Sunday, April 19, 2009

Fog event!



If by chance you've managed to stick with this blog for any length of time, you might remember that I get pretty excited about fog.

For those of you who live in places where atmosphere exists by default such excitement might seem a little odd, but you have to remember that despite living at 7000' altitude in the Colorado Rockies, our average annual precipitation is 10 inches, give or take.

Yes, I know... 20 minutes away at Monarch ski area they had 360-some inches of snow this year. And that doesn't even TOUCH what they got last year. But that is there, and this is here, and most of the time we are forced to run a humidifier so we don't completely desiccate overnight.

Fog is a big deal.

I felt a twinge of guilt as I charged out the door with binoculars and camera: The DM is wrapped in blankets on the sofa, suffering a nasty sore throat and cough.

Didn't STOP me. But I did feel a twinge. Really.

It probably took an entire hour to get around Sands Lake, since I had to keep stopping to take photos. (Well, that, and to suss out what birds were on the water in the fog.) I knew the fog wouldn't last long, and sure enough it was gone before I'd gotten 100 yards up river. But it still made for a lovely morning.

Fifty species of birds didn't hurt, either.

Fog is burning off already, just upriver from Sands Lake.
Turn 180 degrees from the photo above, just a moment later,
and it looked like this:


Finally the bloody ibis have shown up. They're LATE.
Could have turned up while we were away, but that was still later than normal. Slackers.
This shot was taken maybe 90 minutes after the first one above.
No sign of fog. Anywhere.

8 comments:

  1. love the pictures. we get fog here, but its more like pea soup coming in off the sea. I love the reflection of the mountains in the last one :D

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  2. Oh my, what memories these pictures evoke. We used to take our Chesapeake Bay Retriever mix, Abbey, down to Sands Lake and then all around Franz every day. Abbey had to swim - she loved it. I still wonder at our reasons for moving to the desert. ???

    Lindy - 96 degrees this afternoon!

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  3. 96! Oh dear, Lindy... I hope you have ice cubes. Ordinarily I'd say April is my favorite time to be in the desert... but yikes!

    Jennifer, I like the reflection, too... in part because its stillness means it's NOT windy! (Wind can be our particular nemesis here.)

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  4. Gorgeous, absolutely beautiful. What splendor you live in.

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  5. Could I send you some of our humidity?

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  6. Idle! Thank you, no! We whine about it being dry, but humidity would just make me cranky.

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  7. Yay on the Mother's Bistro sales, and thanks for the fog photos. I'm sorry we missed it. I think that was the day I was sitting in the Englewood (Colo) Public Library making nice with the 450 or so patrons who dropped by to ogle authors on the library's annual Meet the Faces Behind the Books day. The things we do to sell books....

    Tell the DM to get rid of that cough! 'Night....

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