During the summer I traveled to Clear Lake for the Splash In which I covered in this blog post. The drive back from that event took me through Calistoga. You descend from the hills to drop down in to the town. That evening, the sun was settings and the light on the hills was absolutely gorgeous. I resolved to go back at a later stage to check this out in more detail. Our Healdsburg trip had us up in Calistoga so I thought it would be worth a second look. Unfortunately, the weather was not too special and the rain was coming down.

We started up the road climbing as we went. The view back over the valley was pretty attractive and we climbed higher. Of course, it didn’t take too long to get high enough that we disappeared into the cloud base. From there it was just rain. We found the first good option and turned around to head back down. Then we stopped off at some of the overlooks to check out the valley.

The colors of the vines were very attractive and the geometry of the vineyards looked great. The hills in the background were also shrouded in low cloud and there was smoke rising from the fires in the buildings scattered across the low lands. While I did take some pictures – obviously since they are here – I did also just stand and enjoy the view for a while. It isn’t easy to appreciate the scale of a view from a photograph. Sometime I like to get the panorama shots just to have something that gives the width of the view. These are best when printed large so don’t translate well to the computer screen. However, they are always stored for possible future use.