I’m not here.

When I woke up this morning I took a double-take, “Is that snow?” Indeed it had snowed again — our flowers and budding bushes and trees endured another bout of Mother Nature’s confusing spring.

The poor crocus, so exciting days ago, buried in snow.

The recently transplanted blueberries bore the snow well — already the sunnier surroundings appear to be paying dividends.

The witch hazel, even covered in snow, has the coolest new growth leaves.

By evening, we were snow free — what will tomorrow bring?

Crocus!

We accomplished a lot of yard work today: pruning the fruit trees, transplanting blueberries, planting early season greens under a cloche. It felt great to be working in the garden and the first crocus of the year added to the excitement.

We have mainly yellow and purple crocus in the yard, usually growing in little clusters. Growing solo out of a small rock wall, the color of this lone purple flower really popped.

The same flower taken from above.

The witch hazel has the most remarkable leaves, lacy in the spring, orange and red in the fall.

Some time ago I read a review about Window Seat and it stuck in my head. I was on a plane this morning and decided to try my hand.

I was fortunate to get a window (I generally choose an aisle) or this would have been a bit more difficult. Of course the wing over which I sat interfered with a clear, wide shot but the wing does help with the composition. At one point, while I was getting ready to shoot, we hit some severe turbulence which made the chop shooting the eagles feel placid. The photos aren’t geocoded, bummer — it would have been cool to set the exif altitude data. The photos also required some significant post-processing to remove the over-saturated blues.

The Cascades have a number of volcanoes which just pop up out of the ground in isolation, unlike more contiguous mountain ranges — it’s kinda cool to see from the sky — pop, pop, pop!

I’m almost positive this is Rainier, but it’s from a vantage point I’m not familiar.

A really cool sunset shown on Baker this evening.

While I was shooting some photos one of the sun deck walkers felt the same.

“Pretty cool, yeah?”

“Indeed.”

I already have hundreds of Rainier photos but I’m not tired of taking them yet.

I spent a day traveling to the Skagit River to view the eagles when all I really had to do was go to Fay Bainbridge — the park hosts a pair overlooking the Sound from their nest.

I know they’re hard to see on the tree to the far left but I wanted this shot.

One of the eagles decided to stretch their wings and soared around for a minute or two before coming back to the nest.

The real reason for the trip to Fay Bainbridge was to see the sun, catch some mountain views (Baker was visible, Rainier was not) and collect shells — this interesting one made it into a coat pocket.