I made the 10-minute scooter ride this morning to Kyoto's Yamashina Ward, to explore what I thought was a mountain road that I discovered yesterday with Google Earth. Sadly, it turns out that the road is not open to the public. Still, I came away with a few nice shots from the mountain-village area just prior to the gate.

This is all very close to the concrete jungle that is Kyoto... perhaps half a mile (it's two miles from my place), but as I've mentioned so many times (especially here), once you get into the mountains, you feel like the city is a million miles away.

I'm not really happy with this last shot because it makes it look more like piled up debris than a nice fence, but it's a nice fence. It's sort of a rustic version of this nice wall at the Giouji Temple.

At one point I took a wrong turn and took a road that slowly morphed into an increasingly rough path up into the mountain. I eventually realized that it had become a hiking path (one that eventually hooks up to a path I've hiked up to Mt. Daimonji). I eventually turned around, but not before taking a few pictures of one of the many logs that had fallen across the path-side stream...

This particular log, once you got in close, seemed to be a botanical city unto its own. I really didn't do a good job in the few shots I took.... I'll have to go back if I ever get a good macro lens...

After lunch, I happened to have the camera with me when I picked up Anthony from school, and took the opportunity to snap a picture of some huge trees in the schoolyard that were pruned to within an inch of their life a month or so ago...

I don't know what it is with pruning in Japan, but it seems that they really like to do it.

These trees are huge... six or eight stories tall. Here's the top 30' or so of one of them... (with the sky wildly overexposed, to allow some detail in the tree):

The tree is stark enough in the winter even with its branches (see here), but at this point it's just a sad sight.

I'm still interested in capturing an amazing sunset like the one I saw a month ago, but from the photographically advantageous vantage offered by Shogunzuka and its sweeping views of Kyoto. Today's late afternoon was overcast with absolutely no promise for a colorful sunset, but one doesn't score big by waiting for a sure thing, so I again slogged up there in hopes I'd be surprised.

As I was walking up to the overlook, a group of middle-school girls were doing some kind of jumping play while their taxi driver snapped a picture, so without breaking my stride I did as well. This shot caught them all airborne...

The guy at left is the taxi driver, snapping a picture of his fare just like the one I featured last month at this same location.

The way the path leading to the overlook is lower than the overlook makes for some nice silhouette opportunities. The shot above is sloppy in that respect, but I had a nice sunset silhouette last month, and some nice nighttime silhouettes last summer.

The sunset itself was okay... a bit nicer than average, perhaps. It was much hazier than normal, so the difference made it interesting...

Anthony wanted to take a picture, so I handed him my Nikon D700 with the huge Nikkor 70-200mm f/2.8 zoom on it. That much camera in the hands of a six-year-old makes for a comical sight, but he got a nice shot....

He was getting chilly, though, so we didn't stick around too much longer.