A Touch of Frost

We’ve had a really mild winter here in the Pacific Northwest. In fact a recent Seattle Times headline heralded a winter without snow since it’s highly unusual to get snow past January, and even rarer past mid-February. Unfortunately, many weeds continued to grow all winter. and I’ve had to start the Spring weeding. No wonder I jumped the gun and felt Spring in all it’s glory was about to arrive.

Last week’s trip to Belfair quietly dispelled that notion. Although it was 43° and cloudy when I left Tacoma, it was 31° and foggy when I got to Theler wetlands. And it felt a lot colder than that even though I was still carrying some winter essentials in my backpack.

Sheets of ice

Ice on riverbank

covered the banks close to the river, probably the result of a high tide in the coldest part of the night.

Frosted rose hips and

frosted Rose Hips

frozen candelabra lit up the trail,

frozen weed

though they did little to dispel gray skies.

Other than the newly frozen grass along the riverbank, the only green I could find was last year’s lichen

lichen

clinging to branches that looked nearly dead but will undoubtably spring back to life when Spring really does arrive. Wishing Spring was here is not the same as Spring being here. Still, it’s hard to complain considering that the East Coast was hit by a major snow storm the same day. There’s winter than there’s Winter!

2 thoughts on “A Touch of Frost”

  1. This makes me shiver as I sit here in northern California where a string of old fashioned Christmas lights in my lemon tree is enough to keep the lemons from freezing.

  2. There is nothing like a bit of frost for showing up the raw beauty of seeds and stalks from last near’s plenty is there Loren? Incidentally, a friend who is a bird watcher and not a blogger is getting great pleasure from looking at your nlog.

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