What A Difference A Week Makes

In case anyone was wondering when winter started... it was yesterday. Wyoming got hammered over the weekend with some nice, heavy, wet snow. A foot or more in places, six inches or so in my neck of the woods. Heavy enough to break limbs off my poor trees. Compare this to last Sunday, when I went hiking at a friend's place near Devils Tower.

Blue skies, temp about in the mid-sixties, a nice breeze blowing...

Well, blowing is an understatement. The breeze came howling down the canyon with enough force to make my sitting-on-top-of-the-canyon-wall meditation a bit nerve-wracking. There were enough downed and precariously perched trees from a fire a few years back that the creaking grew rather ominous. I retreated to the relative safety of a spot further up the canyon, out of the direct line of the wind.



See that tree leaning to the left in the left half of the picture? That was my perch until the wind threatened to rip my ears off my head. Lots of little birds flitting about, bluebirds, a chickadee that serenaded me with a three note rendition of "Stupid Human Tricks". So I gave up on the meditation, and went exploring. I found live deer, a fawn skull and bones, and more evidence of things passed -


Apparently a coyote snacked on a turkey, and left only the bones, feet and feathers. I picked up a few feathers, but declined bringing home gnarly turkey feet for posterity.



I also passed on the snake skeleton. Not sure what it was, bullsnake or rattler, but no rattles I could find, and no head. Better a dead snake than a live one. (And there was a live rattlesnake sighting about an hour before I got there.) The wind picked up yet again, and this time, it was pushing a thunderstorm before it. Rain, a welcome change from the dry. So here we are, a week later, and I have all the anti-dry I could wish for.


Some of us don't seem to mind, however...

If You Don't Like The Weather...

... just wait a minute. Of course, in that minute, lots of things can happen. This is what the landscape in back of me looked like when I started photographing some flowers.


Ominous, but not too bad, right? The wind was picking up in nifty little gusts that made photographing the flowers a matter of 1)wait, 2) time wind gust, 3) push button on digital camera, 4) wait for delayed reaction, and 5) hope I got the shot. A few sprinkles started, but whether they were from the clouds or if the wind pushed water from a neighbor's sprinkler over, I wasn't sure. Being an optimist, I voted sprinkler, and looked through the lens to take this:


A gust of wind almost pushed me over, and made the flowers whip wildly. I unglued my eye from the camera, and looked up to see the trees almost bent double as another lovely 60mph gust of Wyoming wind roared by. I tried to photograph the trees, but by the time I took a picture, the trees had bounced back. For the moment.


Across the field I could see a wall of rain, dust, and debris hurtling towards me. That group of trees in the back of the picture vanished, the trees bent sideways again, someone's styrofoam picnic cooler kept up with the birds hightailing it to the safety of the pines. This is one time I'm glad I wear glasses, as a face full of gravel is not a pleasant sensation. I ran for the house before the next gust knocked me into the siding.

After all the tree-whipping, leave-stripping blasts of wind, the rain was a disappointment. It moved over so quickly it hardly got the ground wet. Even so, I much prefer the hit and run storms to some of the lightning show spectaculars we get around here. So, no lightning, no thunder, no tornado, and only a few flowers shredded by the wind. All in all, a good afternoon...