This is a sight that is very, very rare in Ashland. We get snow a few times a year, but when it snows there are clouds. By the time we get clear skies the snow has disappeared or will melt very rapidly. The night prior to the taking of this picture we got snow and then the clouds moved on. The temperature went below 0 degrees Fahrenheit (about -20 Celsius) so the snow wasn’t going anywhere.

While this may look like a sunrise picture I actually took it well before sunrise. I left the shutter open for 15 seconds. If you click on the photo for a bigger view you can even see some stars. The part of town you can see the lights coming from is near I-5, Exit 14 (14 miles north of the California border).

Posted on December 18th, 2008 under nature. Tags: mountains, snow, sunrise, valley, winter. Comments: 5

Now that the leaves are gone from my Japanese Maple the sky must make up the difference in lost color.

Posted on December 14th, 2008 under nature. Tags: mountains, skywatch, sunrise, trees, winter. Comments: 3

We’ve had lots of foggy mornings lately. I grabbed my camera to take the above picture not so much for the fog as to get the bright oranges and reds on the Japanese Maple tree in the bottom of the picture. Unfortunately, if I focused on the leaves and had them show up in true color in the picture the sky (and everything else) would turn white and you couldn’t see the fog or mountain tops. It was either colorful leaves or sky/mountains/fog. I couldn’t get both in a single picture even though that is what my natural eyes were seeing. Oh well, it’s still a decent photograph anyway.

Posted on December 1st, 2008 under nature. Tags: fog, mountains, sunrise, valley. Comments: 2

I took this picture with a cruddy little camera out an airplane window a few years back at about 7 a.m. I was on my way to Mexico. Ashland is right below me. I had just taken off from the Medford airport and was heading south. The tracks my flight were making can be seen most mornings in Ashland. The higher mountain sticking through the clouds is Mt. McLaughlin, a mountain I climbed the prior fall.

Posted on November 25th, 2008 under nature, places. Tags: clouds, mountains, skywatch, sunrise. Comments: 5