Brad Sondahl's blog

Brad's Blog

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Feb. 3
February came in a like a lion, with 50 mph winds and temperatures in the 40's. I had to do some shoveling before the storm hit, and the snow was still a foot thick everywhere. After the windstorm there was only 4 inches of snow in most places that weren't snowfree... A couple of doors on sheds were damaged by the wind, but none of the pottery in the outside display blew over...

Feb. 8
I scheduled another program of stories from my freighthopping days in Hayden Idaho in April. This photo my brother took of me hitch-hiking, which he used for his job with the Faribault Daily News, and which epitomizes why one might want to journey out of the midwest...

It also features my Johnny B Goode gunny sack guitar case.
Here's the photo I sent along for publicity taken today:

Note the dirty sleeves from my pottery workshirt...

Feb. 10
It was a blue sky day, so we walked over at Farragut Park to fully appreciate it. Walking back to the car through the Sunrise picnic area, we heard a loud rumbling with the sound of stones bonking together, that went on for about 30 seconds. It was a rockslide avalanche, from the cliffs of Bernard Peak. We only caught a glimpse through the ring of trees on our side of the lake, but the sound was amazing... Bernard Peak has a resident herd of mountain goats, so hopefully they were not out on the cliffs at the time... Here's a photo afterwards, with a flow of fog which might have been influenced by the air displaced in the rock slide....

Feb. 15
We went up to check out the icicles at the ridge overhang the other day. So much snow is gone now that it was more traversing the steep moss and stick covered slope that made it difficult...

The cold nights and days in the mid 30's have allowed the icicles to regrow. I think the big windstorm did in the largest of them previously, as chunks of the old icicles could be found below the area...

Since there's still a couple inches of dense snow in Spirit Lake, it was good to visit the Spokane Gaisler Conservatory yesterday and get a little piece of the tropics, or at least a glimpse ahead into spring...

Leap Year
February is always a challenging month, for the winter blahs if not the challenges of winter themselves. We've had little snow this month, so it remains in piles and patches and shady places only. The robins have been back for about two weeks.
We seem to get over to Farragut Park around sunset, so I try to capture the beauty, but it's as challenging as it is ephemeral... Cameras read for an average of light, so sunsets come out too light, and colors too dim. I'm pretty sure my camera has a scene setting to adjust for this, but I tend to do it with photo editing software.. I won't bother to post the before/after editing comparison, just the results:

We call this alpenglow (which may be a little more technical than this), when the sun sneaks under the cloud layer just before sunset to light up the ridges with golden light... It happens pretty frequently around here, since it is dryer and less cloudy 10 miles west at the Idaho Washington border, which creates the lane for light to come through...

This is the breakwater and boat dock at Farragut. Its level is controlled by dams on the Pend O'Reille river, hitting a low mark around now to have capacity to reduce flooding as the spring runoff progresses.
And today on a hike up the ridge, the weather was generally good, but to the north a squall was forming:

books read

The Goodbye Look by Ross MacDonald. Today he's one of the lesser known detective fiction writers, but he was top of the line in the 1960's. His private eye, Archer (drawn from the other half of Sam Spade's firm) gets more involved in the situation than most detectives. And the plots are complicated enough that my weak memory makes them challenging. But it's still a fun ride...

Twisted Twenty-six by Janet Evanovich. Not only does she manage to keep the latest installment interesting, but even makes it a (spoiler alert) cliff hanger... A. Conan Doyle threw his protagonist over a cliff long before this...

The Wanted by Robert Crais I read this a couple years ago and checked it out thinking I hadn't, but it read as well the second time as it did the first--one of the few blessings of aging memory... Detective thriller...

Imperfect Union by Steve Inskeep. I did wonder why the NPR news anchor would write about Jessie and John Fremont, when he's clearly immersed in the present day. He made a compelling biography out of two seminal but flawed characters in our western history...

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