The first week of summer 2019 included several short walks and a nice hike over Firescrew and Cardigan from the north. There were some colorful sunsets, a bit of accidental wildlife, and irises in bloom. Here I’m showing photos from four of the days of the week.
After lunch on June 21, Jann and I visited our favorite farm stand in Sutton. Driving along Keyser Street, we were surprised to see a pair of loons with a pair of chicks in Kezar Lake very close to the road. The light was terrible, a common occurrence this day, but I got a few quick photos from the roadside.
We decided to take the slow road to Warner — the mostly dirt North Road. A short detour took us to Beaver Pond, where I got a distant photo of a mother wood duck with two young.
Back on the North Road there was a small falls in Stevens Brook. The light was too bright to blur the water with a single exposure, so I took 4 photos hand-braced and then applied a “mean stack mode” in Photoshop to blend them. Perhaps, sometime I will write a blog about this technique.
Jann and I hiked to the Dalton Covered Bridge in Warner. There we met a young man out for a motorcycle ride, “trying to convince myself not to sell it”.
We found both wild and planted yellow iris in bloom as summer began.
Late in the day we witnessed a very colorful sunset over Lake Sunapee.
Here are more photos of that sunset.
On June 24, I switched from yellow to blue flag iris. During a walk with Jann in Sunapee and Newport, I photographed the Sugar River. Both of these photos were taken before 7:45 AM.
That evening the sky was colorful, but not as dramatic as a few days earlier.
On June 26, I hiked with three friends from New Colony Road in Orange, up the Mowglis Trail over Firescrew Mountain, and then over Cardigan. I left much earlier than I needed to pick up Gerry and got two photos before 6 AM. The top one is Otter Pond in Sunapee. The second is along Shaker Street in Sutton.
We met Bruce and Alex and headed up the New Colony Road, passing a green frog, Lithobates clamitans if you care, along the way. It had rained a lot the night before so the road and our trail up the mountain were quite wet in places. Other than having to negotiate the water and mud, it was a beautiful day with almost no wind, a rarity for Cardigan.
We reached a beaver pond. At the top right of the photo on the left below you might be able to make out our destination, Mount Cardigan, in the distance. It is not the obvious “hill”, which is Firescrew Mountain, but the tiny bump partly hidden by the tops of the pines. On the right is a magnified view from the same spot.
Part way up we got a nice view of Mount Moosilauke, seen on the left side of this photo. The hill in front of it and to the right is Mount Carr.
We reached the Firescrew summit and headed down, then up again, to Cardigan. Along the way was a nice “pond” reflecting the clouds. When we reached the summit of Cardigan, I made a photo of the tall cairns leading down the West Ridge Trail, a trail we would not take.
The photo above is a black-and-white version of a photo of Mounts Lafayette and Lincoln from Cardigan.
I made a 10-photo panorama of low plants and clouds and a 5-photo pan of a young couple near the summit.
When the couple hiked down I got another photo that shows the cairns better, and their size.
We took the South Ridge Trail down. This is my favorite trail up Cardigan, because one gets a great view of the summit from most of the last half of the climb. But it is much harder going down since it has some steep, tricky places. Here is our group on South Peak with the summit in the background.
I took more photos looking back up as we worked our way down.
The rocks and small plants made a nice pattern as we completed a great hike, just after noon. There was one person on the summit when we arrived, but many more kept coming while we were there. At the base the parking lot was nearly full. It was a beautiful day.
Before arriving home I made some photos of the beautiful clouds over Mount Kearsarge that graced the sky this day.
The day ended with a nice, though not spectacular, sunset.
Early in the morning of July 27, there was some nice fog resulting in a quiet, moody photo.
Jann and I hiked in Sunapee and Newport. I titled this photo, starting young.
Jann pointed out an impressive wood pile to me. Ready for winter, which will come all too soon.
Mount Sunapee with great clouds helped conclude a great first week of summer.
All but two photos in this blog were taken with my new favorite “non-serious” camera, a Sony RX10 IV.
As I worked on this blog, thunderstorms moved through the area several times causing me to unplug, exercising the utmost caution to protect my hard drives.
This next week promises to be sunny and hot with perhaps another rainy weekend. So goes it in this wonderland where many would give anything to spent 50 years, as Jann and I will have, as of next February.