Summer Fog
It's a Saturday morning in early summer. It's humid, very cloudy, and we've had several downpours by 9:30am. A check of the forecast shows the rain is over but it will stay very cloudy, damp and humid all day. Do you stay inside or go outside? Outside of course - there is no such thing as an "inside day" on a weekend in June! Seriously, get a rain jacket on and go outside and do something different!
One of my favorite places to go on a cloudy, misty day in the summer is the forest. It just looks and feels totally different than on a sunny day. On this misty summer Saturday, I decided to hike and photograph at Hawk Mountain.
I spent four hours wandering the ridge top trails. I hiked in similar foggy damp conditions one winter day and wrote about it here. And while there were some similarities, the differences couldn't have been more dramatic.
Everything was a dark saturated green. The fog was bright and changing, moving among the trees, ferns, and rocks. The mountain laurel were near the end of their blooming, but still a dramatic white and pink among the dark green leaves and pale mist. The tree trunks were varying shades of black and gray depending on distance. The occasional breeze brought the sound (and wetness) of rainwater falling from leaves overhead. It looked prehistoric. I imagined this is what the land looked like hundreds of thousands of years ago. I even think the one tree trunk rising in the right half background of the photo above could easily be the long neck of a Brontosaurus as it looked up from munching some grass!
There were only a few people on the trail with me that day. Many more should have put on their rain jacket and hiking shoes and gone out there. They would have been well rewarded.
Other Hawk Mountain images are on the Hawk Mountain Gallery page. At the bottom is a grouping of the best four photos from this foggy Saturday morning.