Idaho—the last installment

Now that I have shown you some of the viewers' favorite posts from the past, I want to remind you of some of my favorite posts. This post, from 2010 remains one of my favorites because I look back at the day I was writing about and remember it as a day I want to remember forever and this post does that for me. It was the final post of several about our trip to my childhood home in Idaho, and a visit with my brother and his family. We had been at the cabin my parents built, which my brother now owns, in a part of Idaho that will always be special to me. It was a perfectly, gorgeous, sparkling Fall day as we made our way from the cabin out along the Snake River and I was seeing both the present and the past in the glory of the scenery. I loved the photos I took that day.

Saturday, October 30, 2010

Idaho—the last installment

I have saved the most scenic for the last and I plan to get all tour guide-y on you, so you are warned.

Quaking Aspen

Boy, do I love these trees. They so remind me of being at the cabin and in the mountains of Idaho.

Through the mountains you see huge groves of aspen. You can see one of these groves, that has lost it's leaves in this photo, across the lake. They are beautiful in every season. In the summer their quivering, silvery leaves seem to shimmer and in the fall they turn that amazing brilliant yellow. In winter they are ghostly and graceful like this grove that we saw driving along the river. 

Did you know that aspen groves grow from a single system of underground roots? All the trees in a grove, growing from that root system are genetically identical and the grove is referred to as a clone. Scientists consider a clone grove of aspens as a single living organism and there is a very large clone in Utah that may be the single largest living organism on earth. You can observe that clone groves, because all the trees are genetically identical, will lose their leaves all at once and not necessarily on the same time schedule as neighboring clones. Makes me wonder if the foreground tree in my photo is not a part of the clone. (Individual trees will also grow from seeds.) I miss the aspens. They don't grow much below 5000 feet, so we don't have them in the part of Oregon where I live, but they are the most common tree in North America.

South Fork of the Snake River

Just to give you a little context, here is a map of the area where the cabin is.

The cabin is on the west side of the Palisades Reservoir, in the vicinity of the lettering on the map that says "Bear Creek Rd.". Jackson Hole and the Grand Tetons are a bit east and north of the righthand side of the map. The Palisades Dam is on the South Fork of the Snake River, and we drove back to Pocatello by way of the Snake River Rd. where all of these photos were taken.

The yellow trees along the river are cottonwoods.

Looking east toward Wyoming.

Sagebrush.

Great fishing along this river. There were fishermen out in their boats the day we were there.

Here in Oregon many of my friends say they long for the ocean and find peace and calm along the beaches and dunes. Me, I find myself longing for the mountains and the aspen and the pine and each time I visit it is like having my battery charged. I guess it is part of who I am.

Ernest Hemingway was one of Idaho's most famous citizens. He died and is buried near Sun Valley. The epitaph on his memorial are his own words, written for a friend.

Best of all he loved the fall
The leaves yellow on the cottonwoods
Leaves floating on the trout streams
And above the hills
The high blue windless skies
Now he will be a part of them forever

 It was that kind of day.