Spring is Coming!

Despite all the rain and gray weather we are having, spring is coming. I promise. And with it will come green hills and wildflowers. I'll be doing more posts in the next month or so on spring photography, but here's a taste of what you can expect to see as the weather warms and the skies clear.

You can view all of my photos tagged with 'spring' on my main website.

California Poppies north of Chico

Wildflowers and Mount Lassen, from the Vina Plains, north of Chico.

Oak tree along Leesville Road, west of Williams

Owls Clover on Table Mountain

Sutter Buttes in Spring

February - Almond Blossom Month

Mid-February is special and particularly beautiful time in the Sacramento Valley; the time when the hundreds of thousands of acres of almond trees bloom.

California produces 80% of the world's almonds, and winter wouldn't be complete without the endless sea of white flowers that appear for two weeks every year.

Here is a sample of what the orchards look like during the bloom (you can see my full set of almond orchard images on my main website):

Hallmarks of the Sacramento Valley: The Sacramento River

Nothing communicates the character of the Sacramento Valley's natural environment like the Sacramento River.

The river begins way up near the Oregon border in the northeast corner of the state as the Pit River. A shorter tributary, the Sacramento River proper, begins on the slopes of Mt. Shasta. Along with the McCloud River, they meet at Shasta Lake and flow from there through the valley, past downtown Sacramento, into the Sacramento Delta, and then on to the San Francisco Bay.

You can learn a lot more about the river on these sites:

• sacramentoriver.org
• Sacramento River Watershed Program
• Sacramento River Presentation Trust

As one of the defining natural and recreational features of the Sacramento Valley, photographs of the river can do a lot to communicate the character and lifestyle in our region.

Here are a few of my images of the Sacramento River at its tributaries:

The Pit River at Fall River Mills, in far northeastern California

Boaters on the Sacramento River near Anderson

The Sacramento River at Sacramento

The Sacramento skyline reflected in the Sacramento River

Clouds reflected in the Sacramento River near Knights Landing

The Sacramento River at Rio Vista in the Sacramento Delta