I wish I had my Camera with me

ByMatt

One of the properties of Moscow is a wet winter and spring. We’re close enough to the coast to get the rainy weather patterns, yet far enough inland to incur the effects of the Cascades rain shadow. Though I suppose being at the foothills of the next major mountain divide, it’s only natural for the moisture to build up and then drop before passing into Montana. The rain here is more of a constant drizzle than the short, hard rains we’d get in the summer in the Appalachians. The drizzle will last all day. It’s the sort of grey rain that feels right if you’re sitting at home in front of the fire place napping all afternoon while watching movies. Unfortunately, that’s not a feasible option five days out of the week.

The surprising property of these rains is that they almost always end before sundown. Often enough, I’ve walked out of school to find the sun shining on the western horizon. The after-storm glow is magnificent. It illuminates the tall, white silos of the grainery in town with the dark purple clouds in the background. It paints Moscow Mountain in a golden glow. Moscow Mountain, by the way, has an abrupt white cap, a specific elevation where the precipitation remained snow and stuck to the trees. The overall warmth in color tones ease the cold, wet day, a perfect blend of color and contrast. It is this point where I kick myself for not thinking ahead.

I wish I had my camera.

Similar Posts

  • Life at Camp

    I haven’t been very good at updating this or my livejournal in a while. I’ve been fairly busy for the past few weeks. I returned to my job at the mountain campus (www.mountaincampus.org, check us out) in the middle of March and spent the first two weeks cleaning up and preparing for the season. With all of the heavy snow this winter, we had a fair number of trees fall in critical places, so we spent the better part of a week removing some of them. It’s been so wet, though, that we can’t get to all of them with…

  • What might the native prairie have looked like?

    It’s hard to imagine what America’s prairies looked like when they were unspoiled. Today, more than 95% of our prairies and grasslands have been repurposed for agriculture. The last remnants are so highly fragmented that it’s a fight to keep non-native invasive species from taking over. Prairies and grasslands were once thought to be ecological wastelands, a monoculture of grass with not much productivity. From a distance, the prairie might seem like a boring place. But up close, prairies have the capacity to harbor more diversity than some forests. To really appreciate all that these grasslands have to offer, it’s…

  • A new Mineral2.com

    For the longest time, I have been wanting to re-design my site to make it easy to update and manage content. At first, I thought a content management system would suit me, but I found them to be a bit daunting. Perhaps later I’ll re-visit the idea, but for the amount of content that I actually publish, a blogging platform would do me much better. I still have the photography up using Gallery2 and the main website is now using WordPress. I figured if I’m going to provide stories and updates, I might as well do it in blog form…

  • Adventures in fast, reliable ineternet

    For the past seven years, I have been living with slow, unreliable internet. In 2004-2005, the Weis Ecology Center was on dial-up service. Camp McDowell in Alabama was also on dial-up service, shared on a wireless network. If you can remember far enough back when dial-up was the forefront of home internet technology, you might also remember how long it took for webpages to load and how it would randomly lose connection, and then the busy signals trying to reconnect. In 2006, those problems had not improved. Ferry Beach had a more reliable connection, though it was still slow. I’m…

  • Smoke in the Air

    Where have I been the last three weeks? To put it lightly, I have been choking on smoke. Since returning from the Seven Devils trip over Labor Day Weekend, the wildfires in the northwest, particularly in Idaho, have flared up. A fire south of the Devils appeared as well as a large fire just outside of Riggins. There have been some smaller fires near Grangeville and Lewiston to add to the mess. Winds from the south have blown all that smoke into the Lewiston-Clarkston valley and onto the Palouse where the smoke has been so thick at times, you could…

  • Birding in Lewiston

    Given my current disabled condition, there’s not much I can do to get ouside and enjoy the sunshine, but there are a few places that I can go. There are paved walking and bike trails in every nearby town, and some of them offer spectacular scenery. The Trail of the Coeur D’Alenes, for example, starts in Plummer and meanders for over 70 miles to the town of Mullan near Lookout Pass. There are some sections of this trail that seem like they’d be good to explore, but this time of year, there might still be some snow blocking my way…