The early spring rains are long gone and the western hills of the Central Valley of California are starting to turn gold.

Of course, it depends on the light that they get as to how golden they seem.

In this first picture the clouds are blocking most of the sun and the hills are more of a brown color. But be patient, the golden hills are coming.

Here the sun is coming through the clouds and some of the hills are showing a golden touch.

I really like this picture. There is definitely gold in them there hills. I really like the way that the sun is highlighting the one ridge here and also the cattle on the hillside below. It looks like a country road here with the truck, but it is actually taken across Interstate 5 from the Westley rest area. These pictures were taken this evening. Two weeks ago I also took some pictures at the rest area and shared them in a post titled Rest Area Nature Call.

If you have been following my posts, you may remember the beautiful picture of an iris bloom starting to open. If not, you can click on the link in the previous paragraph to look at it. Here is what the same bloom looked like this evening.

The upper bloom is the one that was in the picture from two weeks ago.

I also noticed that it was one year ago today that I created Braman’s Wanderings. I really don’t count today as my one year anniversary of the blog, as a simple default post was generated that I didn’t edit until the second day of June. So check back for a blogiversary post in June.

Here is a link to the first post: Welcome to Braman’s Wanderings

Steven