The Office...

A few pictures while on the job.

Baby Juncos!!

Solo Mission

Over the hills to the East Side. What, what! A little weekend excursion if you will.
Can we take a moment to remember that it is nearly the end of June and there is still a ton of snow, particularly at the higher elevations. Yeah, it's crazy. Lakes are still frozen. Really? Where is summer?

On the other side.
Mono Lake! I do love me some tufas. For those of you that aren't on the up and up as far as tufas are concerned...they are the crazy limestone formations found along the lake shore. In addition to looking bizarre, I mostly just like to say their name. A lot.

The wind was whipping up the foam along the shore which was a new feature I hadn't seen before. Kind of fun.

The following day things calmed down, no more foam but nice reflections.

Green Creek.
Irises abound in the meadow at the beginning of the road. The road is a long winding dirt ordeal. Lovely and dusty. The best part is pretty much every vehicle I passed was some sort of large truck and there I am with my little bitty car. Nice.

Evidence of the beavers hard at work along the creek.

The road to my camp site...great...

Hiking up Green Creek to Green Lake.

And there's the lake...

There was a super sweet waterfall across the lake too but apparently that picture is M.I.A. at the moment. I'll have to add it later.

I attempted to continue on the trail up to East Lake but I ran into the snow line, lost the trail and after a couple precarious creek crossings decided maybe I should give up before something bad happened.

A few more iris pictures on the way out...

Precipitation in Many Forms

Alright, I understand that California has been in a drought for years now but this rain and snow business is just getting a little ridiculous. We're not going to make up the water deficit in a single year (or month) so let's just give it up and move on to spring and summer, shall we? Great, glad we talked about it.

Turns out we are having an exceptionally wet winter and at this point, spring. The past few weeks it has rained and snowed and rained some more. The plants seem to appreciate it (for the most part) and everything is still very green which admittedly is nice to look at...when it's not raining. In fact, last year at this point, I'm pretty sure things were well on their way to being dried out and crispy. As they should be! I am ready for warmer weather to show up any day now. The recent trend is for it to rain most of the week and then the weekends are gorgeous. Cool in terms of a weekend, but not so cool if you're trying to get paid and can't work when it's raining. Very un-cool actually.

Ok, fine, so the snow last week wasn't all bad. Obviously it gave me something to take pictures of. Although, looking at them now it appears I was stalking the apple tree in the backyard. Hmmm...We started out with rain followed by an interesting snow/rain combo and eventually full on snow. This was all a little surprising considering the elevation of Groveland is only 2,800ft and it is/was the end of April. But snow it did. For a while there the snow flakes were gigantic. Quite possibly the biggest ones I've ever seen. Quarter sized at least. HUGE!!

Over the course of a couple of hours we had a nice little coating of snow going...

Did I mention it's APRIL...the end of it...What is this?!?

Oh, what's that? The backyard...covered in snow.

Excessive precipitation also makes for, umm, shall we say, precarious driving conditions. Mud and snow are always a good time. Getting out of them is even more fun.
Purple Jeep Liberty = hardcore.
Riiight.
What's even better is when you are obviously stuck and some guy drives by in a big truck, speeds up while passing you, thus spraying mud everywhere and doesn't stop. Nice.
Hey guy, you're a winner! We didn't need you anyway. Pssh.
This is what spring SHOULD look like:

And, technically, that is pretty much what it looked like a couple hours later. The snow melted and the sun came out for a brief moment. We contemplated whether or not we should go to work or if it was going to rain again. I think we did go to work...yeah, and it hailed on us. It was awesome.

Naturally, these pictures are from this weekend...hence the sunshine factor.

Currently, it is....wait for it...can you guess??...RAINING! Maybe pouring is the more appropriate term. If this keeps up I'm going to consider growing rice or something that requires absurd amounts of water. And maybe start studying frogs or fish while I'm at it...
I'll keep you posted.