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.
