Cell Division

It held for about thirty seconds. The weather had been shifting all morning and at some point everything lined up at once — light through the gap, the cloud stacked and splitting overhead the way it had been threatening to all along — and then it was gone. I waited a long time for it to come back, but it never did.

This was my birthday, 2017, and I’d planned it. Months of research went into that trip, and the Old Man of Storr and the Quiraing were my top two candidates for the sunrise. I chose the Quiraing because I knew less about it. I’d heard there was a lone tree out over an overlook up there, and in 2017 there was perhaps one photograph of it online and no directions to be found. I liked that I’d have to go and look, and to figure out what to shoot if I couldn’t find it.

You drive most of the way. There’s a small lot at the crest of the saddle and it’s under half a mile to the good ground on either side of the ridge. Sheep on the road going in, sheep dotted up the hills. I found the tree faster than I’d expected and then it was just waiting.

The title is about the sky. Those are storm cells building and splitting over the ridge, and by mid-morning it was raining hard, then on and off the rest of the day, and we gave up and went to Portree for breakfast and wet-weather shopping.