I’ve talked about cloud layers and lenticular clouds, but there is another formation here that I love: mountain huggers. I know, I go a little overboard with the technical meteorological terms, sorry.

Here is Mt Tom with clouds flowing down the eastern face. Weather comes from the west and spills over the high peaks. Mostly, the valley is full of hot air that dissipates all the moisture. In this case, there’s enough to make it to the valley floor, but just barely. Sometimes the mountain huggers float horizontally in long streams, buoyed by the hot air below.

This is another answer to the question, “Do we have fog?” Yes, we do, and wheneve it rains enough (which is seldom), we can see it in the distance on the mountains. Oddly, unlike a London fog, these clouds don’t hide detail as much as they reveal it.

Those granite ridges are hard to distinguish from each other when they are bare, especially from fifteen miles away. With the fog sliding down the canyons between them, the ridgelines stand out as separate entities. I noticed this when I saw one more ridge than I thought there would be. That area is really hard to explore, because it’s a long drive up a rocky road followed by extensive hiking, and I don’t have a clear idea of where each of those canyons emerge.

The whole weather system changes the appearance of the mountain entirely. Since I can’t see the peak, and the base looks completely different than usual, I wasn’t sure, looking back through the year’s photos, that this was actually Mt Tom. I had to study the foothills and the details of the valley floor to be sure. Fog from a distance is different than when you are in it, but it still changes the way you see the world.