Black Butte
I’m not big on straight landscapes — dead-cars-in-the-desert are really more my kind of thing. But I still like this one, taken of Black Butte in the Mt Shasta area at sunrise sometime late December 2015 with my little point-and-shoot while I was actually trying hard to get a photo of the sunrise on the much more imposing and dramatic Mt Shasta (off to the right in the photo above).
I’d got up early at the hotel (the wonderful Best Western Tree House Inn at Mt. Shasta) and decided to go for a walk outside around the hotel before taking my little nephews swimming in the (indoor!) hotel pool (I’m not a morning swimming kind of guy, but that’s another story altogether…).
It had snowed overnight, and the sky was grey, the air cold, and I left my “real” camera in the hotel because, you know, nothing interesting would happen outside, right? But of course after a few minutes a break in the clouds opened up, and Mt. Shasta and the surrounding peaks on the other side of the valley were lit up with a nice yellowy glow for a minute or two.
I found my little point-and-shoot accidentally left in my jacket pocket from the day before, and fired away as best I could (the best camera is always the one you have with you…). But Mount Shasta itself was quickly obscured by clouds to the point of distraction, and nothing I did came out well. And then, I looked the wrong way and saw this. I thought oh, what the hell, walked out onto the middle of Morgan Way, and took a couple of snaps of it, thinking what a waste of time — I could be back inside having my second coffee, dammit. Why won’t Shasta cooperate?!
And no, this image isn’t manipulated or tweaked (except for some mild cropping because of where I had to take the photo from) — it really did look like that. It’s probably my fave peak in the area — even more so than Shasta itself (I’ve hiked up Black Butte many times over the years).
The Mount Shasta sunrise photos? They look terrible — it just wasn’t the moment for big mountains or big cameras.
