Imbolc Black Mountain Moon
At 6:00 a.m. now the sky has gone from black to a whitish blue, a few stars still visible. When I go to bed, usually around 9:00-9:30 p.m. these days, night has fallen sometime ago, but on the nights around the full moon, the land in our back is a wonder. The moon shine comes in from the south-south east and lights up the snow with its silver glow. It also creates dark, soft shadows around the lodgepole pines. If I follow the pines to the sky toward which they point, I see stars: Cassiopeia and others in her vicinity.
Now, in the morning, Black Mountain slowly emerges from indistinct mass to large, pine-covered height, 10,000+. Sometimes, like today, it has a streak of cloud behind it. Not often, but sometimes, too, it has a lenticular cloud giving it an atmospheric halo.
Shadow Mountain, where we live, only reaches 9,600 feet and we’re about 800 feet below that, so we look up to our taller neighbors. Beyond Black Mountain, but not too far, is Mt. Evans, a fourteener.
Mt. Bierstadt is another fourteener. Those of you interested in art may recognize it since it was named after the Hudson River School painter, Albert Bierstadt. He painted this of another Colorado fourteener, Long’s Peak.