Sometimes nature puts up quite a show.
This morning, 7:34am, view to the east:
Less than twenty minutes later, view to the west:
There was a complete double rainbow, but sadly my camera has neither enough of a wide angle nor the sensor to capture the whole beauty of it. Here’s a closeup of the Southern end:
What a way to start the day, right? Even strange weather like heavy rains at a temperature of 22°C (72°F) has its upsides.
Adventure Journal: The 20 most beautiful day hikes in America.
André and I have done these four:
Observation Point, Zion National Park, Utah (2012)
Antelope Canyon, Page, Arizona (1999, a blast from the past)
Coyote Buttes North, aka “The Wave,“ Paria Canyon/Vermillion Cliffs Wilderness, Arizona (2012)
Hoh River Trail, Olympic National Park, Washington (2008)
My favorite hike ever was the one to and from “The Wave”. André and I were lucky and scored permits at the lottery for our tenth-anniversary-trip to the Southwest in 2012. The hike out to the Wave was well worth it and would even be among my personal top three hikes if The Wave wasn’t at the end of it. Here, take a look at the scenery:
The Wave is of course, famous, and only 20 people are allowed in every day, but if you hike a little further, you reach the “Second Wave”, which we had all to ourselves on our hike:
Tap, tap… this thing on?
Well, it’s been almost two months since I posted anything here… the login button almost felt rusty. I really should get back into the habit of posting something here more regularly.
My six weeks of summer vacation are almost over. André and I spent one week in the Black Forest hiking the Schluchtensteig, I visited friends and family and spent some time relaxing at home and working on a new patchwork project.
Here are a few photos from our trip (as usual, click for a bigger version on Flickr).
On our way to the start of the Schluchtensteig in Stühlingen we spent half a day at Lake Constance and visited the Pfahlbau–Museum.
We started our hike the next morning, mostly following the Wutach for the first three days. Here’s a photo of our descent on the second morning of our hike, near Blumberg:
And here’s a view of the Wutach in beautiful sunny weather.
We saw lots of interesting butterflies, among them many Silver-washed Fritillaries (Kaisermantel):
On the third day the weather was sunny and quite warm, but the forecast predicted lots of rain for the following day, so we decided to keep going for a little while longer until we reached the Schluchsee. This turned out to be a very good idea, because we got to enjoy this view:
We had bad thunderstorms with rain and even hail during the night and congratulated ourselves on our decision to keep going because the Schluchsee was barely visible the next day when you stood right on the shores of it. It rained a lot on the fourth day, but we only had an hour of light rain before we reached our next destination a little after lunchtime.
Fortunately, the rain only lasted for a day, and we were greeted by the sun on the fifth and sixth mornings, and the weather stayed nice for the remainder of our hike.
After spending the night in Wehr, our final destination, we took public transportation back to Stühlingen (quite a journey on a Saturday because the connections were less than optimal) and drove home. We had to take a little detour because of construction work and happened upon one of the train stations for the Sauschwänzlebahn (Wutachtalbahn, siehe auch Wutachtalbahn bei Wikipedia) where a train was just about to depart. We had seen the train on the first day of our hike so of course we had to stop and have a closer look. Here’s one of the historic steam engines which was built in 1942 (auf deutsch mehr Infos zur 50 2988 der Wutachtalbahn):
It’s been snowing quite a bit here during the last week or two, and by now we have about half a metre (19 inches) of snow, I think. I took some photos on Saturday morning, when there was much less snow than now.
This was taken during a walk around our village on Saturday morning, before it started snowing non-stop for the rest of the weekend.
I think this is the most snow we’ve had where I live since the winter of 1979, when the snow was higher than I was tall. Of course, I was a bit younger then…
Last May we were woken up in the middle of the night by the sound of a porcelain catfood dish being pushed over the paved driveway that we share with our neighbour. It turned out to be a hedgehog.
Since then it has been visiting regularly – actually, I think there are two hedgehogs regularly. They always come at dusk, and they seem to just love catfood. They will crunch noisily on the dry food or gobble up wet food with lots of grunting and snorting.
On Tuesday night we saw a tiny hedgehog actually sitting inside the bowl while eating the cat food. It was really cute, but its small size seems a bit worrying because it’s much too small and light to survive the winter. This afternoon it came back to visit in broad daylight while the neighbour and I were chatting outside, and we were both surprised because they are nocturnal and rarely seen before dusk. We fed it some catfood and watched the little guy walking back and forth on the driveway, always sniffing for food but not finishing what was right in front of its nose.
It turns out that at least two of our other neighbours know the little hedgehog as well. Apparently it’s been wandering around on our street in broad daylight, sometimes looking for food but today just lying there, looking very weak. One of the other neighbours gave it some catfood as well, and after that it walked over into our garden.
A little later in the afternoon the hedgehog was once again sitting in the food bowl and eating and was looking a little more perky. The neighbour’s cat and I followed it around a bit until we lost it in a hedge a few houses down the street.
I’m sure that a lot of people are now keeping an eye out for the little hedgehog, but it’s still going to be hard for it to gain enough weight in time for hibernation…
Here it is, with some of the catfood for scale; it’s about 10cm long and weighs about 100g – that would be around 4 inches and 3.5 ounces.
As usual, click for a larger version. André also posted a photo of the little hedgehog.
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