The Road Less Traveled

For those of you not living here in Portland, we’ve got a pretty mild climate.  We get rain in the winter, with the occasional cold snap.  Maybe snow or freezing rain every third winter or so.  (Last winter’s Snowpocalypse, as my friend Sarah called it, does not count.)  But right now, along with much of the country, we’re going through a pretty harsh cold snap.

However (this is not a weather report) one of the great things about this particular cold snap has been how clear and beautiful it’s been.

On a clear day in Portland, the mountain is out.  When we say that locally it means Mt. Hood is visible.  (In fact, there are three volcanic peaks that one can see on a good day from Portland – Mt. Hood to the west, Mt. Saint Helens to the north, and Mt. Adams farther to the east in Washington State.  But I digress.)

The other afternoon rushing from one meeting to the next, atop one of my favorite local parking garages I snapped this photo of the lovely Mt. Hood with the Hawthorne Bridge in the foreground.   Mt. Hood was radiant with its new blanket of snow.  Such a treat.

Can you just feel the crisp breeze blowing across the Willamette River here?

Harvest time along the Fruit Loop

I don’t like to say that any one season is my favorite, but I have to say that this particular fall has been especially beautiful.  I’ve been taking advantage of the fall colors to go out and practice my photography.   So recently I spent a wet weekend day driving the Fruit Loop with a new photography buddy, Brian. (Check out some of his stellar work here.)   For the uninitiated, the Fruit Loop is a 35 mile circuit through orchards, wineries, farms and fabulous fall colors starting in Hood River, Oregon.   (Read on after the break…) (more…)

I’m not really a gardener, as any of my friends could tell you.  But I do love flowers.  Years ago, during my Park Ranger days, I would lead folks on guided walks looking at wildflowers in the the meadows of the sub-alpine (at Olympic National Park) and the tundra (at Denali National Park), which I loved.  But gardening – not my thing.  That was until recently when I went to the Dahlia Festival in Canby recently.  WOW!

I always thought of dahlias as looking like this:

My image of what a dahlia looks like

Something with firm flower heads made up of tight little coiled tunnels that catch the rain.   Beautiful, but I thought that was pretty much it, in a variety of colors.  Well, not being a gardener I was delighted to discover that they range from delicate and graceful to huge and gaudy, and everything in between.

Who knew a dahlia could look like this?

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