Really....the morning was nothing but gray storm clouds overhead while waiting for any sign of color before sunrise. Then the mountain peak lit up and went out like a candle in the coming storm.

This large pond was built by beavers upstream along a creek that flows into a very large lake. You can see the mounded shape of the the beaver lodge in the center of the image. These busy animals dig the mud out of the bottom of shallow areas so they can swim under water right up to the bank of the pond. The roughly parallel dark areas extending up from the bottom of the frame is mud pushed up from the bottom on both sides of a channel that runs to the right of my tripod position and behind me another 20 feet to the stand of willows.