06 January 2008

Winter Hike


The muffled silence of a snowy winter day, thick flakes, falling like powdered sugar sifted from on high, freshly minted footprints in a magical world of white draped boughs of trees and the joyous bounding of dogs. I'd forgotten the wonders of a pinon-juniper forest, of the sagebrush draped landscape. Of trees with vermilion colored trunks twisted like old swinging ropes with age, the red dirt beneath the snow brilliant in it's contrast. There, too, were the round holes created by the Northern Flicker, a woodpecker, soft tooth scratches of the porcupine along the lower reaches of a tree, and the long claw marks of a black bear marking it's territory. The birds and rodents were absolutely silent, safely asleep in their holes and perches, waiting out the brunt of the storm. As we reached the top of the cliff the clouds began to rise off the valley below, exposing the sinewy wind of the river below and the frosted ranch fields and even the damp asphalt of the highway which from that distance looked like a kind of river itself but the mountains remained shrouded.
* * * *
On a totally different note, many of you will be pleased to hear that I have joined a blog feeder. I am still trying to figure it all out. Why do some blogs have three or four feeds while others only one? Is there one format that is better then the rest (rss versus atom, etc). Please enlighten me if you know.

15 comments:

  1. sounds gorgeous.

    and as to blog feeders... ???? I have google reader, and the things you ask mean nothing to me. totally baffled. but I do love having the feeder... makes it much easier to know what to read!

    ReplyDelete
  2. I use bloglines and get asked which feed I want. I usually just select whichever one has the most subscribers. If there aren't any other subscribers, I just pick one. They all seem to work.

    Sounds like a lovely scence.

    ReplyDelete
  3. i use google reader and just use the blog urls itself to set it up. thank god it's that easy or i'd not be using one at all.

    nice hike, girl. i like thinking of you in the snow.

    ReplyDelete
  4. Are the Disreputable Feline and Canine enjoying the cold? I guess it's not as cold as Alaska?

    Re blog feeds, I use Googlesearch. When I works I'm naively pleased, when it doesn't I don't have a clue why. I often copy the web address of a site, open Googlesearch and paste the blog address into the little box. Hope that makes sense. It's always pretty revealing when you try to explain something you only half understand yourself.

    ReplyDelete
  5. Lovely photo! Is this where you grew up?

    ReplyDelete
  6. What a beautiful description, I felt as though I was along for the hike with the bounding dogs, the sights, the scents. My dogs are big fans of the snowy hike. And I miss that pinon-juniper scent. I have a friend who saves a little pinon to toss on top of her wood stove in the winter to scent the house or uses pinon incense Pinon always reminds me of her.

    ReplyDelete
  7. I loved your word choice in this post - very beautifully written.

    And I too know of no reason one blog feed is better than the others. I just pick one. (And yay for feed readers!) :)

    ReplyDelete
  8. beatiful description of your surroundings. Your home region sounds amazing.

    The various feed formats are also a mystery to me. I pick the one that most people subscribe to and that is usually the atom format (don't know why). If I search for my own blog in bloglines the atom format doesn't show up, though I know it exists and has subscribers (very weird).

    ReplyDelete
  9. I'm fond of winter white noise. The wind, the crunching of the snow, of leaves.

    ReplyDelete
  10. Lovely descriptions - it almost - and I mean almost - makes me enjoy the winter.

    Anyone that has a blog on Blogger (which is Google) will have an Atom feed - they decided not to use RSS (Really Simple Syndication) and develop their own system.

    SOOO - if you plan to add any news sites that are NOT blogs to your reader (like huffingtonpost.com or a newspaper feed, for instance), you would only have the option of adding an RSS feed.

    I hope that wasn't too confusing.

    ReplyDelete
  11. Ahh the Poet speaks...and I know what you are referrencing. I lack your descriptive abilities.Winter does add another dimension which is very pristine-for a while.

    I have NO clue what feeds are all about...none.

    ReplyDelete
  12. How beautiful.

    Congrats on the feeder but no idea how any of it works.

    ReplyDelete
  13. parlance, the Direputables are asking "what cold?" because it is much warmer then AK but the Disreputable Dog is very much enjoying the snow and the Disreputable Cat is very much enjoying the increase in indoor space & available laps.

    hypoglycemiagirl, yep! This is pretty much where I grew up.

    qt, thanks for spelling out those acronyms. But I still wonder why some "places" have multiple feeds?

    ReplyDelete
  14. Ooooh.

    Thank you for taking us with on this walk. this walk so mysterious and covered in snow.

    ReplyDelete
  15. sign. Wonderful. It certainly beats the vistas available from the Thames!

    ReplyDelete

Please leave your messages here...I am always delighted to have comments!