Two things hit me as soon as I walked out the door for a late lunch walk today. The first was the smell. The wind was blowing in from a feedlot outside town again, and it was ripe. As in “oh Lord what hath I done to offend thee,” type ripe. Ugh. The second thing was the air pressure.
There is a storm system coming in that is going to drop the temperature back around freezing and dump even more goddamn snow this Thursday and Friday. I could literally feel the change in the air pressure pushing me down. My head throbbed.
The original plan was to cruise some back alleys near my home as HIG (Heavy Item Garbage) pickup is approaching in a couple of weeks, making this the prime time of year to find funky furniture parked out back of homes. You just can’t go wrong when you have a camera and a nasty 70s recliner to point it at. Well, the back alleys are all still mud soup from the current melt and did I mention the godawful stank? I retreated back inside.
I kept an eye out the window in the evening as sunset approached and the sky was starting to look interesting. Even better, I was able to poke my nose out the front door without feeling like I was getting a whiff of Jeffrey Dahmer’s playroom. There was still some “character” in the air, but it was tolerable. I hopped into Vlad the Impala, cruised five minutes north of town, and parked on the west side of the road in a large approach. I snagged the initial panoramic above and then waited for the sun to drop below the horizon.
The sky looks dramatic, but the truth is the clouds were a grayish-white through most of the sunset and they only flashed orange for a minute or two at most. Next, they faded to a pale yellow before disappearing. A bit of pinkish purple alpenglow popped up and just as quickly disappeared on the southern horizon, and not in a spot that was easily photographed.
I’m just happy that I was able to end the day holding a camera and that a few good skylife images fell out of its memory afterward. I am thankful for this day.
All images captured using my mobile phone. It was a grab and snap kind of day.
