My nearly six-year-old daughter wanted to come with daddy last night to photograph the sunset here at Lake Tahoe. We’d scouted the location at mid-day, which is highly recommended compared to trying to find your way over rough terrain by starlight. For some school project in kindergarten, E’s teacher had introduced the Field Journal as a way to get the kids interested in writing daily. E does this anyway, so she loves the field journal idea and was suffering intensely until we stopped at a store to replace the one she’d left at home. With her little blank booklet and pen, she is like a scientist of the imagination, making the drawings and half legible descriptions of the kindergarten naturalist.
To be in position for the 4:50pm sunset, we left our cabin here at Kings Beach just before 4 and headed up the coast toward Sand Harbor. The sky was grey and flat when we arrived, and several times we discussed the likelihood that we would see any color when the sun went down. Prospects seemed grim as we descended the trail from the highway down toward the shore. The path, and I use the term loosely, was steep and rocky, quite challenging for someone 48 inches tall and carrying a field journal. It was no less so for a daddy with what seems like 80 pounds of camera gear on his back and a child in his arms much of the way. We found our secret spot to be quite popular as others had come to watch the sunset from the shore of Lake Tahoe in spite of the frigid air. Fortunately the wind was fairly calm in this sheltered spot, and it was quite a nice place from which to practice photography and make observations in one’s journal.
By comparing what we found along the path to her journal, E was able to identify several bear caves (perhaps suitable for bears weighing no more than 2 or 3 pounds), a warthog den (which was quite interesting to me as I had no idea the warthog was indigenous to this area), and much evidence of horned owl activity. As I fiddled with dials and camera settings, E examined closely the natural world and referred to diagrams and information in her field journal, her imagination running wild.
The temperature dropped, as did the sun, and a faint orange glow appeared on the horizon. Slowly the clouds changed color as the sun fell away to the west, again performing its amazing trick of sending its most interesting light only after it seems to have abandoned the scene. For about ten minutes the sky was spectacular. Just after making the image shown above, I turned to E and commented on how beautiful the sunset was. “It’s okay,” she said, after glancing up from her field journal.
When the show was over, we packed up and headed back to the car via a different, much easier trail that we’d discovered while waiting for the sky to change. Along the way the field journal was immensely useful, helping us identify evidence of a bear rooting in the soil for fish before entering one of the many available bear caves in the area for the season’s hibernation, and the scene were a horned owl had attacked a warthog and carried it off for supper. The natural world amazes!
