If at first you don't succeed...

The strawberry jam I made the other day didn't set, which means the product is thin and syrupy; just the thing to put on ice cream, as it were.

Last Friday, at the ham breakfast, among the containers of home-made jam and jelly whose presence at the breakfast table is an established tradition, there was a small jar of blueberry jam made by Carol, so last night, I asked her advice about where I may have gone wrong, and got some. Seeing as I had bought literally twice as much fruit and sugar than I had needed for the first batch, I stopped by the store to pick up some more pectin and canning lids, and as I write this, another batch of canned fruit jam stands a-cooling in the kitchen.

This batch looks different, but I'm actually apprehensive about picking up a jar and tipping it over right now, to see what the consistency of the contents might be. I think I'll let the product cool off completely to room temperature before seeing if there's any improvement over the first batch.

Cheers...

An outing by myself...

After visiting the kids to see how things went during yesterday's party, I decided - on impulse - to go for a drive and a walk. I ended up driving out toward Wolf Creek and turned left onto the road that takes one to a trailhead that once, many moons ago, Natalie and I started from on a short trek into the Weminuche wilderness. I did not intend to repeat that hike, as it took Natalie and me pretty much an entire day to go in, do some fishing, and come back out, but I did intend to stroll around a bit and maybe look for some springtime mushrooms.

As it turned out, I took a wrong turn and ended up in a completely different place. A scant 20 or 30 meters from where I parked the Nissan, this is what I could see looking upstream along a gurgling brook (although geographers will insist on calling it a river):



The road you see along the top of the picture is Highway 160, in the starting throes of the Wolf Creek Pass, through which it twists and turns "like a malaria germ," in the words of C. W. McCall.

The only problem with hiking upstream was the fact that there was no way to conveniently cross the river without getting one's shoes (and likely other stuff) wet, so I climbed up a slope until I was 40 feet or so above the Nissan, and proceeded upstream. Soon, I was able to take the following picture:



When I saw how steep the banks of the river were becoming, I thought I knew where I was (I was not to find out that I was completely wrong until I drove home). I decided to press on, and soon came to a point in the river where I captured this:



I have to admit, I am a sucker for waterfalls. The only falls I've seen in the Pagosa area are the Treasure Falls, which lie about a hundred feet off and a couple of hundred feet above Highway 160 just before the road heads up to the Continental Divide, and I've heard of something called Pagosa Falls out in the middle of nowhere, but all of that was immaterial: I had never seen these falls.

By this time, my side of the river had become too steep to negotiate, so I crossed the river by walking over a fallen tree, feeling a little nervous about the process, but getting across without mishap. I find the nervousness interesting, after the fact, since I'd never experienced anything like that before. The other bank was fairly level, allowing me to approach the waterfall without much of a problem. Just downstream of the falls, the water swirled down a funnel into a rock-filled pool, like so:



Finally, I got to the falls themselves and let the sound of the falling water permeate me. The rocks to the sides of the falls seemed a little like cathedral spires, but what pleased me particularly was the fact that I could see trees (with what looked like an eagle's nest) and more cliffs beyond the top of the falls.



I felt an urge to strip off my clothes and go for a dip in the water, but my mind told me that the water was ice cold, and I'm no polar bear. (On the off chance that my intellectualizing was wrong, I stripped a sneaker and sock off of one foot, rolled the jeans up a bit and put my foot in the water. My initial guess was right on the money... that water was c-o-l-d!)

As I turned downstream, I happened to look at the panorama and saw the following:



Although it was still fairly early in the afternoon and the sun was high in the sky, it was starting to be not quite as high as the mountain behind which it was preparing to drop, so I hastened my footsteps. I noticed a number of butterflies alighting all around me, seemingly oblivious to my presence. Personally, I lost interest in butterflies at an early age, but I decided to snap my last digital photograph of the day using the camera's macro mode, and photograph one of the butterflies.

An easy task, I thought, as I set the camera for the shot, whereupon the butterflies, which until then had remained unmoving as I walked past them started to flee if I so much as looked in their direction (maybe this is not my imagination?). Finally, I was able to snap the following photo, at a range of about 12 inches:



I have no idea what kind of butterfly this is, but I encountered many of them along the way.

Once back at the car, I set off for home, detouring only down the road I should have taken to that trailhead of yesteryear. Now, I know my way around a little better. It was fun.

* * *The second batch of strawberry jam turned out well (i.e., it set). That led me to go shopping to get basic provisions and a load of blueberries, which are currently cooling off in three pint-sized mason jars in the kitchen. I think we now have enough jam to last the rest of the year.

Cheers...