
A little late-day excitement as a stallion keeps his mare away from another stallion.
Can’t go wrong with that glow … or that background … or those mustangs! 🙂

A little late-day excitement as a stallion keeps his mare away from another stallion.
Can’t go wrong with that glow … or that background … or those mustangs! 🙂
Not many of the mustangs were visible yesterday, but I thought the snow deserved more than one pic before it melted and gave way to dry, brown slopes once again. Green is coming up, but slowly. 🙂

From Chrome’s Point looking northeast-ish across Spring Creek Basin – fresh snow and fresh tracks.

Looking up the Spring Creek arroyo to its source: McKenna Peak.

Hazy in the snow fog, McKenna Peak, submarine ridge and Brumley Point in the distance. And rich, wet, wonderful snow. Moisture much needed.

For whatever reason, this (paraphrased) song comes into my head every time I’m out with – usually! – staid, laidback, solid, never-gets-in-a-rush-to-go-anywhere Skywalker. 🙂 (Sorry about the earwig if you know what I’m talking about!)
Sometimes, when you’re feeling good and the weather is the right mix of a bit nippy and not yet too hot for such shenanigans (and when your bands also are feeling frisky on the way to the water hole!), it feels good to gallop across the range (and, of course, you don’t want to be left behind!)!

This perspective of McKenna Peak (right) and Temple Butte is from quite a bit closer than yesterday’s post of Raven. The ground also was quite a bit muddier – because it’s higher in elevation and closer to the roll of the snow-bringing clouds when we get snow – back in this far eastern region of Spring Creek Basin than even the northernish area shown in yesterday’s post.
It was a pleasant surprise to see the heads of Sundance’s mares, then the big guy himself, pop up over a small ridge. It was a bit of a slog to get to them, but I’m grateful for the moisture of that muddy ground!

Ravens – the winged kind – are wheeling and soaring and diving, ready for spring.
Raven – our grounded girl – is soaking up sweet sunshine in a land of quickly melting snow.

A good deal of that fabulous snow is now melted, but who doesn’t appreciate that scenery? And the background is pretty nice, too. 😉

We still have a nice cover of snow … but it’s melting rapidly, and we have temps near 60 – SIXTY – in the forecast! The parched ground is soaking up the snow super-fast.
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In another note, thanks to a comment from reader TamrahJo, I remembered this pic that I took with my phone a couple of days ago while snowshoeing out to a couple of bands in the basin:

The first “shape” I saw was the big “heart.” It looks like someone drew the lines with a stick or something, but I promise you that that “someone” was NOT me, nor was there any evidence at all of another human being out there (there’s almost never any other evidence of humans hiking where I hike).
I can’t explain it, but with all the hate rampant in the world, I’d like to offer this image and what it (might) represent (to humans, anyway) as a simple antidote: From Mother Nature to the world, with love.

We definitely have snow – and mud when the sunshine starts working on all that snow. 🙂
The important part of that is that … we definitely have SNOW, which is to say that we have moisture.
It is SO good to have moisture. I’m sure Temple would agree!

That’s not a trick of the light, and unless you’re completely distracted by the lovely Gaia, you see the snow on McKenna Peak and the snow on the ground at her hooves.
That’s right, folks: For the first time in more than a very long month and a half, we got snow. Moisture, in any form, is extremely much super very totally needed this winter, and although it wasn’t a whole heckuva lot, it was *something* … and we need a whole lotta wet somethings. News broke this week that “the megadrought gripping the American West is so severe that it’s become the driest two decades in the region in at least 1,200 years – and drought conditions will likely persist for years.”
Yikes. (And a bunch of other swear words.)
The snow dampened the excruciatingly long dust trails raised by vehicles on local roads, but by mid-afternoon, those local roads were dry or nearly so. In potentially other good news, next week brings some more chances for snow. Please keep your fingers crossed for us, and dance a dance or two. 🙂