Leon Turnbull Photography

After work on Friday, I drove up to the mountains to find some Fall Colors. Last year at this time, Monitor Pass was at full peak for color. This year, not so much. It was still very green everywhere. We had a very warm and hot September here, and thus the leaves have not yet started to turn yet, but I was hoping Monitor Pass would have a bit more color as that area usually turns first. It didn’t. Well, they say it is supposed to really cool off this week, so by next weekend it should hopefully be much better.

When I arrived at the Aspen grove at the top of the pass, I found a large group (or two) of campers. They had their four wheelers all lined up and were making lots of obnoxious noise. Argh! Firstly, I think it is a strange place to be camping, there is not much around here (but if they’re just there to tear up all the trails with their four wheelers, I guess that makes sense – argh again!). Secondly, whenever I have been up here before, I have never seen very many people here. Maybe one or two (at the most) other people camping is all I have seen. Thirdly, they were completely blocking the road where I wanted to go! I could not drive around them where I wanted, and they were being too obnoxious and likely drunk, so I didn’t want to walk right through their camp. Instead, I made my way around to the other side of the grove. I found this scene with the moon rising over the trees and glowing in the late evening light. These trees had some yellow colors starting to show, but still were mostly green.

Here’s another one from my nice sunset evening at Folsom Lake last week, taken a bit earlier in the evening. There was no foreground I could use at all, with the lake so low the shoreline is rather ugly, so I just lined up my camera on the edge of the water and used the reflection as the foreground. It was a challenge to keep the kids from throwing rocks into the water near my camera, which would then mess up the reflection with ripples in the water. Sigh.

On Sunday, I went out again for sunset, and back to Lake Clementine. A couple weeks ago, I took my son Jadon on a hike to the lake in search of a sunset view overlooking the lake, but we ended up at the wrong spot and sunset was a dud. This time, I found the right spot, but sunset was again a dud, this time because the cloud cover was just too thick. Strike two.

I went by myself this time, because Jadon did not feel like coming on the hike with me. I did find the right spot, though, and I apologize to my friend, Rob, for stealing his secret location. But I did really like his photo from here, and I really wanted to come here to get a similar shot myself. Besides, I am sure he has stolen a secret waterfall location from me, once or twice. ha ha. Anyway, I’ll have to return again here some day, since the sunset colors just never materialized.

It is a bit of a hike up to this spot, about 1.5 miles, and I admit I was a bit nervous hiking back in the dusky light. I walked as fast as I could to try to get back to the car before dark. I kept hearing noises in the bushes, and the terrain is such that it would be a great area for a mountain lion to hide out above the trail and pounce down on me. The noises I heard were probably just birds, I guess, as I never did see anything. Except once I did hear a very large noise in the bushes, and when I looked up, I saw that it was just a deer. Phew. Well, I made it back to the car in one piece, and before it got dark.

On Saturday I had plans to get up for a very early morning sunrise hike in the mountains. But I just couldn’t get up and out of bed. I just wasn’t into it, and just felt more like sleeping in. That put me in a bit of a sour mood for the rest of the day because I knew I should have forced myself to get up. I’m sure I would have had a fabulous morning had I done so.

Well, if I couldn’t get out for sunrise, there was always a possibility for sunset, if the weather co-operated. And at first, it looked pretty interesting. There was a lot of cloud cover, and we even had rain, thunder, and lightning throughout the morning. And it was still very warm out, hot even. Strange stuff. We went up to the El Dorado Hills library, where there was some sort of pirate festival going on. It was kinda strange too, but the kids enjoyed it. Jadon and Nekoda dressed up as pirates themselves, and they looked very cool. We met up there with our friends from church so the four kids could enjoy the festivities together, then we went out to lunch together.

In the evening, my wife had a planned “girls night out”, so I had the kids by myself. I had hopes to take them somewhere easy enough to enjoy the sunset, and I could take photographs. But in the afternoon, the clouds dissipated, at least in the direction where the sun was setting. It did not look like it would be a very good sunset after all, so I told the kids we weren’t going on any hike after all, and I said I would just take them out for ice cream. They liked that, but while we were enjoying that together, I had a change of heart. I thought maybe the sunset wouldn’t be too bad after all. There was still time, so we whipped on back home, I grabbed my camera, and we drove out to Folsom Lake. It is a bit of a walk from the parking area down to the lake, and by now it was almost sunset time, so I told the kids they had to walk as fast as they could to the lake. They did, and we made it in good time with only one fall along the way (Nekoda). I set up along the lake with my camera, while the kids gathered some rocks to throw into the lake (away from where I was shooting, I told them). It turned out to be a very beautiful sunset after all, and this is no doubt the best photo I have taken of Folsom Lake to date. I was very pleased that we were able to get out this evening.

Folsom Lake is pretty low again, now at 44 percent capacity. This is not really surprising or alarming, as it is now the end of summer. It is still higher than it was at this time last year. Nonetheless, it is a huge difference from earlier this spring when it was almost full. The Old Salmon Falls bridge is visible again, you can see it in this photo. This location, Salmon Falls, used to be an old townsite of course, that was flooded when the Folsom Dam was built. You can still see remnants of the old townsite in addition to the notable bridge. I mention this all because of my daughter Nekoda. She is so funny sometimes. While I was taking photographs, the kids were (in addition to throwing rocks) discussing the fate of the people who used to live here. Nekoda had it all figured out. Apparently, wolves and tigers came down from the hills, and threw all the people into the lake where they then drowned. Their footprints are still all over the place. Actually, they are really just dog prints but don’t tell her that.

This is from our recent trip to Santa Cruz. After lunch, we all headed down to the beach to play. The kids got extremely sandy and dirty of course, getting sand in every conceivable part of their body. Oh well, they had fun, and that’s the important part.

When we first arrived, I headed down to one end of the beach where I saw some pelicans diving for food very close to the shore. There were a lot of pelicans here, and we saw them diving during the whole time we were there. However, as soon as I arrived close, they seemed to just go away and didn’t return. There were, however, some long billed curlews here, and they let me get pretty close to take photos of them.

The beach was very crowded as one would expect on a sunny Sunday afternoon. But as I was walking down the beach, I saw a dead sea lion in the middle of the beach. The weird part about it, though, is that there were kids playing right around it. Geepers, I think I’d want to keep my kids well away from something like that. Gross.

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