October 20 -- Perfect Bookends For A Rainy Day -- Fire In The Sky Sunrise And Lightning At Dusk

I've been waking up at around 2:30am lately --- which means I'm getting MORE sleep than before, 5 hours when it used to be about 3 hours. I spend that time in the early morning writing the blog post for the day before,  doing posts on Facebook, clean and refill the hummingbird feeders, and generally getting ready for the day. Then I take a look out the kitchen windows looking to the east to see if there's the possibility of a good sunrise. If there is, I take my 2 cameras, go out to the side porch -- and wait. If I have some time before any color display, I put bird seed in the back yard trays, make sure the water features are topped up -- and keep an eye out for the male Northern Cardinal. It's been said that Cardinals are among the first birds at the feeders in the morning and among the last in the evening; the evening part was correct; Mr. Cardinal was among the last birds I saw at a bird seed tray. And this morning, I peered around the corner around 6:15am and there he was, chowing down on sunflower seeds. So perhaps "the saying" was right...Then the color started to the east, and just got better and better until --

The sunrises in San Pedro, my hometown, were different -- spectacular, yet in an urban port setting of container and cruise ships, terminals, docks, and everything else that makes up a busy, international port. Here on the east side of the Chiricahuas, it's nature, pure and simple, When you open the front door and look to the east at night, there are only about 5 twinkles of light denoting other houses -- and that's it.  How else can it be? This area bordering New Mexico averages about 1 person per square mile, and the biggest city -- more a town, really -- is Lordsburg, New Mexico, about 50 miles to the northeast off Interstate 10, with Douglas, Arizona, a close second at about 55 miles to the south. I like to tell friends back in LA's South Bay that we're not at the Back of the Beyond here -- merely Beyond. Meanwhile, as I'm ruminating all of this, the sky color gets more intense and impressionistic-looking, with streams of clouds looking like flames in the sky, so I get out my 100-400 lens and zoom in on a section of it -- 

Then, just before sunrise, there are 3 small clouds tinged with red that pass over the soon-to-be-sunrise part of the sky, so I zoom in on that next -- 

Just amazing. And this has been the most intense a sunrise that I've seen here -- which is saying a lot, as you can tell from the previous daily posts. And all of this only lasts about 15 minutes at most. How can you top THAT? Well, you can, and it does...

Later that morning I paid a visit to the Myrtle Kraft Library, in "downtown" Portal next to the post office (which isn't offically a PO as it's on contract with the USPS; everything seems to have a story here). Kathleen, the only library worker on salary, had returned after being out for a few weeks following Achilles tendon surgery. I found out she's from Bishop, California of all places, as the areas it's in, the eastern Sierra Nevada, is my second favorite place (you can guess the first). So we chatted about Bishop, Rodeo, Portal, and living in a rural area (we both love it). I told her I'd like to bring my camera inside the library and do a little background writeup and take photos, so watch for that a few posts down the line...A couple of residents come in to drop off books or check them out. Kathleen remarks that one of them, an elderly gentleman of indeterminate age, lives in a dwelling up the mountain that, as far as she knows, doesn't have electricity and makes it sound as if HE is in The Back Of the Beyond. I invite her and her husband over for dinner at Faranuf. By this time it's raining intermittently, accompanied by sunshine, and the rest of the day continues like that, with wind around 20mph and more, so it limits what I can do outside. I keep an eye out for Mr. Cardinal -- but he never shows up, even in the evening. But that could be due to the weather -- I hope. My friend Helen drops by, bringing bread that I'd asked her to get during her Douglas Run as I'd run out, and she showed me a female tarantula she'd rescued from probably being squashed on the Hwy 80 road. . I'd invited a friend to dinner at the Portal Cafe here (there are only 2 places for a sit-down dinner within at least 50 miles, the Portal Cafe and the Rodeo Tavern 10 miles away in Rodeo) and find out from Helen that it's closed that evening. And so is the Rodeo Tavern. Aaagh! That's one of the minor inconveniences here, but can be dealt with if you can remember the opening times...I then go over to the house of friends I'm watching while they're on a birding trip to Guyana, and when I drive back to Faranuf I notice huge flashes in a cloud over a ridge to the south. The flashes are immense, lighting the entire cloud for a second, and when I get back to Faranuf I get my camera and tripod and go out to the front porch to try to capture it. The first shots turn out terrible due to focusing -- for lightning shots you have to use manual focus -- then I get the distance correct and start taking photos using my shutter control remote. The button on the remote control later sticks, but by that time I got a few keepers with the lightning strikes hitting the ground -- 

I wanted to show the immensity of the landscape -- and the cloud -- with the lightning a small part of it. I thought it would be more effective, particularly since the lightning was pretty far off -- 

Here's one I cropped later in post-processing to bring the lightning a bit closer --

And I de-saturated most of the photos for the black-and-white effect. So -- perfect weather "bookends" to another memorable day here in the Beyond...