The last week has been miserably hot. A high pressure dome has set up over us and we feel like ants under a magnifying lens. Temps have been over 37°C for the last week and topped 41° twice. There is no trace of the rains from a few weeks ago; everything is dry and brown. Sunrises and…
I took my first bird photo on June 13, 2011. Those of you that have been following me from the beginning (all three of you) know that those first pics were taken with a Kodak Easyshare that I borrowed from my daughter. A few months later a bought a Canon Rebel T3 and then, last…
Summer begins tomorrow and I’m not all that thrilled. Panhandle summers are, as a rule, hot, dry, and windy, characteristics that I don’t particularly enjoy. Dry and hot are the more tolerable of the three, although I’ve developed an aversion to sweating over the years, but windy really annoys me. Dust and grit in your…
The National Park Service at Lake Meredith National Recreational Area has started a new trail project at the south end of the lake. They opened the first phase of five last week. It’s a two mile long rough trail that starts at the Harbor Bay boat ramp and climbs about halfway up the side of…
I spent a couple of hours at McBride Canyon this morning, walking down the gravel road and through the picnic areas and scaring a couple of campers (crazy old man with a camera must be a chainsaw massacrist or something,) but mostly just enjoying the beautiful morning. It was cooler and the wind wasn’t so bad…
One of my favorite things about getting old (besides not dropping dead) is that I get to experience the things that I bitched about as a younger man. For example, I went to Amarillo today to get some parts to repair our toilet and on the way back I decided, suddenly, to drive down a…
A few miles north of the town of Panhandle, Texas is a playa lake. In moderately wet years it covers 10 or 15 acres on both sides of Highway 207 to a depth of maybe 6-8 ft, tops. Last summer it was dry as a bone every time I went by it. We’ve had some…
Photoavian 