An American Bison (a.k.a. Buffalo) keeps a watchful eye on me while hunting for grass under snowfall.
Seen at the Rocky Mountain Arsenal National Wildlife Refuge just outside of Denver, Colorado.
EXIF:
OM System OM-1 camera, M.Zuiko 100-400mm f/5.0-6.3 lens
100mm, ISO 200, 1/1600 sec, f/5.6
A snow sculpture of Ullr, norse god of skiing, on display at the 2023 Breckenridge International Snow Sculpture Championships.
As luck (good? bad?) would have it, our drive up to Breckenridge for the 1st public day of sculpture viewing coincided with the arrival of another storm front. Appropriate, I suppose, for a bunch of sculptures made from snow.
A shot of an intrepid couple, working their way across a snow-covered patch of ice.
Seen at Barr Lake State Park, Colorado.
EXIF:
Olympus E-M1X
M.Zuiko 300mm f/4 lens + MC-20
f/8.0, 1/2000 sec, ISO 200
On our trip to Iceland this January, we got to see a new perspective on a subject we’ve had earlier experiences with — lava tubes. Formed when lava flows crusted over and subsequently drained, we’ve walked through some in Hawaii — but never previously seen one in a colder clime.
So this is what happens near the Arctic Circle where there’s a lava tube “skylight” (localized collapse of the tube’s ceiling). Continue reading
We got hit by an odd late-winter storm the other day, and here’s what we woke up to:
This was the result of a storm that was supposed to dump a foot or more of snow on us, but wound up leaving us maybe an inch. And since the storm hit town quickly (temperature dropped by 40 degrees F in a matter of a few hours), it landed on warm pavement.
So for at least a few hours the next morning, I could play with my camera (in super cold temps) with this unusual snow pattern — only surviving over the joints between our patio pavers.
So a few months back, we got a late afternoon dusting of very sticky wet snow — the immediate result was an odd vertical ridge of snow on top of all our trees’ branches. So lit only by our porch light, I had to grab a shot of this unusual scene:
It took a little help from Topaz Adjust to bring out the contrast in what’s admittedly a very abstract image…
One of the best parts of living in Colorado is that we can get up to some… interesting… mountain events over the course of the year. This was a Canadian entry at the 2012 Breckenridge snow sculpture contest:
I’m always amazed at just how much detail the sculptors can coax out of packed snow (OK, in this case with a bit of help from some icicles).
And of course, you have to look carefully to spot all the goodies they’ve packed into their work.
Captured as we were heading to Juneau, Alaska — via the inland passage.
The inland passage is pretty calm to begin with — I took this shot early in the morning while the water was even more still.