We’ll start this post with yet another sunrise. There is so much variety in texture and colour in this view.

The spring flowers came on apace.

Pink pussy toes mixed with cut leafed fleabane.

Star Solomon seal. This one has a flower spider on it. I had disturbed it by sticking the camera lens in front of it, but they are the same colour as the flowers, and usually sit on the blossoms waiting for a pollinator to approach within striking distance.

The ubiquitous violets.

More cutleaf fleabane; some have ray flowers and some don’t but they are the same species.

Rain was never far away.

Despite the warmer weather, Perkins Peak still had a lot of snow.

My trail camera caught. a mule deer family. Poor mum looks pretty bedraggled after the rain.

I snuck in an hour or two of sunshine and hiked up the north dunes. As always I am fascinated by the horsetails that grow there. Every other species I know of likes wet areas.

One of the very few flowering plants of Jacob’s Ladder that I have found. Last year was the same in its sparsity.

The “spider tree” was alive and well.

Note the roots.

More baby ducks appeared. This Barrow’s goldeneye had about 6.

And this one had 14!

Richardson’s penstemon bloomed showily but briefly.

Pine flowers shed pollen.

And Senecio canus flowered.

The humidity was extreme (for this part of the world) and thunderstorms happened often. One morning, it was quite pleasant and sunny at home, but a black cloud in the north was already grumbling. A few flashes – then I heard a roar. It was persistent and steady. There didn’t seem to be much wind. My second thought was fire. I jumped on the ATV and rode along my road. The burned area started 2 km away. The black soil was littered with large hailstones. I had forgotten to put the memory card in the camera so grabbed a few to bring home to photograph.

Only the burned area had hailstones on it. The black soil must have radiated more heat than the green forest and triggered the storm. The roar of the hail had been so loud I had clearly heard it 2 km away. The green forest had no hailstones, but the thundercloud spread to encompass everything – as far as Bella Coola and nearly to Williams Lake. The loud thunder and multiple lightning strikes went on for hours. For a while, in the afternoon, the thunder noise never stopped. It growled and banged and rumbled continuously. It rained steadily, and then turned to a deluge. Finally as the temperature cooled to 10C, the lightning quit, but the deluge continued for half the night.

The river was now quite high.

There was never a day without thunder.

Sometimes we had brief dramatic lighting effects.

Water vapour was never far away.

Then we had a second major storm. By midday, thunder was grumbling in the northeast, but it seemed to want to stay there for a while. But towards sundown it erupted overhead. The setting sun managed to poke fingers under the cloud lid and, while all the banging and crashing and jagged lightning was going on, it lit up the rain.

The noise lasted most of the night and by morning the rain was dumping down again.

Pepita has discovered a new game. She tears back and forth through the big puddles like a lunatic.

At least the risk of fire was minimal. Not impossible, though. One of the hundreds of strikes could have ripped into a rotten tree. It might smoulder there until the wind got up. But so far this yearwe are spared fire worries. In 2017, half of BC was burning by this time, and last year I was already eyeing the Big Stick fire that was eventually going to cause me so much angst.