Snowy mountains

Left: Lake Almanor framed through the trees on a ridgetop above

I've been feeling restless lately. I get online and read blogs but e-mail makes me antsy. I've had several ideas for my own blog this week and then just sighed and
signed off instead of following through. But now I feel guilty as there's nothing new here for anyone to read. So, I'll just make it a quick hello and then I'm seriously considering getting off my butt and cleaning my house. The sun is out. A whisper of spring cleaning in the air perhaps?

Yesterday I had to "X" off the calendar for anything I wanted to do, and commit to taking William up to Coppervale to go snowboarding. The local ski hill FINALLY opened and he wanted to meet his buddies up there for the first weekend of the season. It's mostly an all day sort of thing and so I always feel a bit frustrated at all the things I could theoretically be doing if I wasn't stuck up there. Not that I seriously think I would accomplish anything if I was home. But there's the fantasy of it.

I ended up having a nice time yesterday despite my preset resistance to it. A few days earlier we'd had a big storm. Well, we were supposed to have a big storm. It fizzled out before it got down to the valley, so until I drove up into the mountains the other day, I didn't know that in fact the storm HAD been big and just a few miles up the road from me, the scenery changed from blah/gray/dreary into a winter wonderland. It looked like the scenery in the Narnia movie - all fresh white snow blanketing the mountains, drooping heavily on fir trees, topping dark rocky outcroppings. Quite breathtaking.

So I dropped William off at the resort and went galivanting about the mountain roads taking photographs. I drove from spot to spot on the highway and then stomped knee deep through assorted unplowed side roads and snow plow berms in an effort to capture images without the distracting addition of telephone wires, fences, open highway. I didn't hike all that far, but when you're moving through that much snow, it's hard work. I spent two hours, until my boots got wet. Then I stopped in Chester and ordered a pineapple pizza to bring back to the William and spent the last couple hours chatting with another mom while waited for our children/teens to be tired enough to call it day.

We both got a good work out apparently. William boarding up and down the slopes, me climbing, falling up and down the roadside berms. I offered to take William to see the new Underworld movie last night and not only did he turn me down, but I realized I was too tired to care. We both found ourselves dozing off on the couch in front of the television instead. So, who won the Miss America crown?

Here, for your viewing pleasure, are a few more of the beautiful spots I captured through my lens (click on them to see a larger image):

I wish the sun had been out when I took this shot. In real life the red of the creekside bushes really stood out against the darker firs.











If you click on this, you can make out the starfish patterns in the middle of the ice where it is melting. Several days earlier, when I didn't have my camera with me, in this same view we watched as flocks of hundreds of Snow Geese, Canadian Geese, and white Pelicans flew across the sky.







I liked the way the cloud looked like a wave about to crash down on Lake Almanor