December 13th, 2016

Poverty gave him all his wealth. The leisure to spend a day, whenever he chose, walking twenty or thirty miles, or voyaging about the river in December, when the drops froze on his oars, pleased with the silvery chime of the icicles against the stem of his button brushes. Van Wyck Brooks

Morning y'all,
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It's a calm, cloudy morning up top. The high yesterday reached 38 degrees. The overnight low was 28 degrees. It was 33 degrees and cloudy at 7am observation. The mountain received .57" of rain yesterday, mostly in the morning. It looks like it will be in and out of the clouds today. I would expect the trails to have some ice, but nothing too hazardous. It feels like another quiet day to be out - enjoy!
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Top photo: The evening show. Above: Grace and some evergreen silhouettes.

I spent another day laying around the cabin yesterday (morning came and morning went...), reading books and listening to the rain. After the rain subsided around 1, I was surprised to realize that it looked like the makings of a fine sunset. Grace and I headed out at 5 and caught a great episode of 'caretaker tv'. I am enamored with that time of day. The evening light has a great angle to it, highlighting the understory of jagged rocks, soil and strange mosses bathed in a warm orange. With the coming evening chill, there was a fragile ice starting to set in along the outer edges of the puddles on trail. We walked back along that familiar old path in a dense dark, just before the bright moon rose over High Top.