A Hundred Words for "Fog"

The conventional wisdom is that the Inuit have hundreds of words for snow. We don't get snow here in the Snoqualmie Valley very often, so I'm content with just calling it all 'snow' and letting it go at that.

What we get here, though, is an infinite variety of fog. Ground fog. Morning fog. Fog rising off a wet field when the sun gets high enough to dry the grass. Evening ground fog. Low clouds scudding over the hilltops to the west, as the breeze comes in from over Puget Sound way. We even, like today, get the all over packed in solid "London Fog" type.

I'm becoming an expert in fog. Different fogs smell different, feel different on your skin. They sound different, or at least sound travels through them differently. Photographically, they're as different as can be in the way they capture light, alter color, change contrast.

Today was yet another lesson in fog.

Driving off to have lunch with Bryan.

Driving home from lunch with Bryan.

A while back, my neighbor did a commercial thinning of his forest. The trees are still flagged, and the forest seems extra thin until the trees bulk up. In the meantime, when the fog drifts up the hill and into his forest, it looks like this. For some reason, when it's full of fog like this, it's extra quiet. All I could hear when I took this was the ticking sound of my car engine cooling, from where the car was parked on the gravel road behind me.