Water levels

I’m spending some time looking back through photo files, trying to organize myself a bit. For a long time, too long, I relied on a Smugmug subscription to organize my photos, but it got too unmanageable and, frankly, it was a lazy way to do it. Now I’m combing through Smugmug and then loading files into Lightroom to process again. It’s still a mess, but I’m getting there.

One side benefit has been discovering photos I ignored the first time around and now see as keepers. This bunch is from 2018, Watson Lake near Prescott, Arizona. We were nomads at the time, hopping from DC to Chicago to Seattle to Sedona to Prescott, staying with friends, family, and petsitting. Mary was in training for the Boston Marathon, and we found a nice trail for her to run near the lake, so I was able to scramble around on the granite boulders and make some pictures.

I’m struck, a little shocked, at the water lines around the lake. It takes a long time to turn granite that blue color, and in most places the top line was 6 or 8 feet above the water, so the water had been receding for years. How much snowmelt and rain will it take to bring it back to its high water mark? Is it even possible?

I didn’t give it a lot of thought until now, 6 years later, when I pulled these up on my computer screen. I haven’t been to Prescott since I made these, and I wonder what it’s like there now. Is the lake hanging on, like this yucca in the photo below, hoping for a little relief?