Pine Street Woods Spring 2024
It has been a busy and troubled spring for me this year. I have been helping my father settle into his new routine at a long term care facility here and I am happy to say he is on a happy and better plateau now.
Meanwhile if have had some health troubles of my own that has kept any activity at bay but now I am out of those woods. So time to get back to the more enjoyable woods here in North Idaho.
Spring has been drier this year and but for a week of unseasonably warm weather has been cold and windy. I was in England about 6 weeks ago and spring there was far ahead of where it is here and my sense is there is about a 4-5 week lag. Now, however, most of the deciduous trees have new bright green leaves and we are cycling through the season of blossoms and the larch have just about re-fletched themselves as well.
Pine Street Woods is a wonderfully farsighted asset to the local community. Consisting of three adjacent donated parcels of land spread over the top of a hill to the west of town it is laced with trails for hiking, mountain biking, cross country skiing, and horseback riding. It is free to use and maintained by volunteers and donations. Dogs are allowed so Mollie loves running the trails there. Now that my health is better I have resumed daily hikes there in its most beautiful setting. Below are some photos I have taken the last few days.
I took these with my Fuji GFX50sii digital camera with an Olympus mount Tamron 70-210mm f4.5 lens. These are all in-camera images with no post adjustment. I opted for the Provia slide film emulation to give the proper saturated look available in wet weather. The light levels are low in these conditions and all the images were handheld so I was working with relatively high ISOs (800-1600) typically using the max aperture or stopped down one or two stops from there. This makes for very thin depth of field that emphasizes the subject but also makes for softer images on closer inspection.
The hill upon which Pine Street Woods stands consists of glacially carved granite which manifests itself as outcroppings of sculpted granite. Littered across the hill are smaller stones that are of different rock types and highly polished like river rocks. Puzzlingly though this is not part of a river valley. These rocks were likely transported here from Lake Missoula perhaps 20,000 years ago when an ice dam at the entrance of the Clark Fork River in to Lake Pend Oreille broke and released a surge of water from the 1-2,000 foot deep Lake Missoula further east in Montana. This violent pulse of flood water irrevocably changed the areas west and south through Western Idaho and Eastern Washington and into the Columbia River gorge out to the sea.
The polished stones are strandings of the upstream river gravels, driven high up this hill by the force of the flood.
The tops of granite slabs are home to small gardens of moss and other plants.
