When I was a kid growing up I could hear the train out my bedroom window every evening and morning. I loved the sound of the distant train. When we moved to Ashland in 2000 I was happy to hear the sound of the train in the distance once again. However, we soon upgraded our windows to the double-pane variety which meant no more train sounds except in the summer when we left our windows open. Now we don’t even get that as the trains have stopped rolling through town for the past few years. I don’t know why but it has been a long time since a train came through Ashland.

As I was riding my bike over the overpass in town I saw a guy walking on the train tracks playing (or pretending to anyway) an electric flying V guitar. I quickly stopped and pulled out my camera. However, I hadn’t reloaded my SD card and by the time I did so he was already under me. So I was left with the above view of empty tracks instead. No train, no guitarist. No one is even on the bike path that runs along the tracks on the left side of this photograph.

The way my camera is pointing leads to Medford, Oregon (followed by Eugene, Portland, Seattle, etc.). The way the guitarist was walking is California, which if he followed the tracks he would have ended up in about 15 miles later.

Posted on May 8th, 2009 under only in ashland, places. Tags: spring, valley. Comments: 3

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: home, mountains, snow, sunrise, valley, winter. Comments: 5

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, home, mountains, sunrise, valley. Comments: 2

I woke up and looked out my window last week to the above view. After snapping this picture I hopped in the shower. When I got out of the shower the fog had risen another few hundred feet and nothing could be seen, but fog, until several hours later.

Posted on November 17th, 2008 under nature. Tags: clouds, fog, home, mountains, nature, skywatch, sunrise, valley. Comments: 3