Never have I been more grateful to be IN the VW, where it was possible to sleep through the incessant wind and most of the nesting kingbirds' raucous, pre-dawn gabbling. By the time I saw this, the chorus had quieted a good deal. The wind made a walkabout an unpleasant prospect, but we watched as it sifted sand-wraiths across the dunes in magic swirls.
The following text is my record of the year, written as a 'year end letter.'
My primary thought, as I look at all these images and remember the adventures they represent, is, "Where did it all go, so fast?!" My memories are that I was JUST there, what, last weekend, wasn't I?
Then, up bubbles my utmost gratitude to the people who helped make so many of these possible, as they were taken either on First Saturday Photo Safari (FSPS) outings with friends from the local photography club, or during trips with other organizations and groups of friends. Each year, I realize more strongly that I need companions when I explore outdoors. Not only is there an element of safety added, but also--it surprises me--I seem to SEE more! If I'm leading an outing, I can't focus on more than what I'm doing, but for the FSPS days, we are all common adventurers, with equal opportunity to see something delightful, which leads to seeing things each one of us might not have seen otherwise.
The places shown here--Caribou, Cassia, and Power Counties, Kirkham Trailhead and other sites encircling Pocatello, the north side of Boise, Bruneau Dunes, McCammon, the Deep Creek Mountains, and a variety of locations along the Snake River, are all within Idaho. I must have been concentrating so hard on the books-on-tape that I played while I drove through Oregon to California and back in August that I didn't see any reason to stop. Well, and it was too hot to stop anyway...without air conditioning in my quarter-century-old vehicles, the only way to get across a state in our summer days is at a good clip with a window open!
Except, of course, on the long, slow, corrugated gravel roads of Harney and Lake Counties in eastern Oregon, where I joined a Karl Holte weekend trip with our Idaho Native Plant Society chapter, exploring the areas I had last roamed in the mid-1990's. We had to keep a quarter-mile at least between cars to keep from choking in the billowing, white dust. I did take some photos off the west side of Hart Mountain, but none turned out well enough to show here.
I wish I were able to "wrap" text around the photos here, and so keep up a running commentary, but no, that's not possible. So I've had to make do with perhaps more words than I might otherwise have provided under the images themselves. If you're using the "slideshow" function to see the images quickly, you'll miss everything I wrote, but I can certainly understand if you don't want to see ALL the details on ALL the images. As you might guess from the visual cues, the pictures here are more-or-less in order with regard to trips taken (at least twenty-one outings in all!), covering the year from February to November (apparently blizzards kept us sequestered indoors on the first Saturdays in both January and December!).
May you have an enormous measure of the warmth of enjoyment I've had in creating both these images and this display. With love and the best of wishes to you, I go now in peace; may you do likewise for at least the whole year ahead of us!
Feel free to leave comments and questions at any point; it will get us talking!
