2018 NH Summer/SH Winter Photo Thread

Very nice. Is getting drenched in afternoon showers a regular part of your job?

So after having got drunk yesterday on midsummer's eve, I reslized there were no night buses. Shit I thought, as I realized I had to walk home in the 10'C drizzle, 3-4km at midnight. Luckily for me I managed to find a shortcut right through the largest forest in the city, a circle with a 2km diameter right next to the city center, reaching a 220ft height. And luckily for me, it was bright at midnight. Would've been a lot more depressing if it were pitch black. The following images are going to be the most redundant albun I've ever posted because all the images look the bloody same. I have a question to you guys though: Do you prefer this type of taiga over your own native vegitation?

I love western Europe's vegetation personally. It's absolutely stunning. However, there's a certain charm with taiga too. It's like a spooky coziness. Also, the smell of taiga is really unique. A sharp smell of spruce, pine, juniper, blueberry shrubs and resin. Mmmmmhm, that's a nice homey smell to me.








Powerline clearing with this strange shack. I wonder what it's for.


Power central


Eventually got to the other side. These are my new nearby fields, although they areb't quiete as nearby as those in Tavelsjö were... Nor nearly as pretty.

Taiga following the Miami thunderstorm photos make a neat contrast

Taiga is MUCH FUCKING BETTER. It’s hard to get more boring than Rochester’s vegetation and taiga is pretty much the only kinda of forest I actually like.

Hard question, because outside natural reserves the forests around here are not as unspoiled as yours. Anyway, the interesting part of the forests and flora around here is that it changes a lot depending on altitude, sun exposition, slope and so on. 
Around the center of my village the vegetation mostly comprehends broad-leaves trees (at the moment the presence of a lot of chestnut trees is particularly evident, because they have just flowered and so look quite yellow-ish from here), but there are also quite a lot of pines which occupy the highest slope spots. The highest part of my village instead is at about 1500 m of altitude, which correspond to the transition from broad-leaves (mostly beech trees at that altitude) to conifers (mostly larches, but also some firs), and these conifers are the only trees we have in the few hundred of meters above that. Even higher (1800-2000 m) it is all Alpine flora, which doesn't comprehend real trees anymore but comprehends a lot of stunning flowers and other short plants. 




Anyway, this evening I also wanted to post a couple of clouds pictures I took in the last few days between my village and the closest little town. 

Yesterday started as a quite windy day, with really characteristic clouds in the sky. I took this first picture in an hurry just before leaving home, the exposition is terrible but anyway...



Much better picture from the train station:




Today instead we had really thick clouds all over the day, but only concentrated on the mountain tops. The center of the sky was actually mostly clear for all the day. 

So that my village is in a quite narrow part of the valley, it was mostly cloudy in here.







Our neighbour little town instead is in a more open position, and the clouds were much less close




^ quite a lot of water in the river, considering the weather we had during the last 6 months this is not particularly surprising...




Bonus picture: so that the solstice has just passed, here there is another picture of the sun hiding behind the mountain just west of us as early as 7:15 pm (again with an horrible exposition). We actually spend quite a lot of time in the shadow of some mountain, even during the summer we get direct sunlight only from 7 am to 7:15 pm (so about 12 hours). I've never thought too much about this before, and then in particular during the summer it is not so bad because it means longer evenings with enjoyable temps. 

I went to some heritage site near the center with old buildings and a bunch of museums about Swedish and Sami culture.

There's a pond there. When I was little there were always dozens of ducks and swans of different kinds. Today there was one single duck mother and her three ducklings.


Bunch of old buildings. People usually come here to celebrate midsummer.


In here they have the midsummer pole. Not allowed to to there now though apparently.



Not gonna comment these more. They're all just old stuff anyway. How old? Idk. Mostly from the 1700-1800's I think though not entirely sure.






This birch has got palm sized leaves wtf?


I like these dense deciduous forests with thin spindly trees common around Umeå.


A few oak saplings here and there. Looking forward to having a bunch of oak trees in our forests in a couple of decades.


"Colorful buildings"


This house was cool.


I like suburbia.


This linden had a very strange shape, and its leaves were all hand sized. Don't know what kind of linden it is but I want one.


Cool winding cul-de-sac.


And ewww what the fuck. Spotted this seagull trying to eat the cadaver of some smaller bird.


A noticeable amount of trees showing signs of the drought now. Rained a lot a few days though,  25mm this week, So some of the less permanent damages done should revert soon maybe? Lot of stuff will probably stay broken until next year.

Fuck man. Those beech and elm trees nnnghnggghh.

That first picture with the summerless sky looks a lot like Tavelsjö in summer

Went for lunch downtown with some friends today. I got there shortly before 1:00pm and it was 23C with a 16C dew point at that time, a bit muggy but not super warm. It was mostly cloudy but the cloud cover wasn't very ominous or stormy at the time. That all changed when we were done, though...













As we were finished, shortly before 3:00pm, the temperature had gone up to 25C and the dew point had dropped to 15C. And where there was fairly unremarkable cloud cover just two hours earlier we now had some fairly ominous looking storm clouds brewing in the distance. I took a little stroll through downtown and by the river to get some shots, but the pictures definitely don't do justice to how stormy the clouds looked in person...




























Shortly after I finished my walk some window-rattlingly loud thunder kicked in, and a few minutes later came torrential downpours. No pictures of that, unfortunately.

University Campus doesn't seem to have got any better since the rainfalls last week...