I wonder how long this mountain gnome will stick around. There was a notebook inside the white mailbox, but I didn't look at it. There was something slightly uninviting about reaching into the dark box to pull out the large dark notebook. I figured it was either a geocache or some other kind of visitor's register. I'll check it out next time I'm up there and slip a print of this picture in there.
Earlier in the morning I'd been watching the rising sun as it tried to break through thick layers of fog and cloud. The woods were dripping enough to make the ground wet, creating water shadows beneath the trees. Where there was no drip, the ground was dusty and dry. Where the drip was captured by moss, the moss had turned bright green. Beneath the dripping trees at Rock Spring, a banana slug, straight as a pencil, glided slowly over the surface of a picnic table.
The moisture, the moss, and the banana slugs were an intimation of wet weather to come. Hopefully we'll get the real thing before the month is out.
Last week all the news outlets eagerly announced that the season's first rain could be on its way. It's a great reminder of how complex nature really is, when the most modern meteorology, despite all of its measuring devices and supercomputers, often can't predict a change in the weather more than a day or two in advance.
Going through my past October images from Mt. Tam, there was a good amount of moisture on the mountain in 2010, '11, '12, and especially the latter part of the month in 2016. It's not that often that Cataract Creek is running while there's still fall color in the canyon maples.
On Friday I spent a lot of time chasing fogbows and hoping to find Inspector Brokken, but the right conditions didn't materialize.
Despite having no luck on that front, there was still a lot of beauty in the landscape.
A large covey of California quail also diverted me for a while.
They were difficult to approach, but if I remained still for a while, they'd slowly venture within camera range.
Surprisingly, this lovely, blue-tinged mourning dove didn't fly away when I staked out a quail-stalking position just a few feet away.
Not long after I left the quail, I saw a cooper's hawk down in a ravine. It hopped up onto a rock and fluffed its feathers awhile before flying over the ridge toward Bolinas. The sun broke through as I walked down a trail where the hawk had been. Its warmth lit up a couple dozen or so fluffy balls in a thicket of coyote brush that turned out to be white-crowned sparrows.
These deer were too busy browsing in the grass, so beautifully lit, to be overly bothered by my presence.
They eventually crossed a few feet in front of me to enter the woods through a little gnome hole in the branches. I walked over to look at the trail to see their hoofprints still sharp in the dust.
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