Blue skies

Days and days pass with blue skies that don’t end. Clouds don’t even dot any part of the horizon and haven’t for the better part of a week now. It’s beautiful, even though the heat rises a few more degrees every day. But if you’ve a hawkwatcher, this weather is gruesome. Just try staring into that blue sky with binoculars for 8 or 9 hours, trying to locate hawks, with no clouds to give any perspective on size or to create a background to see one against.

It’s skies like this that keep me away from a hawkwatch but make me appreciate the counters who show up every day and do the work. I can deal with the heat, the cold, rain or sleet or worse, but when a sky looks like this, no way. This is bluebird weather, a real eye-burner.

The mountain in this photo is Nell’s Hill, my view to the west. At least it is my view in winter. At the moment all I can see is greenery and I have to walk out a hundred yards or more to reach the abandoned ski hill where I took this photo. I call Nell’s Hill a mountain not because of its size but because it is covered with forest. Around here hills, no matter how high, are things that are cleared, usually for agriculture or pasture, but mountains are anything that retain their forest cover. At least that’s the local definition. So how this one came to be called a hill instead of a mountain is something for which I have no answer.