September 2011

POTD: All the Comforts of Home

All the Comforts of Home
Brooks Lake, Wyoming
2011

The campground hosts at Brooks Lake use their spare time to decorate the pit toilets with tables, rugs, reading material, wall art and even telephones. The phones didn’t actually work (there was no electricity or even cell phone service in the area), but they said they were wanting to be able to make them ring whenever someone went in and sat down. We were camped right across from this toilet and whenever someone would go to use it for the first time they would invariably at least giggle if not laugh out loud.

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POTD: Pinnacle Buttes

Pinnacle Buttes
Brooks Lake, Wyoming
2011

Looking across Brooks Lake to the Pinnacle Buttes where the high point is at 11,516 feet. While I’m partial to black and white landscapes anyway, converting this photo to black and white had the added advantage of mostly hiding the fact that about 50 percent of the forests on the slopes of the mountain are dead due to beetle kill. Climate change? What climate change?

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POTD: The Palisade

The Palisade
Brooks Lake, Wyoming
2011

When I was a kid in Kansas, summer camping trips to Colorado were always major events in our family and a big treat on those trips was coming to the continental divide at the top of some high mountain pass. Because of those trips, to me, the continental divide became synonymous with craggy peaks at the top of the world. Of course I later realized that there are less inspiring points on the divide, places where a signpost on a seemingly flat highway is the only indication of the change in geography.

At Brooks Lake these shear 500′ cliffs met my childhood expectation of the divide, at least partially. A couple of miles away at the northern end of these cliffs there is a break in the spine of rocks through which a trail runs and on which I was able to stroll to the divide, barely fifty feet elevation gain from where I was standing when I took this photo.

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POTD: Turn, Turn, Turn

Turn, Turn, Turn
Brooks Lake, Wyoming
2011

I heard temperatures have been over 100 degrees in some parts of the country the last couple of days. But at 9,000 feet in the Wind River range, it got down to 22 degrees Friday morning producing a large amount of frost on leaves that while still green aren’t going to be for long. I remember about 30 years ago spending a long Alaska winter night in a tent when it got down to some 30 below zero. By comparison, Friday’s 22 degrees seems quite balmy but is still about as daring as I care to get these days. I’m not saying I couldn’t still survive a colder night without some sort of heater, just that I don’t want to have to. Must be getting old.

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