Looking forward, sideways, and backward

While on an April Fool's Day hike in the South Park area north of Chandler Road, I had a flashback of the kind of view that got me excited about hiking up mountains when I was a teenager.  Click on this first photo for a closer view of my pickup which we could first see after hiking a mile or so. When I add a little imagination, I can still see the White Mountains of New Hampshire where my younger brother and I loved hiking through dense forest and every once in a while getting a new, distant view of where we parked our car.  I've enjoyed that sensation many times since while hiking the trail to the top of Lassen Peak.  Every few switchbacks provide a new, distant view of where we came from.  I get a similar feeling when hiking or driving to the top of nearby Mt. Hough where the town I live in looks more and more like a airplane view and the people look like ants and the cars look like toys.  Back in 1981 I published a two-part essay called "The View from the Top" based on "scaling" Mt. Hough both ways.

I brought my camera on yesterday's hike in case I found my first photogenic wildflowers of the season.  And I did.  However, on these wildflower hikes, I'm constantly looking every which way for anything that I might find interesting, such as the ants in the above photo.  Besides the ants, we also saw lots of baby fence lizards, but they were too fast for me to get a good photo.  Plus, it was  getting too hot for me to have Ansel Adams' patience.  We hiked onward, still looking sideways.

Then I started finding patches of leaves that forecast the next wave of wildflowers.  These lupine leaves were among at least a dozen species of flowers that should be blooming in the next few weeks in this area.  They also whetted the appetite for my first photo trip of the season down Feather River Canyon where some of them might already be blooming.  Thinking Wednesday so I can beat the next rainstorm that's been forecast.  Destinations - Caribou Road, Bear Creek Falls, and points between.  This year's first major test of my peripheral vision.