Starry, starry night.
Once, years ago, when I was camping in a state park near Middlebury, Vermont, I walked out to the lake beside which the camp ground resided and lay on the dock looking up at the most amazing field of stars I’d ever seen. Every time I’ve visited Grandfather Mountain, I’ve hoped to get a similar view from the top of the mountain. Though it lacks scenic vistas in any horizontal direction, the Alpine Meadow camp site is the only place that has a suitably unobstructed view of the sky, and so I’d decided to forgo the usual sunset/sunrise landscape shots in hopes of seeing an unphotographable but beautiful starry, starry night.
There was one, eventually, but the clouds lingered far past the time which I was willing to stay up (that is to say, far past the time which I was capable of keeping my eyes open after a long day). And the earliest I was able to drag my sorry self out of my sleeping bag the next morning was 5:00 a.m. By this time the pre-dawn glow on the horizon had already started to wash out the sky. It was indeed beautiful, but it wasn’t the dazzling star field I’d been hoping for. Disappointing, given how rare clear skies seem to be at this time of year, but there was no possible way I was going to get up any earlier than five o’clock after the efforts of the previous day!
I got a beautiful crescent moon as a consolation prize and took a few shots of the dawn skies and the Alpine Meadow camp site before packing everything up and starting down the trail. My legs hadn’t completely recovered from the previous day’s efforts (must be old age creeping up on me) but I only had to cover a couple of miles to get back to the trail head at this point so I took my time. One of the benefits of the late spring they’d had in this part of North Carolina was a late season for spring wildflowers and I was rewarded with some beautiful examples around this part of the trail.
The grand prize was a quadrillium, a four-leafed trillium. This is really nothing more than a mutant trillium with four leaves and four petals to its flower, but it’s quite striking, especially when seen amongst a group of three-leafed but otherwise identical trillium. With the official Nature Photography Weekend about to begin and the photo contest judging already weighing on my mind, I regarded this as a good omen for lots of good entries this year.
