacement for an earlier model that I paid nearly $1,000 for in May of 2000. It’s a 4mp camera that some cell phones currently rival, at least in pixel size. There is some color distortion because of the fact that these were shot through tinted windows. I went outside to try and shoot but the view from the 3rd floor was the best I could do.
My good friend came out from Michigan and in spite of having to dodge rain from time to time, we got in a whole lotta hiking. Because I had to work on Friday he was able to pick up 3 or 4 more miles than me and I clocked in with 21 miles. We did 8 miles on Saturday, 7.5 on Sunday including a march up the mountain, and a morning quickie of 5.5 miles on Monday.
I dropped him at the airport at 1:00 in the afternoon and then decided it was time for a afternoon at rest.
Strawberry Cactus
The field guide says that the “desert landscape is punctuated with showy, rose-pink flowers.”
What I say is that the color is a bit off in the photo, it shows a tad too purple in this image.
This plant is one of the many that grace the spring trails in the Sandias and is more commonly known as Apache plume. After the flowers blossom a fine light pink plume emerges from the plant.
I looked today through the Field Guide to the Sandias and could not really identify these flowers, primarily because they have not yet opened. I suspect they are Golden Peas, but I’ll have to wait till next weekend and try to climb on back to the summit to check. these plants were at about 10,100 feet, just below the level of the Tram.
Plume drops after an early morning rain.
Fabulous day, clear sky, mild temps, hiking without having to carry tons of extra clothes, just in case…
And the pink from two weeks ago, today has turned white.
While along the deep forested trail sunlight singles out the wildflowers against the dark backdrop of the woods.
I was hiking with the guy who I ran into on the trail a couple of weeks ago and I didn’t feel quite the need to beg his indulgence as his son was along shooting an occasional photo as well.
As usual however, you can find me at the end of the line, trying to compose one last shot.
We made it to the summit in about 5 and a half hours, and as we clinked our glasses at the bar we kept to the slogan we adopted on our first climb together 2 weeks ago, “you are not finished till you see the foam.”
I thought about hiking up to the top of the Sandias this weekend but a quick check of the weather put an end to that thinking, primarily because of the forecast for high winds.
Where we live, at the edge of a canyon, that usually means that the winds will really be high, and if that’s the case, they will probably be so high that the tram won’t run as well. It’s difficult to capture the effect of a really strong wind, but one of the trees in the image seems to say it well.
The curious thing about the canyon cool air is that sometimes it rolls over the mountain like the edge of a down comforter, just hanging on the top of the mountain, leaving about 95% of the slope clear below. I suspect that the cool moist air pours over onto the dry side of the Sandias and evaporates.
So it was a day to finish up the garden and almost all of the flowers in the back yard.
Just as the day was ending I shot this panorama of the cloud on the near side of the mountain. It looked to me like someone had turned on a fog machine. You could actually watch the cloud roll over the top, down the slope and just disappear.
started with the top down and headed out to one of the Mrs’s favorite hiking spots. First we did breakfast then a couple mile hike to a “warm pool” where we hung out for about an hour and a half.
After the hike back out we decided to head on around the big loop in the perfect weather north through Los Alamos then to Santa Fe for dinner and finally back home through the back roads.
Best image could have been better, if I had taken my water socks out of the photo, but that’s the view from the highest of the warm pools.
Larger image here.
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