summer_jackel

Here in this forest, the soil is dry and the tan oaks are coming back, recovering from the disease that has ravaged them for several years with soft, fuzzy new growth. It was overcast this morning, and the tops of the redwood and doug fir I am currently staring at are moving restlessly with the first breaths of Autumn. Another year is getting ready to turn.

Elsewhere, the mountains remain high, remote and rarefied.

Here are the rest of my backpacking pictures, Ansel Adams Wilderness...was it barely over a week ago?

Bird people, I need help with another ID. I think he's some sort of warbler; he's, uh, several pictures down, somewhere in there.

The Minarets

Lower Graveyard Lake

Sniffing a Jeffrey pine. This tree has the best smell in the whole world, almost, at least to me. Like a perfect vanilla, only without the somewhat cloying tint strong vanilla sometimes has. I want to roll in a pile of this tree like a dog.
Interesting factoid = I had been calling Jeffrey pines sugar pines, but it turns out that the sugar pine is wholly different. It isn't super sniffy, but its sap is sweet and tasty. Now I know...and next time I am in the appropriate biome, I need to find the right tree to lick.

I am a jackal with a mission.

Upper Graveyard Lake

View therefrom

Storm coming

Coba cares not; he has a stick. A twig, really, as he is but a housefox and tender of muzzle.

What did you say about my muzzle?

I'd never seen columbines like this. They seem to be high-elevation only, very different from the streamside habitat I see another species in at the Trinity Alps.

THe life in the rock, very high up, is sparse, tenacious and unexpectedly vibrant.

View from the top

Sheltie in context

Starchy found a rare and beautiful female Yosemite Toad (http://www.californiaherps.com/frogs/pages/b.canorus.html) while we were wandering around without benefit of trail. I scampered back to where I'd left the camera---lesson learned, 'if you are going to bring a camera, keep it with you pretty much at all times'---and somehow found the toad again, with a male!

"Conservation Status: Disappeared from over 50% of its historic range, even in seemingly still-pristine habitats. Remaining populations may not be reproducing enough to survive. Disease, livestock grazing degrading habitat, ultraviolet radiation, introduced fishes, and windborne pesticide poisoning are some of the possible causes of the decline."

Trees move me

Perfect alpine meadow by perfect alpine lake (L. of the Lone Indian)

The trail goes over this. It feels very uphill. Being who we are, we climbed even more of it.

awwwwwwwwww. He is probably a lodgepole chipmunk, but may also be a yellow-pine chipmunk.

Morning

Frost on the tiny things

What am I, birdgeeks?

My diagnosis is either yellow or orange-crowned warbler. Getting good pics of cute little birds is not particularly easy.

The understated record of a death, high above Goodale Pass.

And delicate life. Echo Azure:

A little shade, a little moisture, a tiny garden

View from the top

I saw a pika too, for the first time. He didn't stay still enough to photograph, alas, but it was still a fantastic sighting, way up the mountain in his remote granite height. This guy may be a shadow chipmunk.