I think I’m going to stop here.

The few reddish-brown trees are the maples that have not yet lost all their leaves. But the colors are muted and the leaves are drying. The woods now look entirely like pines (they are mostly hemlocks).

Perhaps this winter I will take a camera into the woods if it snows. It’s magical and beautiful but it’s also pretty cold and muddy.

Driving home from Pittsburgh on Saturday I pulled over a the spot where I pulled over last week and shot this:

Now it looks like this:

The hills over Altoona used to be one of my favorite sights, when I did early morning drives to the airport down in Washington. It’s a long ridge – about 20 miles long – and it’s high enough that a distinctive frost-line often forms. You clearly see a line where there is snow, and where the temperature got high enough for it to melt. I used to see that and think “oh, shit!” because 30 miles down the road I had to cross the mountain pass at Amaranth, and that’s quite a bit higher. There have been times I’d go up the hill for a few miles and be in blizzard conditions until I slowly crept over the bridge of the mountain and down the other side far enough for the sun to come out and everything was beautiful again.