You Don't Have to be at the Beach to Enjoy a Gorgeous PTown Sunset

In Provincetown, beauty is where you find it.

One of the best things about Provincetown's pristine beaches is the spectacular sunset views that regularly appear over the Atlantic as well as Cape Cod Bay.
But you don't have to be at the beach to catch the sunset.
I recently came across a number of pictures I'd stashed in my Sky file over the last few years. Click on this photo to enlarge it.
This shot, and several others, prove that you don't have to drive or bike out to Herring Cove to marvel at the vivid sunsets we see from Provincetown nearly every night of the week. I caught this splendid view from a yard on Court Street.

A Bonfire at Herring Cove is Quietly Exhilarating, Even in December

Dressed for the occasion, you can still enjoy a bonfire with a
winter sunset on spectacular Herring Cove Beach, in Provincetown.

That warmish winter weather we've been having lately has been attracting folks to Herring Cove for a bonfire at sunset, despite the ever-present breeze along the shoreline. This always puts a smile on my face.
This little band of hardy souls typically piles out of a couple of vehicles about an hour before sunset, dressed to suit the bracing weather in hats, gloves and parkas, with a blanket or two to wrap up in if they need to.
While the water and clouds begin changing colors, a couple of folks carry a wood box, along with a few tools and various impedimenta, to the sandy shore, and someone begins setting up beach chairs while a couple of others dig a little fire pit and coax a tiny flame and a bit of kindling into a small but satisfying blaze.
A stroll on the water's edge, a conversation and a laugh around the fireside, and gazing alternately between the flickering firelight and a glorious sunset… What better way to end a wintery afternoon in Provincetown?

If you decide to try this yourself some evening, it takes just a bit of planning. Remember to leave the beach exactly as you found it, and don't forget to get your bonfire permit and rules from the park ranger ahead of time. Bon lumière!

Provincetown's First Day of Winter Reaches 58 Degrees

Today is the winter solstice in the northern hemisphere, the first day of winter, and the shortest day of the year. We're not likely to notice the sunset this evening, though, if you can call 4:14 PM evening, since it's likely to be rainy and/or foggy on this unseasonably warm day in Provincetown.
So to mark the occasion, and to glean a bit of joy in keen anticipation of the few moments more of daylight we'll be soaking up over the coming week, I dug out one of my favorite sunset photos from last winter to enjoy in lieu of this afternoon's fog and drizzle. It's the sun setting in my rearview mirror one day last winter as I drove along the edge of the cemetery, on Jerome Smith Road.

I'd have missed this sunset if I had tried to pursue it, so I stopped smack in the middle of the road to savor it.

When I turned onto that little street precisely as the sun was setting, I knew I'd miss it if I tried to turn around and race out to the beach for the view behind me, and, after all, it is Provincetown, so I stopped right there in the middle of the road to luxuriate a bit in that gorgeous, evanescent moment.
In less than three minutes, that moment was gone, the sky was graying, and that, my friends, is the significance of the tiny bit of extra daylight we'll realize by this time next week. Coming down the road in three minutes less light I'd have missed that view, which turns out to be a moment I can recall to soften my heart and raise my spirits, and it's helped in every case where I've tried this little smidgen of therapy over the past year, which was a doozy, by the way.
In seven days the sun will be setting five minutes later, and by the summer we'll be gaining a couple of hours of morning light, and nearly 4 hours in the evening, so the thought of nearly six more hours of daily sunlight to enjoy the stunning beauty that surrounds us is raising my easily-tanked winter spirits.
This too-mild weather we've been having is really terrible for the planet, but when it's combined with a few minutes more of light day by day, and potentially just about enough money saved up this year to get through an uneventful winter without any major setbacks, (we can dream, can't we?) well, all that has me barely dreading the winter at all.
Now, if we can get away with something less than eight feet of snow over these next 15 weeks… we'll have it made.

The Spectacular Provincetown Sky, Opus 3

Sometimes I think I could spend the rest of my time on this planet just watching the colors change in the sky and in the various waters that surround Provincetown…

As this rising tide crept into the marsh and stole the golden colors right out of the sky, these little dollops of clouds parted just enough to let a few rays from the setting sun turn this sandy hillside at the edge of the wetlands a little pinkish.

The Spectacular Provincetown Sky, Opus 2

The Provincetown breeze forms a series of rolling waves in the clouds as the sun sets over the rooftops.

If I had turned the corner from Carver onto Commercial Street 30 seconds earlier, or later, I'd have missed this shot of an insistent breeze gently swirling the clouds into a series of rolling ocean waves.
I happened into a crowd that had gathered spontaneously in front of the Aquarium Marketplace, at the beginning of Provincetown's West End, where people were looking up over the rooftops toward the western sky, exclaiming over the sight they were seeing as they fumbled for their cameras. The wind was twirling the clouds into neat little curlicues as it blew them along the horizon. I heard someone say there was a name for this phenomenon, but no one seemed to know what it was.
You might think these clouds have been "photoshopped" into the picture, but there is no trickery here. This is simply Mother Nature doing what she does… turning the natural elements around us into  stunning, elegant little displays that magically appear wherever you go in Provincetown.

UPDATE: My thanks to a reader who e-mailed me a name for these clouds, enabling me to look up some information on them. It turns out this sort of cloud formation sometimes results when there is more than one layer of air above us, moving at different speeds on a windy day. A thinner layer of air might move more quickly over a denser, heavier layer, rolling a bank of clouds into a shape that resembles a series of cresting waves.
These cloud formations are known by a number of names around the world, and are often called "Kelvin-Helmoltz" clouds or billows. They were named for Lord William Thomas Kelvin, a Scottish physicist and mathematician, and for Hermann von Helmholtz, a German physicist, physician and philosopher (say that five times really fast,) both of whom were born in the 1820s.
"Shear-gravity clouds" is another monicker for these whimsical swirls of condensed water vapor that most often indicate instability in the atmosphere, and are a predictor of likely turbulence for airplanes. And they make a dandy bit of sculpture in Mother Nature's sky.

The Spectacular Provincetown Sky, Opus 1

There's not too much to be said about a sky like this. Just enjoy this photo, shot over the rooftops of the excavation and gravel yard in an alley off of Court Street. Beauty is where you find it, and in Provincetown you find it everywhere. Notice that instead of a high cloud allowing beams of light to shine down from above, the clouds near the bottom are casting streaks of shadow up from below. I've never seen this before. If you were to paint this sky, people would think you made it up. After 24 years here, every day in PTown I still see something completely new, something that just takes my breath away.