Fishing in the Rogue River
As each day gets a little darker and colder than the last this time of year it is fun to dip into the archives and remember what it’s like to go fishing in the nearby Rogue River in August.
Ashland Daily Photo - A picture a day from beautiful Ashland, Southern Oregon USA in the Rogue Valley
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Archive for nature
Bull Gap Trail
Today’s picture goes along with yesterday’s. It was taken a couple of months after yesterday’s photo in 2004. My kids and I were hiking on Bull Gap Trail. In the background (upper left) you can see Wagner Butte.
Bull Gap is a trail that leads you right up to the ski lodge on Mt. Ashland. I’ve hiked it a couple of times and ridden my bike down it a half dozen or so times. If you want to bike down it you should ride your bike up the main road to the lodge or you can ride up some fire roads to get there. If you start from Ashland you’ll be in for a long day. If you don’t have the time you can drive a car up to four corners and ride up from there.
Both Bull Gap and Wagner Butte are in the Siskiyou Mountains. From both you can view the Cascade Mountain Range.
Hike to Wagner Butte
I’ve been showing some pictures of Mexico on my other blog this week. Most are of Ashland’s sister city, Guanajuato. By searching for those pictures, I’ve discovered some others of Southern Oregon like the last two days’ photos.
Today’s picture is of a hike I took with my kids several years ago in May. Snow was still on some of the local mountains even though everything had turned green. The hike was to Wagner Butte, a place that can be seen from Ashland. We didn’t make it all the way there, but I went back a month later without my kids to complete the trip. (Wagner Butte Hike is over 10 miles round trip with an elevation gain of 2,200 feet.) This photograph was taken after just a mile (which is actually the steepest part of the whole hike).
We would have hit snow long before we reached Wagner Butte anyway so the intent on that day wasn’t to do the whole thing. To get to the trailhead you go through Talent, the town just north of Ashland. Best time to do it is late spring or summer as there can be tons of wildflowers.
Ashland from the air on a cloudy day
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.
Japanese Maples
The Japanese Maple trees in our backyard are going a bit crazy at the moment. Actually, the one I was sitting under to take the above picture has lost most of its leaves. The one farther away is hitting its peak and hasn’t lost any yet.
This is the photograph from outside. Tomorrow I’ll show you what it looks like from inside our sunroom (which can also be seen in the above picture on the right doing the reflecting).
Foggy sunrise
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.
Sea squirrel
Here is the little guy I talked about in yesterday’s blog entry. He was living out on this big rock in the ocean. There was grass (or maybe it was just moss) on the top of this rock but no trees. I’m not sure what he lived on. I doubt he scampers back into town on a regular basis since the rock is only connected to the beach for a brief part of the day. Even then it is probably a 40-yard scramble over a bunch of jagged rocks with water flowing between them. Then it’s another 20-yards of beach to the trees.
I suppose you could say he is a mini, non-human version of Ted Kaczynski, living life on his own terms, bucking the trends that his predecessor squirrels followed. I didn’t notice any manifestos or bombs in his possession however.
View from a rock in the ocean
At low tide on the Oregon coast you can walk out onto some of the large rocks in the ocean that are surrounded by water when the tide is higher. I took the above picture from one of those rocks. I was quite surprised to find a living friend out there who didn’t have wings and can’t swim (as far as I know). I’ll show you him next time.
Turning branches tree
What would be a fitting place for a crazy looking tree like this where every branch takes a wild turn? The Ashland Cemetery of course.
Fall wood pile
I took the above photograph a few weeks ago from my driveway. We have no fences between our house and the neighbor’s, but there is a wood pile that sort of separates the two properties. I like this shot because even though there are several inches of leaves on the ground, there are still plenty left in the trees too. With the storms of the past week, there are no longer many left in the tree. Time to get out the rake…