This last weekend (September 7-8, 2024) I was able to take my family on a trip to Chena Hot Springs Resort, which is about 50 miles east of Fairbanks. We have hardly any money for vacations, but my brother lent me his RV, and it only costs $20/night for an RV parking spot at the resort. The big expenses, actually, are the per-person cost of swimming, along with high prices for water bottles and any items you want to get from the gift shop.
Anyway, it was a great trip, and I got lots of photos. The weather was mostly cloud and rainy throughout the weekend. But by divine providence, every time we wanted to go outside, the rain would stop, and then it would start falling again right after we finished our activity.
I tried to do some stargazing, but I gave up quickly. I could see a few stars here and there through small holes in the clouds, but it didn't seem worth the trouble. However, I did get some stunning pictures of my campfire:
The resort has a nice trail called the Monument Creek trail. Naturally I got a lot of pictures of the creek:
Monument Creek waterfall (thumbnail)
And there was lots of other beautiful fall scenery, with mostly green and yellow colors, and some pink and red:
Here are some early morning shots. I didn't get to see a sunrise, or a rainbow, as I had hoped, but I got a few decent photos with fog or darkness:
A patch of the forest was burnt a few years ago by a forest fire.
I thought this reddish and yellow bush was very interesting:
Blueberries were still out, and they still tasted good, but were getting very wrinkled.
Lichen always makes for an interesting study.
Some dew on Sunday morning:
The resort makes some money off of giving horse rides to tourists. Well, what we would call a patch of horse poo-ey, makes a great home for mushrooms!
And finally, some white flowers cling on past the end of summer:
I used the Nikon AW130 for all these photos, with no post-processing except resizing. The camera's "dusk mode" was used for a few shots.
This work © 2024 by Christopher Howard is licensed under Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 International.
