A Day without Rain

I'm hard at work writing the next post.   In fact, I am working on two computers at once.


In the meantime, Wednesday was a rare day without rain.    Here are some sunset photos from Trail Lake.

Back to work!

Bewitched before the Midnight Hour

Tuesday, another hot day in a sequence of unusually hot days.  This day was a little different, though, because a nice breeze kept things cool enough to be tolerable.

Unlike Monday, which was far too hot for me, and which broke records in several coastal towns.   In fact, Alaska set higher temperatures than most of the US west, except in those places where gila monsters and rattlesnakes live (where no humans should, either).

I went kayaking Monday evening at Tern Lake.  Pulling into my driveway at 9 PM, that Midnight Sun was still shining brightly on my house.

At 10:30, I glanced out an east-facing window and saw a wall of dark gray heading this way.

When the promised rain began, I stepped onto the back deck and got this photo of a faint rainbow as the sun pierced through the cloud bank.   The combination of dark clouds, rain showers, and late sun made for some fantastic colors.

This was at 11 PM.    The sun is on the upper parts of the mountains.

Here's the progression of the sunset in the west:


11:23 PM:

11:30 PM:

11:37PM:

11: 38 PM

These photos give as accurate a representation of ambient light as I could manage with my Nikon Coolpix..   I had to decrease the camera by several stops to get close.

Hard to stay in bed with that Ol' Midnight Sun putting on a show like this, and obviously, I didn't.

Tourist Season

 Good morning.   Have a nice sleep?

 

Ah, welcome back.  Sorry about the snow.

Ten o'clock sunset a few days ago:

Low Tide and Sunsets

I went down to the dock just before sunset this evening to check on Jim's boat.  The tides have been exceedingly low lately and I wanted to see if the boat was still afloat or resting on the exposed seafloor.

It was raining slightly, so I drove the golf cart. 

This is a "road" at Stillpoint.  They're just slightly more than wide enough for a golf cart and a snowblower.  This was taken through the plastic windshield, which is why it's fuzzy.

Good thing, because I would have missed a couple good photos.

Here's the dock as I approached and the progression of the sunset.

I took the lower "road" on the way back home and decided to photograph this narrow neck of the cove.  It goes dry during real low tides.

When I framed the shot with driftwood, I noticed the color of the mountain in the background.  I ran for the golf cart and drove home as fast as that little electric buggy would go, all the while remembering a lesson I'd learned long ago.

Not a moment too soon.  Here's the same mountain from the front deck of where I'm staying.

And a minute later.

And the final shot.

Publish Post

Oh.  That lesson?  When watching a sunset always, always look behind you.

Moose Racing, Sunsets, and Capt. Bligh

Hey, kid!  Race you to the end of the guardrail?


What're you doing hangin' out next to this busy highway?  I warned you about that the last time I saw you.  And aren't you supposed to be bedded down this time of day?

You're hungry?

Teenagers!  Guess you can never fill them up.

Beat you by a bumper, but I had a running start.  Next time, kid.  Stay off the road, huh?

By the way, cute little antler nubbins you're growing there.

What?  Oh.  Sorry.  Didn't know size mattered to moose.  Too.

***

There's something special about the late evening light when the clouds part after a cloudy, rainy day.

***

Ah, Turnagain Arm on a windy day, just after high tide.   Just a piece of it, though.  After all, it's more than fifty miles long and several miles wide.

A few years before Capt. William Bligh had his contretemps with Christian Fletcher, Bligh was sailing master on Capt. James Cook's HM Sloop Resolution.  In 1778, sailing up a gray and silty body of water that forked near its terminus in Southcentral Alaska, Cook thought he'd reached the end of that quest in the search for a Northwest Passage.  

He ordered Bligh and a party of sailors to explore both  forks  to see if either led to the sought-after passage.  

Bligh reported that the northern arm, Knik, ended in a river, and after a sail up the southern arm, disdainfully said of that arm "turn again,"  no Northwest Passage here.  The name stuck.

Cook then sailed off to the Hawaiian Islands where he encountered his own fatal contretemps with the natives, who thought him a god.  Such a let down.

Such history in these parts.