55 Minutes To Sunset

The sky continues it's turbulent art work for the third day in a row; creating some pretty neat cloud formations...





Cool clouds often mean cool sunsets. After work, we immediately got our stuff together and headed out to find a summit view. We had a little less than an hour...just enough time, I reckoned, to zoom up to Bare Mt. and hike to the top. With exceptional coordination and deftness, we had our hiking shoes on, dog on the leash and in the vehicle, water in hand, and were moving up to Rte. 116; all in less than ten minutes from the word "Go".



Less than 20 minutes in, we could see the target... Bare Mountain.



25 minutes from Go, we had boots on the trail.



We've become a well-oiled hiking machine.

A good rain had just passed through. The bark on the trees were dark, and the rocks underfoot just a little slippery. The moisture brought out some of the fantastic smells of the forest, and the cool weather kept the mosquitos and gnats at bay. The birds sang out their evening tunes.





I had been a little wiped out all day, from the late Wednesday night we had. My head pulsed with the sudden shock of exertion as I tried to keep up with Kelly and the dog. But half way up, we stopped dead in our tracks, as we were treated to this marvelous sight.



Aaah, a rainbow of my own, to contribute to the spate of blogger sightings that occured yesterday...

The little blogger in my brain tried to shake me into motion, and hurry me to the top in the hope of getting a full arc shot of the rainbow. A little further on I could see the southern half of it, closer, through the trees. The top part was already disappearing.



The little brain-blogger now cracked whips and hollered like a drill Sargent for me to hurry it up. Soon I couldn't hear the voice any more, over my horse, wheezing breaths, as I stumbled over rocks on the two lit matches where my legs used to be.

Finally we reached the top, Kelly and the dog too. But alas, just a few minutes to late. Bare Mountain, at the eastern end of the Holyoke Range, was blocking the now very low sunlight in the west. The northern half of the rainbow had vanished. But like a token prize, the view to the south offered some remnants of the rainbow, slowly vanishing from both top and bottom.



Just south of Springfield, a rain shower could be seen. Then beyond the trees to the west, the sun made it's final splashes of light.





The eastern-facing Bare Mountain probably isn't the best place to see the full sunset. But the quick, tough little hike never fails to jog the body, and mind, into a healthier place.