3 Shots: White Mountains

I've found that teaching full time (and running a outdoor leadership program and playing 1-3 adult recreational sports and doing everything else a normal adult human needs to do) doesn't leave much mental bandwidth for writing.  And yet, I still want to blog.  So, I'm introducing a new thing: posts consisting of 3 pictures and brief captions.  It's an exercise in restraint, or an exercise in laziness: you decide.

These pictures from from my recent trip to the White Mountains with my friends Michael and Xavier.  I took a bunch of pictures, but here are three that I think tell the story:

This is No Ketchum Pond, with Wildcat Mountain and Carter Dome in the background.  It's a peaceful black-water pond, fringed by thick, dewy bushes. At around 7am, when this picture was taken, it was silent but for the rustling of the wind over our heads and the twittering of a few birds.  I had hoped to see a moose, but no luck.  Also pictured is Xavier getting a nice water bottle of mud water.

This isn't a masterpiece of a picture, but is one of those worth 1000 words cases (the whole point of this type of post).  We left our tent poles on top of a mountain, and so when we arrived a No Ketchum, we faced a conundrum.  Here, you can see the 4 small dead trees we chose to hold up the tent, as well as my bootlace tying them together.  It wasn't elegant, but hey it held up the tent.

This is our last night in the woods, at the Imp Shelter.  There's a considerable amount of post-processing in this photo, but suffice to say sitting at the bench overlooking the sunset was wonderful and beautiful.  All in all, it was a fantastic trip, and we were lucky to have the opportunity to do it.