Jordan River morning….
I was driving around the Rose Park area of Salt Lake City yesterday morning looking for the access point to the Jordan River Walkway where I made this photograph a few years ago. I knew I was in the general area, but couldn’t remember exactly where it was…until I was actually leaving and returning home after having given-up the search.
It wasn’t really a sad moment, though, thinking that I would miss the occasion to photograph that bridge in the Fall, as I found myself in this wonderful location just five blocks north of where I originally wanted to go. There were no-parking signs along the street, so I parked at the Day-Riverside Library just west on 1000 North, took my time making photos from the street-bridge in both directions, and then walking a roughly half-mile loop south down to the next river-bridge and back.
Not bad for a little point-and-shoot camera….
Fall…memories….
It was probably a Sunday, because it usually was…September 23 of two years ago…hiking in the mountains of Little Cottonwood Canyon, just south and east of Salt Lake City, Utah…the Wasatch Mountains in Fall. I would say that it feels like a lifetime ago…with so many changes since then, but it was in my life…then…consistently, richly…and now it is in memories only.
did you ever…
…look at things is if you might never see them again…?
I imagine that we would see those things with a certain richness…
…one that would surpass the experience of when we first saw them.
I think it would be bittersweet, as well…
…for while we would be sad that we would never see them again, we would be joyous that we had ever beheld them at all….
Looking west in October
Captured in an image from my first few months in Utah, back in 2010, these are the Oquirrh Mountains that form the western geographic boundary of the Salt Lake Valley. While they are not much to look at for several months of the year, they do clean-up nicely with the clouds and snow.
Big Cottonwood Canyon in the Fall
This photo is from roughly two months ago, looking toward the east from the south side of Mount Raymond…. This peak is on the ridge between Millcreek Canyon to the north and Big Cottonwood Canyon to the south. On this particular Sunday, I climbed the trail in Porter Fork, rounded the back/south side of Mount Raymond, and then went through Baker’s Pass and down into Bowman Fork…which took me to about 1/4 of a mile from my starting point at the Porter Fork trail-head in Millcreek Canyon. This route around the mountain, up one fork, around the mountain, and down the other fork, is somewhere between eight and nine miles in length and has an elevation change of approximately 2,400 feet. I had been up Porter Fork a couple of times in the past, and in Bowman Fork only once, but had never taken the trail all the way around Mount Raymond…so this view was entirely new to me…and a wonderful surprise.
the orchard is empty
the orchard is empty and the fruit is all down and the trucks have driven away and left only their tire tracks in the grass and the delicate lingering fumes of their exhaust as a fine mist in the treetops, a filigree of vapor and chemical rind that leaves slowly and at the whim of the breeze. we put the ladders away, back in the barn where they will collect the seasons’ dust and cobwebs as they long for the touch of our hands and the trod of boots on their rungs in the night of the year
a quiet has returned to the place where the buzzing of bees and bird-song are the loudest sounds we hear and a fox peers tentatively from under the fence in the far west end and a man I know steps lightly on the morning stairs, down and down from the ancient painted house and into the yard as the newling morning sun peeks over the distant mountains and the crisp in yesterday’s air left in the evening breeze behind warm currents that lofted lazily into the yard and scooted the leaves yon and away. the quiet will be here for a long while and the trees will settle for their slumber and life abides and kindles a slow flame like a warm and hiding light…and the orchard is empty and the fruit is all down as we pray to our gods for a gentle winter and wet
Baptism by Fall
October, 2010…not the first in my life, but the first significant one in too many years….
Fall…Part Two and Three and Four and…
Somehow, we can’t leave the three to four inches of leaves all over the back yard…snow is coming and its melting and more snowing will turn the Fall beauty into a Spring nightmare of deep raking to get the leaf-slime out of the waking lawn…but there is nothing like the smell of raking the leaves…as odd as it sounds…so earthy and rich…and clean, too….
Scott's Place...Images and Words 