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The dryness of the year is only enhanced when one looks at the state of Wy'East as it is, now.
A few weeks back, a friend (and several others) posted up pictures of California's Shasta, utterly bereft of snow. I'm not a local to that and I imagine that late in summer, Shasta's usually down to next-to-nothing, but it was not only unsettling to see it that bare but that bare that early in the summer. That heat wave we endured took some thirty per cent off Tahoma's (Rainier) snowpack along.
Wy'East being a more modest peak than either of those two, I had to expect no small amount of white gone. The wildfires being what they have been, I've not seen the mountain itself for a few weeks; the mantle from those east-of-the-Cascades infernos spreading westward enough to turn the eastern horizon into a visual miasma (I'll comment on that in a subsequent entry).
Work being what it is, I come home during the afternoon now instead of the morning. And when I passed by my favorite photo spot, NE 122nd and Shaver in front of Rossi Farms, this is what I saw today:
Now, I've looked back through my historic photos and have determined that Wy'East looking this way in September is not really all that unusual (I'll post some comparisons in another subsequent post). But when seen through the lenses of this historically torrid Oregon summer and the mounting anxieties about the changing climate, it seems a little drier, a little more dessicated.
The only white left on Wy'East are its modest glaciers. Here's a close-up with the two most visible from my POV called out:
And so it, so far, goes.
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