Life on Star Mountain: The glory of spring in the mountains

Thursday, June 9, 2016

The glory of spring in the mountains

I awoke to hundreds of bird singing out my open bedroom window -at 5am. Clearly not in Florida anymore. Thrilled out of my mind to be back at Star Mt. Only sad that Mark will not be back for a couple of weeks more.

Things have bloomed and blossomed while I was gone. The cycles here are very predictable and I was afraid I had missed some things. Nope, the wild iris are still going, the lupine and larkspur continue to bloom, and the yellow sunflowers are just starting to open. Our fields will be one mass of golden yellow in short order.

And the elk, wow. I heard elk bugling, yes really, even though I am quite sure its the wrong time of year. They are everywhere, babies have been born and my first morning walk had two mommies much disturbed by me and suddenly two babies shot across the road. Simply magic...

The wild iris are everywhere there's a spec of water. Halfway through their bloom I estimate.

Birds and birds and birds. One of the robin pair has an active nest along with a bluebird pair under the deck. They were busy while we were gone. Hummingbird feeders (2) are back up but only a handful are partaking at the moment. And on the woods walk this darling bird shown above hopped down 3 feet from me and decided to have a snack. It's a Cassin's finch - a high altitude finch (8,000-11,000ft) and as most of you know we are close to 9,000ft at the house.

Went to fill up the water container at the magic spring. Still stuns me that we have some of the purest water available just down the road.

On that same trip went down to make sure that Ohio Pass was open. You can see what I found to my surprise. First time I've seen that, maybe an extra rough winter snow? Hope it's really open July 1 - we have tons of family visiting then....