I have been moving my website and didn’t get a chance to post any photos.   I came upon the foal with it’s mama one day going to town

There have only been 3 buds this year I missed the little bud stage but caught it as it was opening

One pic of chimney rock in the sunset

I love it when the fluff clouds get all lit up

This was off opposite of the sunset

They were doing a controlled burn a few miles away.  Whose idea was it to do a controlled burn in the middle of July?  That just seems insane and asking for trouble, normally they are in the early spring or late fall!

A panorama of the mountains in silhouette

Chimney Rock as the Sun sets

The wispy sunset

Two more feet we got here at the house!  After the neighbor plowed out the driveway the house is disappearing quickly.  The roof had just been shoveled so we didn’t get the big pile up on there.

For those who have seen the photos of earlier in the winter what was once the birdbath that we could use to gauge our snowfall is now just a bump in the snow LOL.  Now we have to clean off the back porch and use a yard stick to measure for each storm.

When I finally made it into town on Tuesday just a little sun was breaking through as I was coming down to cat creek road making these cool pattens on the snow.  It didn’t transfer to the photo as dramatic as it was though. 

It was on the way home though that I got a treat.  There was one little break in the clouds right on the horizon letting the sun come through at sunset.  The sun going down caused this spike of light to come upward which was cool.

But it was when I rounded the corner that I got the treat, chimney rock was in a glow of the little sunset breaking through.  Four years on this mountain up here driving cat creek road all the time and I’ve never seen anything like it.

This is what chimney rock looks like from highway 160, this was about 3 weeks ago.

and this is what it looks like from right across the street up here on the ridge, this was Thursday night.

We had a huge snowstorm come through and drop close to two feet here and a good four feet up in the high country.  We lost power right in the middle of watching the third Pirates of the Caribbean, very annoying LOL Power was out for 2 1/2 days!  That is the longest power outage I have endured, other than camping and so forth.  It was a good practice run, so to speak to really see what kind of preparedness was most important in this location.  Fist would be getting some solar on our well pump so we had running water.  We keep 30 -40 gallons on hand always but if it had been a week, we would have been melting snow for dishes and so forth.  We have two powerful wood stoves in fact maybe too powerful.  If we cranked it up high enough to really heat water for example it was just way to hot in the house.  So we are looking at trading one of them for a small wood cook stove.  We had plenty of food on hand and over all we were just a little bored.  We realize we need some games or something for the evening when it is just candle light.  We had a battery powered radio so we had music and one with weather band.  I don’t listen to the regular am - fm radio much the last few years.  It has become pretty worthless in such a situation, even the station here in our little town didn’t even mention the power outage.  Growing up as a child in Minnesota we relied on the radio during tornado warnings and so forth, I can’t believe how worthless it has become.  So communication is something to give a great deal of thought to.

Here is the back yard the storm came in two waves and the first wave kind of packed down some before round two hit.  At the back behind the birdbath is a tree cage like the one in front, but it is so blanketed you can’t tell there is a tree in there.

I tried to take this one while it was snowing just to see what would happen.

The cat (Annapurna) wandered outside and started to dig in the snow, she hates the litter box and is always outside in the summer and I guess she decided snow was as good as dirt.

This is Chimney Rock and old Indian cliff dwelling, there is a visitor’s center there on top of the flat part to the left.

Our neighbor came down in his tractor and plowed the driveway after the biggest part of the snow and then he drove by again the next day when there was a new dusting.  No one else had driven down the road which is rare.

I liked the color contrast of this tree trunk against the white snow

When the sun started to come out the morning of day three the icicles that had formed on the south side of the house came crashing down.

The neighbor’s shed, I love seeing it in the snow because the red is such a bright contrast.

Tree branch heavy with snow

The Jays have finally found the feeder in the front yard

When the clouds cleared away in the morning wouldn’t you know they started screwing up the view with some chemtrails, within a couple hours the beautiful sky was all a fricken haze again.

I took a couple pics from the end of the road and put some effects to make it look like night.  The first one I then added a paint effect to for fun.