This early heat wave – if it was this much warmer than normal during the summer, that’s surely what it would be called – has resulted in early flowering of almost everything, including some plants that shouldn’t even be flowering until late April. As well, most trees have started leafing out and the hardwood portions of the local forests have started turning green.
The following video from our yard captures just a small part of this strange season in Arkansas. For this video, I didn’t add any music, just natural back ground sounds from our yard.
How are the seasons progressing where you are?
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Like most U.S. national park campgrounds, Devils Garden has no hookups for water, electricity, or sewer. Facilities do include potable water, picnic tables, and grills, but there are no showers. There are 50 sites that can be reserved between March 1 and October 31. This is a very popular campground and, for anyone who would like to camp here, I would recommend making reservations.
Our first hike of our 2011 visit to Arches National Park was the 3.0 mile (4.8 km) round-trip trek to Delicate Arch on September 21. We had done this hike almost exactly 
Overall, for us, this winter has been crazily mild. While, we did have one spell in December that was cold enough to brown much of the ground vegetation that normally stays green in this part of the country, it has been much warmer than normal for most of the season.
Winter’s probably not over here. Typically, our snowiest month is February, followed by March, and we’ve even had snow in April, though some years we don’t get any snow at all. Last year, on February 9th, we had nearly a foot, and that was the second snow of the week.
In my view, our warmer weather and the colder weather in Alaska are just regional climate variations, not global warming or cooling, not a direct manifestation of climate change, though change is coming – it always is.
This was our second time on this trail segment, which runs from the Bear Lake parking area to Emerald Lake and connects with other Bear Lake area trails. We had hoped to make it to Emerald Lake if our legs, and the weather, held out. The weather had been iffy overnight and during the morning. Trail Ridge Road had been closed closed the night before and remained closed due to snow for the first time in the season. With rain threatening, instead of a hike that morning, we went into Estes Park. After lunch and walking around Estes Park town center a bit more, we headed back into the park to the Bear Lake area trailhead.
From the Bear Lake area trails parking lot (9,475 ft.), the trail climbs steady for 1/2 mile, then levels off at about 9, 700 feet at the south end of small, lily pad covered Nymph Lake. The trail begins climbing again in the forest on the north end of Nymph Lake and levels off again at Dream Lake, 1.1 miles from the trail head and at an elevation of 9,912′ ft. Dream Lake is .35 miles long. The trail passes along its west shore.
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