Early Morning Sun Rays in My Forest, photos, part 3
April 26, 2008
Photographs contained in this post are the intellectual copyright Of Dawna Morton. All Rights Reserved. Do not copy in any form. Copies are available for purchase in Dawna’s Zazzle gallery.
Here is my next installment of Early Morning Sun Rays Photos. I hope you enjoy them. If you like these pictures you may also enjoy part 1 and part 2.
There is a variety of evergreen trees here. We have quite a few fir or pine trees, as well as a good number of cedar and maple. Interspersed sparingly are some holly. We have ivy everywhere and climbing up everything. Ivy is not native to Oregon, but for some reason we have it climbing up all the trees at my house. I plan on borrowing some goats, who love to eat ivy (yay 
), seeing as I don’t want to weed 1/4 acre worth of forest by hand. I have a hard enough time keeping up with every thing else I’m doing (such as getting the garden ready to plant and keeping up with the other 1/4 acre of yard).
Aside from the ivy, the other issue that needs to be addressed, although thankfully enough, not apparent in these photos, is the garbage that people have dumped down there over the years. Most of the time the Ivy covers everything so it’s not visible, but around February and March the ivy has died back enough that I can see it all 
. I went down there last week and spent quite some time hauling up buckets of bricks, broken bottles, scrap metal, and several tires.It hardly made a dent in what is down there. I am trying not to get discouraged and apply Flylady’s principle of “I can do anything for 15 minutes.” It was exhausting hauling the tires up my steep ravine. They were only about 5 feet down there, but you would not believe how heavy they felt trying to push, pull, shove, roll, flip and basically wrangle them up that hill. I was worn out enough that I did only one tire on one day and the other several days later.
On the long term what I would love to do is to make some hiking trails down there for the kids (and myself too of course ). It’s going to be a long and slow process, but it will be worth it. Hopefully I can find some native plants that will provide good ground cover and keep the hill from eroding, without being invasive like the ivy.
I’ll be posting updates as I continue to make progress. In the mean time please enjoy some more photos in part 4…
April 26, 2008 at 12:32 pm
Those are some really cool pictures of the sunrise. What time did you take them and what was the weather like? The rays seem to be caught in the photographs and that is cool how you got them like that.
April 26, 2008 at 12:56 pm
It was between 7:30 and 8:30 am.The weather was frosty and there was a light fog without clouds and the sun was really bright. The trees seemed to cause the separation effect and the fog made it more visible. I have a few pictures I took from the road I can post later if you are interested which will give you a better idea of the light conditions etc at the time.
Thanks for the comment, glad you enjoyed the photos.
Dawna