Inclement Weather.

We have a weather system moving through our area, with a lot of moisture and substantial winds.

This season has been dry enough that I welcome the rain, and expect to tolerate the rest of the mess – the wind, lowland flooding, etc. It isn’t a disaster if Nature in general benefits by it.

I cruised a bit this afternoon, hoping to find a bit of lushness between the raindrops. Perhaps some plump moss, drunk and luminescent, or the first red leaves of autumn, richly saturated by the conditions.

The going was slow and the pickings scant; the recent bloom of mushrooms was bloated and toppling, and the moss was full but lacking the regenerative spark of Spring.

I headed to higher ground, hoping to find the beginning of our seasonal color change.

I wound my way westward around Mount Greylock, our state’s highest peak, and caught this view of a wind farm in Hancock:

A steep front was rolling in from the southwest, and I hustled up the Greylock road from Route 8 to beat it to the summit.

The mixed hardwood forest passed by uneventfully as  I crept up the mountain with Gizmo affixed to my camera; my last trip up this road had given me an encounter with an owl, and I wanted to be ready for another such event. I wasn’t so blessed, but still, the slow pace and attentive eye turned my uphill ride into an appreciative survey of my surroundings.

I still had Gizmo on the box when I arrived at the summit to find it in dense clouds, and took this telephoto shot of a snag protruding from the boreal forest:

As so commonly happens in a photographer’s world, it wasn’t what I went looking for, but it’s what I got, and I just say “Thank you” for that.