Wintertime, and the living is easy

I like winter. I even like a small dose of cold. Snow is fine. It's the thaw, and the slush I abhor.

Winter in California is wonderful. Cold-ish nights, and warmish days. Cosy in a robe and slippers, the trees in riotous color (which lasts longer) and the leaves hanging on, in all their finery until January.

In December the San Gabriels are covered in snow. They are actually steep, and pretty tall. The front range jumps up about to abou 2,000 feet. Where I live it's about 3 miles, as the crow flies, to those peaks, and the altitude is 900 ft. A few miles futher and that crow is looking at Mt. Baden-Powell, which is the highest peak in the Angeles Crest (skeetermonkey and I have failed to get to the top, three times [if memory serves, but at least twice]; when they say it's a difficult climb, they mean it. Start before noon, and be prepared for ice on the shaded parts of the trail; don't do it later than Sept. without some warm clothes, and make sure you turn around well before dark. The trail is easy to keep, but it gets cold up above 8,000 feet, and the peak was last measured at 9,399 ft. The Limber Pine can be found here, above 9,000 feet. They are rare, and about 2,000 years old).

Back in December we got a cold snap; nightime temps in Pasadena got down into the high twenties, and it rained. The snowline got down to a bit below 2,000 feet. The lower elevations didn't keep it, but I got some shots, nonetheless.

Through the Cypress



The peak to the left is Baden-Powell, the lower peak is a lot closer; in the front range.


The Front Range, with color



You can just see Baden-Powell, behind the near hills (about 800'), and the front range (a different perspective of the same peak in the first photo) is on the left, with the sharp edge of the snowline plainly visible.

In which we discuss plans

The next week is going to be busy. I have a VA app’t tomorrow (follow up on an earlier app’t to look at one of the symptomatic conditions of my Reiter’s). Friday I head out to Joshua Tree for the annual retreat of the Southern California Quarterly Meeting of the Religious Society of Friends (if anyone should like to attend, let me know; it runs from Friday to Monday. There will be walks, and campfires, and marshmallows and music and talk and [for those who are inclined, a Meeting for Worship on Sunday], and there is room).

The next Tuesday Obama is going to be inaugurated and Weds. I go to Canada.

The two have nothing in common. There are some people I’d like to visit, who wouldn’t mind seeing me, and someone who wants photography lessons, so the two will be combined and I’ll be in Ottawa for a month.

Happily, in the realms of ego-boo, the show I’ve been working on getting in Ottawa will probably open while I’m there. I don’t think (it not being a gallery per se, but an art/coffee house) there will be an opening, but I’ll be there the first night, and will be able to see some of the reaction. They have also agreed to carry cards on a regular basis.

In there I have some photography to work on (I still have photos of the mountains from a couple of weeks ago, when the snow level dropped to about 2,000 ft., and I ought to write something for TKP), and politics aren’t going to stop. The last few days of the present administration will see a fair bit of gamesmanship and stage setting (no small part of it by Republican apparatchiks and the sympathisers, who are doing their best to box Obama into a corner before he takes office; that the various agendae they have will be put into place. Some for their direct benefit, some to prevent prosecution for abuses they took part in during the past eight years and some with the hope of setting up failures, so they can say Democrats can’t be trusted to run things (after all the incoming administration is taking charge of a United States with a reputation unequaled in living memory, and being handed an economy few alive can recall the equal of).

So, that’s my schedule for the next week, or so.