{All images above are from Flickr. To learn more about a specific image, please click on its title to be taken to its respective Flickr page.}
Amongst the tall hills that tower like gentle giants around Penticton one will find Apex Mountain, the town's well known and much beloved ski hill. Popular, gorgeous, and inviting as it is the icy cold winter months, it is actually during the opposite half of the year that I adore this wilderness location most of all. The reason has nothing to do with skiing or even snow at all, it is because, when one ventures up its twirling, narrow roads at night during the summer and reaches certain spots, you can pull off the road, get out of your vehicle and suddenly find yourself draped in a majestic blanket of flickering stars.
On a clear night, you can see the stars from elsewhere around town. Thankfully, we're not a polluted or heavily artificial light filled community, so there's little to block out nature's fairy bulbs, but as with most places on earth, the higher you go and the further you venture from civilization, the more sublime the night's sky becomes, and the view from Apex is no exception there.
These treks aren't an every day occurrence, in fact, they can be years apart, but when they do happen, I find the experience to have an almost meditative quality to it. Swaddled in long sleeved, comfortable clothing, perhaps a fleece blanket in tow (keep in mind, you're up a ski hill after all and even in the off-season, it still gets a bit chilly when the sun goes down), and a heavy dousing of bug spray applied before embarking, one parks the car and settles in for the evening.
You don't stay inside though. Not at all. The aim here is to connect with nature. To gaze your irises upon the same stars, the same inky blue-black July sky, same mother-of-pearl moon that countless other fellow human beings, and animals for that matter, have done since the dawn of time.
One does not want to be encased in anything as modern as a vehicle, nor to listen to the radio when there are crickets serenading us, owls hooting in the far distance, and the haunting call of coyotes transmitting woodland secrets to each other across the almost electric air. These jaunts, these midnight rendezvous are about tranquilly, connecting with some far greater than the sum of any one person. A force and a beauty deeper and truer than anything we could ever conjure up here down on our mortal planet.
They outings are one of my favourite things to do in the whole world and it is the memory of each and every one of these summertime stargazing sessions that inspired the images and colour palette in today's edition of Flickr Favourites.
Before the summer is over, which thankfully is still a good ways off, I hope to get in another evening spent up Apex, laying on the hood of the car or on my back nestled into the tall, wild grass that smells vaguely of flax, and let each of those sublimely beautiful stars carry off another of life’s daily worries, if only for a few brief, enchantingly illuminated hours.
