Adventurous Outtakes

I shall not bore you with the sordid details of my life, but just say: it's chaos here.  So no geology just yet.  I'll have something up by Saturday, after carving out some research time.

In the meantime, let us have some outtakes from Monday's outing.  My intrepid companion and I had plans.  Oh, yes.  I'd pick him up, and we'd have some lunch, and then watch a fuck of a lot of Castle.  But the weather didn't cooperate.  No, instead of peeing down rain, or being cloudy and cold, it decided to be all sunny and sweet.  We ended up attempting a visit to Dash Point State Park.

It was closed.

So we drove up the shoreline, and ended up at Discovery Park instead.  Been meaning to get there since getting the new camera, after all, and when you want a spot o' hiking and a bit o' beach with perhaps a lighthouse and a view of the Olympics, there's no better place to go:

West Point Lighthouse and the Olympic Mountains, Discovery Park

Okay, yes, I know, there are clouds, and I said it was sunny.  It was sunny.  I mean, there were whole patches of sky that looked suspiciously blue, and there were frequent glimpses of the evil yellow hurty thing, and some of my pictures show actual sunlight.  Evidence below the fold.




Just check out this shot of the Sound if you doubt:

Big Blue

In fact, there was enough sunshine to shine through a shell:

Shining Through

So, yes, there were clouds piling up over the Olympics:

Olympics Demonstrating Physics of Wet Air Masses and Mountains

But overall, we had remarkably few clouds to contend with, considering it's Seattle in October.  Mount Rainier even managed an appearance:

Mount Rainier

 The lighthouse has always been a highlight - it fills the point and provides something interesting and historical to look at.  They're in the midst of a restoral project, the exterior's had all the lead paint stripped from it, and it's shining very prettily now:

Lead-Free!

The interior should be finished by January or so, and then we'll be able to go in and esplore.  For now, we have to content ourselves with leaning over the fence and shooting photos through the window:

Sneak Peek of the Lighthouse Interior

But who needs the interior of a lighthouse when you've got riprap?  Quite a few interesting rocks piled up around the point, mostly the usual piles of basaltic andesite and other local volcanics, but every once in a while, you'll run into a very nice boulder of gneiss:

Nice Gneiss

The obligatory closeup of the gneissy goodness:

Macro-Gneiss

Some people hoard animals.  If I wasn't living in an apartment, I'd probably be hoarding rocks like this. 

Eventually turned my attention away from the pretty rocks and noticed the sun silhouetting the lighthouse a bit:

Backlit Lighthouse

And out in the bay, a fishing trawler came home for the night, complete with an entourage of hungry seagulls:

Fishing Trawler aka Buffet

Still haven't figured out what this barge was all about, but the late sunlight hitting it looks awfully pretty:

Industry Inaction

Arachnophobes should look away now, because I'm about to show an absolutely brilliant orb spider just hangin' out in his beachfront web:

Beach Bum

You may wonder why I seem to have this obsession with spiders.  The reasons are thus: They sit still, and their webs look awesome.  This makes them a pleasure to photograph.  They seem good with it - I've not yet had one get upset.

Unfortunately, we couldn't linger.  The sun sank:

Sinking Sun

And we got one more good one of the lighthouse:

Sundown and Lighthouse

And then it was time to haul our asses up the bluff so we'd not be caught in the woods after dark.

That's it.  Very probably the last adventure of the summer season.  But I've got more than enough photos left from the summer's outings to hold us through the dark, cold gloom.  In the cantina, summer never really ends.  We'll just crank up the heat and use our imaginations.