It’s been some time since the last Things Seen post—I believe that was in March, when things were still very wintry in the high country & rather bleak down here in the valley. The landscape is much different now: after a late start, we’re moving into the high summer, which means triple digit temperatures in the lowlands with a more pleasant clime in the mountains (there’s still snow on the peaks). It also means the beginning of the fire season; this morning was the first “official” day with a Fire Weather Watch; apparently dry thunderstorms & winds are predicted for the next couple of days.
But in the meantime, the landscape is lovely—still green, even in the valleys due to a long, wet spring; the skies are clear & blue in a way that always seems unique to the west. On Wednesday morning I made my weekly trek up to Cascade; these are some of the things I saw along the way:
- Electric light wires turned silver along Mesa Hill in the early sun
- Locusts with dark green leaves & a smattering of yellow leaves nestled among these & Russian olives with pale green leaves & silver leaves lining the banks along the road
- Square hay bales stacked in a pasture
- Two meadowlarks on a barbed wire fence silhouetted against the sun
- A very rusty pale blue pick up with no hood or engine, & with lumber stacked around it
- Four crows swooping over the high school football field & landing on the bleachers
- The red Adams County dump truck
- A bronze 70s vintage Buick parked in a hay shelter
- A patch of sunflowers growing from the gravel along the highway
- White clumps of serviceberry blooms growing from a rock face
- The pine needles along the eastern side of the highway almost white in the sun
- Wisps of fog rising off the Little Salmon River near Tamarack Mill
- A herd of cows & calves grazing; all the cows are black; two calves have white faces
- Salsify gone to seed in puffballs lining the highway
- White hellebore blossoms & the hellebores’ fleshy succulent leaves & stems also lining the highway, especially on the west side
- Log trucks traveling north
- A small plane circling New Meadows, then coming in for a landing, descending thru the sky above Brown’s Market
- An old pale green boat with a for sale sign near a house with glass cold frames in the front yard
- Young aspens with slender silver trunks shading a white plastic fence—the fence has been designed to look like a whitewashed wood fence
- Four planes, including a tanker, on the runway at the McCall Smoke Jumpers Base
- Training equipment involving harnesses hanging from large poles at the same base; behind this equipment there’s a large plywood cut out of a smoke jumper with parachute open; the figure is attached to an old water tower
- A large herd of cattle grazing in a pasture; there’s an orange wind sock planted in the midst of the pasture, & an old A-shaped red brown at the pasture’s southern end
- Purple vetch growing in profusion along a cedar split barbed wire fence
- An elk weather vane
- More purple vetch, this time mixed with cattails, mullein, sunflowers & salsify along another fence line running east-west in Lake Fork
- A hawk perched on a light wire
- A melon-colored single-wide trailer home; there’s a melon colored lean-to beside it
- Stretches of snow on the western summit of New Business Mountain
- White & yellow bee boxes in a rocky cow pasture
- Two ospreys standing next to their nest that’s built atop a telephone pole north of Donnelly on Highway 55
- Another osprey standing by a second nest; this is at the outskirts of Donnelly, & again built atop a phone pole
- Businesses in Donnelly: Buffalo Gal, world cuisine & sushi; Flight of Fancy Bakeshop; Vigilantes Restaurant & Lounge; The Trading Post liquor store sporting both a Coca-Cola & a Pepsi sign; the hat store, with white cowboy hats displayed on tree branches outside the front door
- Horses grazing under a stand of hemlocks
- A red-winged blackbird preening on a speed limit sign
- A horse weathervane
- Clouds of dust rising like smoke from a gravel pit
- The abandoned ski trails at the bankrupt Tamarack Resort
- The glassy slate-colored water of Cascade Reservoir (now called Lake Cascade)
- Two young mule deer in a pasture
- Sandstone cliffs dotted with pines on the grade before the ascent into Cascade’s valley
