Broads Fork – Part I
I would guess that there is some historical significance to the name, but I haven’t been able to identify it yet…but Broads Fork itself is located about four miles into Big Cottonwood Canyon, which is just south and east of Salt Lake City, and is one of the three or four main canyons that lead into the Wasatch Mountain front that is the eastern border for the Salt Lake Valley. The trail is reported to be just over four and a half miles in length from the parking lot to the cirque, or bowl-shaped meadow at the end, and gains just over 2,000 feet in elevation.
I’m not sure of the exact length of this portion of the trail, but it starts out as something resembling a logging trail and then turns into a single track that winds through very thick brush that is often waist to shoulder high….
I haven’t been able to identify these flowers in any of the sources I have at hand, but they look like a variation of hops to me….
UPDATE: While I was out hiking yesterday, Sunday July 15, I met Knick Knickerbocker from the Wasatch Mountain Club and gave him one of my blog cards. He emailed me this morning after reading this post to tell me that these flowers are called Mountain Horsemint…and the taxonomic name is something like Agastache urticifolia…if anyone wanted to know that. Thank you again, Knick. 
This was the first view of what the on-line literature calls the “lower meadow” in Broads Fork. After climbing through old-growth pine forest and then a thick stand of aspen and the brush that I mentioned above, the trail makes a sharp turn around a rise in the terrain and this panorama is suddenly in front of you…it is so unexpected…breath-taking, jaw-dropping, however you want to describe it.
This is the view looking to the left of the above meadow….
The trail proceeds through the meadow and immediately into a stand of aspen and pines, again with the thick brush on each side…slowly climbing higher and higher as it makes its way out of this lower meadow and on toward the upper meadow.
When I’m hiking, especially when I’m on a trail for the first time, I frequently stop and turn around to take a look at the trail coming from the opposite direction…it helps with orientation on the way back if I will be taking the same route. It’s amazing sometimes to see what’s behind you as you come out of the woods, arrive at the top of a ridge, or otherwise gain a dramatically different view of your surroundings than you had only moments before…. This is the view I encountered upon leaving the thick aspen that covers the side of the bowl where the lower meadow is situated. I stood on the rise in the trail as it makes its entry into the upper meadow and turned around….
Here’s an infrequent ”people picture” offered to demonstrate scale…. It’s rather difficult to feel significant or important out here…the notions of “Self” and “Me” seem to disolve somewhere between the first few steps on the trail…. This photo was taken near that rise in the trail mentioned above, but a little further down and facing into the second meadow, and with a nearly full view of the rest of the fork or gulch.
And this is a wider view that encompasses more of the area to the right of the location in the above photograph…I understand the peak in the middle to be Sunrise Peak, the one on the left to be Dromedary Peak, and the one in the upper right of the photo to be the western peak of the Twin Peaks set. The western summit has been measured at 11,330 ft and the eastern summit at 11,328 ft in elevation. These peaks are reported to be the tallest of the Wasatch Mountains that border Salt Lake City.
More to follow…in Broads Fork – Park II.
Windows and Wood – Part II
In a comment on my earlier post, Windows and Wood, Andy (from LensScaper) suggested that I treat some of the photos with a gritty B&W finish and see how they look. I think it was an excellent idea….
Historic Church Door
The State of Utah’s historical marker informs us that this door opens to the Trinity African Methodist Episcopal (AME) Church…built in 1909 and restored in 1976. It is located at 239 East on 600 South, in Salt Lake City, Utah, USA. The marker also states that the church was “organized during the 1880s…and has served as a focus of black (sic) religious, social, and cultural activity in Utah from territorial days to the present.” This is another door image inspired by Mike Fiveson, from Mike’s Look at Life.
gray cat from the green house on the corner…
“…somewhere between here and somewhere else.” I finally saw the cat again, but haven’t seen the old man lately…and have never seen them together. Could he/they be shape-shifting…? Please see the earlier post to make at least half-sense of what I’m writing about here. “a green house on the corner”
Brick Door and Window
Another door photo inspired by Mike and his look at life - with a twist….
This building is a couple blocks down the same road from the Church/Barn Door photo and appears to be from the same era. It appears to be used for music instruction, as I have seen children of all ages arriving and leaving with their cased instruments at all times of the morning and afternoon…from a regular door on the front of the building.
Vintage Modified
This is another door inspired by Mike, from Mike’s Look at Life. A novice door collector myself, I was looking for something that a connoisseur would approve of…and found this on the backside of a building on the industrial side of Salt Lake City. The bricks were painted in a faded beige and the door was actually pretty and worn, but when I viewed it on the computer, it was too washed-out…and no matter how much I manipulated and processed the photo, it seemed to lack the vitality and old-school charm that it had in “real life.” This pencil rendering is the most justice I could do for it…the texture is there and you can almost feel a splinter piercing the skin of your hands as you run them over the beautiful wood. It appears that the lower portion of the door has been modified to allow the louver panel to be placed in the center, facilitating the exhaust or circulation of air when evaporative coolers are operating during the warmer months…you can see plywood sheets that have been cut and placed on each side of the louvers…very clearly not part of the original door.
3/21/12 1905hrs – SUPPLEMENTAL INFO: It appears that my wording above may have been misleading or otherwise eaily misunderstood…the “pencil rendering” is not of my doing. I did not draw the pencil sketch of the below door. When I mentioned that I was trying to manipulate the photo to remove the washed-out and pale appearance, I used Picassa to add colors and shadows and other effects to the photo…none of them were satisfactory to me…so I ended-up using Picassa to turn the picture into a pencil sketch rendering of the second photo below. Please forgive me if I led you to think otherwise. I haven’t the skill to even begin to draw something as beautiful or detailed as this picture.
On second thought, maybe the original doesn’t look too bad…here’s the way it looks from the dock to the camera to the computer, and now to you…maybe I should leave well-enough alone….
Church/Barn Door…?
The image was collected on inspiration by Mike and his look at life…doors being a recurrent theme in his blog. I’ve been walking past this door and its building for over a year on my lunch-time walks…and have been wondering at the building for the entire time. It is located in a central city neighborhood in Salt Lake City and appears to have been built in the very early part of the last century. The whole structure reminds me of barns that I used to see when I lived in Germany, but there are windows on the side of the building (on the right side and perpendicular to the side viewed in this photo) that are rather tall and arching…as would be found on a church. Regardless of what the building was in its former usefulness, it now appears to be only a relic of that former time and used to house assorted junk and other items that simply have not been hauled-away yet.
Salt Lake City Squirrel
Hmm…I’m not aware of any legends or folk-lore from the early pioneers that involve crops being saved by squirrels or anything like that…no Miracle of the Squirrels…but I was lacking a particularly creative title for these photos, so I borrowed the earlier one from the sea-gulls…I don’t think they’ll mind…and I hope you won’t either.
I rounded a corner in Liberty Park on my lunch-time walk yesterday and heard this guy scolding someone, or otherwise chatting up a storm. As I stood there and snapped a dozen or so photos, it became clear that it was scolding…and it was directed at me. You can tell through the photos that the squirrel’s curiosity was piqued…and then his patience began to wane…resulting in the last photo where he was looking downright threateningly at me…insisting in his squirrel fashion that I desist with the photo-taking and continue onward with my walk…. “You only have so much time for your walk, right? So get on with it…!”
Winter doesn’t seem to have been too harsh for this little guy….
“Aren’t you done yet? You said ‘just one more’ before you took the last one?”
“Ok, that was fun…now go away!”
Driving in Snow
I find that one of the main hazards of driving in snow happens after the snow has fallen, the roads have been plowed, the immediate sky has cleared, and the clouds are gathering again over the mountains to loose another load of the white stuff. It’s rather distracting…in a beautiful way. It’s kind of hard to keep one eye on the car in front of you while using the other eye to keep the mountains lined-up properly in the view-finder…with the camera pointing out the side window…. After several anxious moments and a few close calls, it seemed more prudent to simply pull to the side of the road and take a few seconds longer to make it home.
This is Mount Olympus…a rather gorgeous part of the Wasatch Mountain range in any weather…
Somewhere around the cloud-filled bowl we can find Bells Peak and Lone Peak on a less cloudy day…
This is historic Wheeler Farm in front of Twin Peaks…
This is also part of Wheeler Farm…just to the left of the above picture…and with the afore-mentioned Mount Olympus in the background…
And this is Twin Peaks again…too pretty not to look at one more time….
These were all taken on my way home from work today…traveling south on 900 East, from around 4800 South to 6000 South, in the greater area of Salt Lake City, Utah, USA. I suppose the streets actually went through the towns/cities of Murray and Cottonwood Heights…-ish…or something like that.
We had somewhere between three and five inches of snow last night, depending on how and where you might measure the pretty white stuff…and have a 100% chance of getting 2-4 more inches tonight…so they say….
