Back on the road

I'm back for another tour in beautiful Dorris, California, just 5 miles from the Oregon border. Here's a leftover picture from the first tour. The big sky and wide open spaces are so different from the mountain forests where I live. As you can see below, their sunsets are just amazing.

On the long drive out to the job site, I saw this old thing actually being used! I just had to stop and take a few pictures of this very interesting old road grader.

This must have been a top-of-the-line model in its time. Looks like it wasn't built for comfort, though.

Finally, I have another leftover from the previous tour. The mountain looks VERY different today than when I took this one. A summer snow storm came through and covered the mountain from head to toe with a new 6-10 inches of new snow!! I'll just have to wait until the time is right to go out and get a new Shasta picture. Maybe this evening there'll be another great sunset (?)

My latest pictures

When I arrived on my latest assignment last weekend, I was pleasantly surprised to see that Mount Shasta had a new dusting of fresh snow, in the middle of August! So much for "global warming", eh? Shasta always astounds me with its beauty and the mountain teased me with a peek of its peak. I wished I could enhance the forest below the clouds, so you could really appreciate how immense this strato-volcano is.

This next one is a very similar picture except that I cropped it out of a bigger picture that I didn't quite compose right. The polarizing filter made the sky nice and blue.

Now we get to a picture I took just a half hour ago. What do you think this is a picture of? Yeah, there's not much to go on, there but, it's an interesting and puzzling picture.

Here's a little bit wider shot that might help a little bit more. Not enough, still? OK, there's plenty of agriculture in Butte Valley, California and they cover their fields with plastic, maybe to reduce water losses in their volcanic ash-laden soils they have near Mount Shasta.

I took this little sidetrip on the way back to the motel from Klamath Falls. Since I have been playing with Photoshop and substituting different skies into other pictures, I took this opportunity to grab some excellent sunset shots. While the oranges are intense and saturated, ya gotta love that deep black of the mountains, too. I sure wished I had my Fuji and its powerful zoom for these shots. Alas, I had to use the work camera. I'm happy with what I came away with, though.

Edit: The above picture is dedicated to my friend and co-worker Jesse. His light shown brightly while he was here and we will never see his quick and easy smile again.

Rest easy, bud!