After my last two ‘new moon’ trips having been snuffed out by the abundantly incessant wildfires throughout the West, the air finally cleared for about 36 hours so I ran up to Webster Pass (12,103′ MSL) in Summit County, CO. I hung the hammock between the 4Runner and the 6″ diameter wooden ‘Webster Pass info’ sign, and as dusk approached a large herd of mountain goats came to hang out with me. A total of 23 goats roamed around, chasing their young, slowly walking up to stare me in the face, perhaps wondering what the heck I was doing there so late?
Was able to capture a sequence of clouds moving over the valley below (looking toward Montezuma and Keystone), and composited it into a Terralapse image showing 4 minutes and 57 seconds of cloud movement after the sun had set. Haven’t finished processing the astro image yet.
One interesting thing I ran across was a small pine-looking tree–almost like a juniper bush–up around 12,600′ MSL. I’ve spent a lot of time above timberline here in Colorado over the last 20 years, and I’ve never seen such a sight this high up. Whether it’s some harbinger of climate change or an errant bush that received the benefit of one of Darwin’s theories I do not know, but it was quite an oddity.
