Not Quite a Painting a Day by Steven Thor Johanneson: Looking at the Great Divide.

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Saturday, September 2 to Wednesday, September 5, 2017; to Brooks Lake, Absaroka Range, Wyoming.

C1639

“Moonset at Dawn”

(Brooks Mountain, Absaroka Range, Wyoming)

Oil Sketch on Centurian oil primed Linen Panel

4” x 6”

Click here to make this your Own

Saturday: Over across the lake from my dispersed campsite is Sublette Peak and Brooks Mountain [I met Brooks Lake Lodge local who set me straight on the name], which mark the Continental Divide, and at present I am on the eastern side of it, so the streams here will be flowing to the Mississippi River and the Gulf of Mexico. I’ve been bouncing back and forth over the divide since crossing Independence Pass the day after leaving Salida. I crossed from the Atlantic to Pacific flowing waters there, and back again when I crossed over South Pass, at the south end of the Wind River Range, and back to the west side a day later when I crossed over Union Pass before the Eclipse. An interesting aside here is that in the Union Pass area waters flow in three directions; east to the Mississippi and the Atlantic, south to the Green River, which joins the Colorado and eventually into the Gulf of California (which separates Baja from the rest of Mexico), and northwest into the Snake River, which joins the Columbia and the Pacific, between Oregon and Washington. On Tuesday I recrossed Union Pass to the east side, to Dubois, and am still on that side here at Brooks Lake, looking at the Divide in the form of Brooks Mountain, and watching the shadow of the Pinnacles Buttes slowly crawling down its face in the dawn light.

View from my 2^nd Brooks Lake Camp at the north end of the lake.

Flowers in my Camp.

Afternoon light …
I believe this is part of the Pinnacles,
but this mountain is separated
from the main body by a Valley.

Evening.

Morning Shadows.

Monday, Labor Day: Extreme smoke haze from the forest fires way up near Glacier National Park in northern Montana, so much so that you could not tell the Sun had risen by the usual shadow descending the cliffs across the lake, and those cliffs themselves were almost lost in the haze, although only two miles, or so, away. The lake surface itself was calm until about noon, after which a breeze blew up for the rest of the day, but that had no effect on the haze. In the evening twilight, the usually bright planet Jupiter could hardly be seen, and in fact I had to find it with binoculars before I could make it out with the naked eye. By the time it lowered into the notch between Sublette Peak and Brooks Mountain, it could only be made out with binoculars, before it passed behind the latter … now that is haze! However, it made for a beautiful warm, reddish-gold full moon … gosh! Two weeks since the eclipse already!!

Wednesday: A light ground frost this morning, and still a bit of smoke haze, as was yesterday, although nowhere near as much as on Labor Day. Jupiter was easily seen last night and the Moon was its usual silvery self by the time rose high enough for it to have crested the Pinnacles and tall trees behind my campsite.