Wednesday, December 21, 2022

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.