Looking west from the top of MT Monadnock, the most climbed mountain in North America and second only to Mount Fuji in the world.
On a weekday afternoon in the first week of Sept. though, there were only a few hikers at the top. We went up via the Dublin Trail, one I had never used. My preferred route is still the Old Halfway House Trail, accessible from Rt. 124; it’s the shortest and steepest path, but that dirt road for the first half of the journey is a wonderful way to start as well as close the hike.
There’s almost too much going on in this photo; with the bright afternoon sunlight careening around all the architectural details, everything seems to be vying for attention.
I prefer softer light for these type of shots – perhaps a high overcast day as on the previous post – but nothing remotely close to that was going to happen here until the sun came off the building, probably a couple hours out. And I was in transit.
Such are the realities of serendipitous shooting. But this one is growing on me.
Two old friends that I originally met circa 1984, and as we live in three separate states, only see sporadically. I’m happy to say we didn’t talk politics until late in the evening.
The park is one of my favorite places, magnificent pretty much any time of the year, but especially in the Fall. The main workshop always strikes me as a hallowed space, and the Adams Memorial something to behold. Plan to spend a better part of a day.
Lighthearted, joyous, and usually found growing every which way in small patches, what’s not to love about ferns? They certainly have a special place in my heart. I remember once – a brilliant midsummer day on a small island off the coast of Maine – standing in the midst of a huge field of them, all rugged and leathery from the wind and salt air, but a beautiful hue of green nonetheless. Somewhere in my slide collection, there’s a 360 panorama of that scene waiting to be released into the world.
I had a girlfriend once who went on to a lifetime with flowers and plants, and seems to have developed a keen awareness of their secret lives along the way. She and I never had a conversation about ferns, or even flowers; we were young and barely formed, and a romance that bloomed so sweetly in the dead of winter, was gone by the time the fiddleheads appeared in the spring. And so it goes; decades later, I wonder what she knows about ferns.
Looking west from the top of MT Monadnock, the most climbed mountain in North America and second only to Mount Fuji in the world. 
