The New Year Has Come! (The Silmaril Series)

Merry New Year! I hope you are simply having a wonderful holiday season. As I have stated before I have a tendency to think of Christmas time continuing until about the second weekend of January (or whenever Martin Luther King's birthday holiday is in the U.S.). So, I typically have what most would consider Christmas music in my mp3 player until then. Keep in mind I do not really listen to the popular Christmas music you hear on the radio during the season. I always enjoy taking walks at night listening to my music and seeing what houses are still decorated with lights. It gets less and less as the weeks go on, but I have seen some Christmas lights out until March before. 

Skipping back to my previous December 21, 2022 blog entry, I showed what happened back in May, 2022 when I hiked to Leavitt Lake. It was a strange weekend, but I was somewhat happy to get some sort of picture of the "winter-like" conditions there.

So, we went back about two months later near the end of July. This time the issue was there was a lot of smoke due to fires going on. Again, this was frustrating. I was a bit fortunate in a few ways:

So, as one should expect during the summer, all that winter snow and ice was gone. The only downside I had was a small amount of smoke haze I had to deal with here. You have to look really closely, but on the right side in the lake is tiny little boat. Some guy was fishing there. There were others camping around the lake with the 4WD vehicles which you need to have to drive into this area. For this blog entry and the one back on December 21st we hiked in on the dirt road. In the past, I have been driven in with 4WD trucks. I have to stress that or someone will get stuck in the middle of nowhere! Do not drive this road unless you have the proper vehicle! 

I did get the drone to clear the lake. This is looking back across the lake. I kept pushing the drone to see if I could get all that pond in the shot, but at the same time I did not want to crash into the side of the mountain as I kept going backwards. So, this is the best I could do. 

The smokey haze was much more apparent in the background. I moved the camera down to focus on the lake. The mountainside was very smokey so no need to show that. You can see some of it on the upper right side.

We did not spend much time at the lake. Just enough for me to fly there and back again. There is more hiking that can be done around the lake. We have talked about doing more, but I hope to do other things before coming back here in the future.

So with that said, we start the new year! I will have another "housekeeping" type of blog entry in the next week or two. I am preparing a video for it that is more for my video watchers than those who read the blog, but stay tuned here since it will prepare how I go about 2023.

Winter Is Coming! (The Silmaril Series)

 At least in the Northern Hemisphere! 

So, will be the last blog entry of the year. Please have a great Christmas and New Year! Note that many are coming down with illnesses of various types, including Covid still being around, so please protect yourselves and bulk up on your vitamins. 

So, one of the goals I had this year was to use my drone at Leavitt Lake. This is one of the shots I took:

The trick on this one is I took it during Memorial Day Weekend. I had just re-registered my drone, and the week before the weather forecasts were saying that there would be lots of wind in the Eastern Sierra that weekend. Exactly what I did not want to happen.

Sure enough when we got there it was all very windy. We decided to go up the HWY 108 anyways to see what it was like at Leavitt Lake. Turns out that morning was not too bad for wind, but as we kept going the cloud cover was lower as we kept going higher on the road. 

We parked off the road. Normally one takes a 4-wheel drive to Leavitt Lake, but the road was blocked due to winter conditions still existing, and we were just going to hike the road anyways. Off we went.

It took us about an hour to hike in. A few huge trees had fallen down over the winter so even if the road were open, no one was getting through with any vehicle. As we got closer to the lake the more snow we encountered. In fact, at a few points I was pretty much sunk in knee deep. 

At the lake I had already decided I was going to fly my drone quickly. Go up, get a few pictures, and get down. There was a slight drizzle of rain coming down, but not overwhelming. I took the drone up and flew over some of the lake. 

I flew it back and took the above picture. I was going to do a little more flying over the lake at a lower level, but then the rain started to kick in a little more. I would have liked to have taken a picture of the lake without all the cloud cover around and the sun out, but that was not in the cards on this day.

I ended up flying my drone a few more times that weekend with the wind really blowing. I was kind of fortunate I did not lose the drone, but I had waited many months to fly again. Looking back now I will probably never fly in any type of rainy conditions or that type of strong wind ever again. 

So that ends my flight with winter conditions at Leavitt Lake. There is more to this drone story at Leavitt Lake, but I am going to wait until the beginning of January to tell the rest of the story.