It’s been gray/rainy/foggy and cool this week. Typically fall. Our mushroom foray that was rescheduled for today was put on hold for yet another week. It would seem the mushrooms are reluctant to make an appearance. So instead we visited Bed, Bath & Beyond and bought new bed pillows, sheets, and towels. The washer and dryer are working overtime getting them all ready for use. Well, not the pillows of course. (Did I mention the dryer is fixed? Well, mostly. It still needs a new belt which will be installed on Monday, but at least it’s usable.)

I just now stepped out on my deck because I heard the Carolina Wren singing its sweet song. It actually prompted me to write this entry. Such a cool bird to have around and it has so many different tunes it can sing! My neighbor’s rooster was crowing too, and every once in a while the sheep chime in with their cute baaaa…baaaa…baaaa‘s. My neighbor told me that they will be bred this fall so we’ll have more sheepy noises to come. I told her we’d love to have some milk to make cheese from but I don’t know if that will happen or not. It’s complicated. There will be wool though from the shearing. (Not that I would know what to do with it!)

There is also the very loud thwack! sound of acorns (or maybe it’s the other large nut-like things that have been falling this year) hitting the deck of my neighbors across the street. The rustling of tree leaves and limbs can also be heard as the squirrels busily run to and fro with their nutty booty.

Even though the trees are not showing much color as yet, fall has arrived. And maybe, just maybe, I’m out of my blut.

I never got around to blogging about what was in bloom at the cabin. It’s not the time of year for prolific wildflowers, but there were some still putting on a show.

There were quite a few Gallardias.

Somehow these large white daisies have seeded themselves in front of the cabin and a few other locations. I don’t know if they came from the grass and wildflower seed mix we spread so many years ago or what. I don’t think they indigenous. They are pretty though!

The asters were still blooming too.

A few harebells were still hanging in there.

A lone lupine with Bull Mountain as a backdrop.

Rose hips and some kind of berry.

A bull thistle along the road.

Sometimes the prettiest things are the ones no longer blooming but gone to seed.

A few flowers just naturally dry themselves which I find particularly interesting.

Pine drops.

Here is a little dried flower garden.

And here is the bouquet I picked of all the flowers growing around the cabin.

Since we left I’ve been told that they’ve had the first snow of several inches up there. You could feel the change in the air right before we left.  Sleep well little flowers!

I thought I would post a few photos from our morning walk. I am going to think of all our beetle-killed pines as just changing color for the season. If I think of it that way they don’t look quite so bad.

Bella liked the boggy area of our beaver pond (of course).

The aspen trees in the bottom of our woods are thick and lush. Some of them are so big we can’t get our arms around them.

The little aspens on our “avalanche slope” (as we like to call the huge hill that collects snow in the winter) are changing.

Alex trotting up the road on the last leg of the walk.

Alex and Bella on the road at our driveway. Not sure if you can see them in this photo, but the dark trees on the mountain across the way are all beetle-killed. It has really spread since last year. In my blog header you can see the same mountain as it was two years ago.

I did take my long awaited walk in the woods the other day. I hadn’t been yet this summer and mostly because of the ticks. We’ve had mosquitoes too this year, which we haven’t had since we moved here. This year they’re bad! So, I sprayed myself down with Deep Woods OFF! and off I went. I contemplated taking one of the dogs with me but I knew in my heart they would not appreciate all the stopping I was hopefully going to do when I saw something to take a photo of.

A leaf decoupaged onto another from the heavy rain the other day.

The woods are lusher than normal this year with all the rain we’ve had. It was even hard to find the beginning of the trail it’s so overgrown. No thorns reached out to clutch at my clothing as I entered the forest as they have done in previous times. I can’t describe it, but the woods have a different feel to them. Almost more secretive.

The trail was boggy and wet and I came across many pools of standing water. At this point I was glad I decided not to bring a dog!

Of course, all this wetness means that it’s just the right kind of conditions for mushrooms to thrive. I found they came in all colors.

Bright orange.

Yellow.

A combination of colors.

Purple. (!)

Some were huge. These were bigger than they look. My hand could not span the top of these.

Some were ugly.

Some grew on trees.

Some were brown but interesting all the same.

Some had me fooled. (do you know why?) Look closely.

While others didn’t look like mushrooms at all. This one looks like it’s trying to disguise itself by looking like the surrounding mulch.

And this one. Well, anybody for a cheese pizza?

Remember the coral mushroom I showed you the other day? Seems they come in different colors too. Yellow and this lovely peachy color.

I didn’t take just photos of mushrooms. A few blooming things along the way caught my eye.

I walked all the way down to the pond which had a lot of visitors for the middle of the day during the week. An elderly man that was fishing commented to me that it was a nice spot for taking photographs, and asked me what I was taking photos of. When I told him mostly mushrooms he cocked his head, raised one eyebrow and said “Kinda strange, don’t you think?” I told him I didn’t think it was strange at all. I’m sure most of the people I passed on my photographic journey walked right past all those mushrooms and didn’t even see them. Admit, it: aren’t you glad I pointed them out to you?

 

The other day I grabbed my camera and headed off to see what I could find in my yard and woods. We’ve had so much rain lately that I was hoping to find to find a few interesting things.

In the woods in back of my house I found a few fungusy-mushroomy things. Like this coral mushroom. I’m pretty sure it’s Jellied False Coral. My book says it’s edible, but I think I’ll pass. Can you see why it’s called a coral mushroom?

And these that were growing on a log. I can’t identify the species but I think they are pretty.

I came across this group of Indian Pipe Plants. To me they seem to be members of a dance troupe working out a piece of very complex choreography, albeit a somewhat ghostly one.

Next I focused my attention on what flowers are blooming in the beds. I came across this spider napping. See how he’s holding on to the leaf with his leg?

Bee balm up close and personal.

I don’t know what these flowers are. Maybe bellflowers? It’s the same type of flower that the spider is napping on, just that this one is fully opened.

And this little beauty growing wild in the front yard. It resembles the Pipsissewa  (or Prince’s Pine) that we have in Colorado only this one is white.

And lastly, this strange bug that has been camped out on the same bee balm flower for about three days now. Even after the rain the other night he reappeared. It’s amazing what you see when you are using a macro lens!

He seemed to be studying me and trying to figure out what that big black thing is that is staring him in the face. Should he eat it? Maybe not ...

All this and I never had to leave the confines of my own property. Pretty amazing isn’t it? I plan to take a walk down to the pond, maybe this morning, and see what I can find in the “real” woods.

Edited to add: I think the Pipsissewa is also known as Swamp Pyrola and perhaps not Prince’s Pine.