I’ve shared a lot of photos of Folsom Lake’s south fork in the past, but at the end of October I made my first trip in a couple of years out to the area of the old Salmon Falls bridge and the Monte Vista and Sweetwater trails. It took me a little while to get my bearings; and of course the shoreline looks very different depending on the time of year. We had a lot of rainfall (and snow in the mountains) last season, which brought the lake levels up. So now that they’ve dropped over the summer, I found soft mud along the banks of Sweetwater Creek, not to mention some very enthusiastic wildflowers — and one or two unexpected items.

Yellow monkeyflower

My best guess, a sunshade lost overboard in the summer

The remains of a once-mighty tree that stood beside Sweetwater Creek prior to 1955