Up Pye Road West

The day was sunny and warm. I took the highway north. Beyond Roberts Lake, I saw a logging road I hadn't investigated and headed up it.

Near the bottom, a trail went off into the forest. I parked and followed it.

First stop.

The human trail soon petered out, but a narrower trail wandered off uphill. So did I. It was a bear trail; I saw a few wide, round tracks, and a log torn apart, where a bear was looking for grubs. But in the daylight, it looked like I was alone. There was no sound except for the crackling twigs underfoot.

Open forest: ferns, moss, Oregon grape. Many downed, dry, crackling twigs.

Burned nurse stump. The new tree has split it in half.

Half a tree

Near the top of the woods, I turned back. At the bottom of the hill, the moss was thicker; there was a trickling stream winding through.

Fallen tree, with mossy roots.

Tomorrow: what else I found there. No, not a bear.

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Hacía sol, y un poco de calor; por fin pude dejar la chamarra. Tomé la carretera que va hacia el norte. Pasando el Lago Roberts, vi un camino de madereros que aún no había explorado. 

A no muy gran distancia, un caminito se dirigía dentro del bosque. Me estacioné y seguí el camino, que resultó ser muy corto. Pero otro sendero, no hecho por humanos, subía entre los árboles; lo seguí.

Era un camino de osos. Vi varias huellas, grandes y redondas, y un tronco viejo que el oso había hecho trizas, buscando hormigas o gusanos. Pero en ese momento, en el dia, parecía que yo estaba sola.

El bosque era abierto, con el suelo seco cubierto de ramas viejas, crujientes. Había un poco de musgo, algunos helechos, mucho silencio.

Cerca del final del bosque, di vuelta y regresé. Allá abajo, un riachuelo corría tranquilamente; el musgo era más espeso. Un árbol caído tenía las raices cubiertas de musgo.

Las otras dos fotos son de un tronco "criadero". El árbol a que dió albergue lo ha partido en dos.

Mañana: lo que encontré allí. No, no fue un oso.

Spider, fly, woodpecker holes

Every now and then I decide to make trouble for myself. Instead of the usual lenses I use on the camera - the kit lens, because it can handle small crabs and distant islands reasonably well (and it's lightweight; that counts when your bones are wearing out), or the 40 mm because it can focus and take a photo from an inch away; handy when I'm flipping stones with the camera in one hand, the stone in another. - sometimes I fit the camera out with the 85 mm. lens. It does better in the shade than the others, and lets me take photos of things like yesterday's butterfly without getting so close that I scare them away.

But it has its disadvantages: it has no zoom. It won't focus at all at short distances. It won't open up to take in a whole stump unless I'm so far away that there are a dozen other trees between me and it. It's almost hopeless on scenery. It doesn't like extremes of light and dark; it haloes branches in pink and blue.

But it challenges me to look at things in a different way. Helps me to notice things I might otherwise have missed. Allows me to take photos of small things that I can't quite get close enough to because of the terrain. And, as cameras do, it sees things that I could not.

I was hiking up the Ridge Trail, taking random shots at anything out of normal reach; a scrap of moss, a woodpecker hole, a distant shelf fungus, an oddly-shaped log. On the way up, there wasn't much else to see. I was following a bear's track, which the camera didn't think was as obvious as I did, and the patches of scraped-away duff and the moist sawdust under a log, fallen as the bear checked it for ants, weren't really photogenic. So: bits of moss on distant trunks. And the butterflies.

A tuft of moss on a tree a few metres away. And what I couldn't see: cladonia lichen and a spotted fly.

I have to use automatic focus away from home; without my glasses, I can't read the screen any more. So what I want and what the camera thinks is important sometimes conflict, and the camera wins. I found a small patch of periwinkles, already in bloom. I thought they were worth a photo; the camera saw, instead, a tiny spider beside one of them.

Blurry periwinkle, not-so-blurry spider, upside-down.

Blotchy brown shelf fungus, Interesting pattern. Moss, lichen, ferns.

Woodpecker snag. As shot. Looks rather spooky to me.

If you zoom into this photo, you can see the pink tips on the huckleberry shrub on the left.

More tomorrow.