Tag: Snow
House on the Frozen Lake
The northeastern US has been gripped by severe and hardened cold. Consider, for a moment, how much colder 20 ºF feels than 60 ºF. Imagine that difference projected past its original low point, out the other side to -20 ºF. After past winter temperatures like these, I can attest that the return to “normal” winter really does feel 40 ºF warmer. The rivers and lakes are freezing. The snow is a dry powder, dozens of degrees below its melting point. A warm home above the frozen waters sounds pretty inviting.
First Snow
Wishing everyone a happy Boxing Day!
Campus on the Eve of Finals Week
Finals week is upon St. Lawrence University. The campus is in full “winter mode”, blanketed with snow. The oddest thing about this time is its effect on the student population: a sharp partitioning between those who are finished, relaxed, preparing to leave and those who are tense, stressed, and trying to make it through. Like the dynamics of molecules in excited states, that latter group slowly relaxes to join the former.
Shade
Behold, Shasta!
See Mt. Shasta rising from the forests around it, all snowbound and rocky. Perspective may push them together, but the difference in scale between trees and mountaintops is staggering.
Flooded Flats II
Another image from the flooded Bonneville Salt Flats.
Nevada Valley
Contemplating a drive back across North America, I’m most looking forward to the West. The mildly populated areas (look at the tiny path in the distant center of the image) remind me of the best parts of Sergio Leone’s Spaghetti Westerns.
Flooded Flats
So flat are the Bonneville Salt Flats that, during the winter months, the region will be covered uniformly by only about one inch of water. This layer is so thin that it can’t support large waves and surface disturbances, resulting in almost perfect reflection of the far-off hills and clouds.
Trucks in Their Respective Expanses
Hundreds of miles apart from each other, I happened upon these two images of vehicles, paired with their owners, otherwise alone in an expanse of western America. On a clear day, the yellow pickup in the image below is almost lost in the brush.
By comparison, this Nevadan Jeep stands out amid the dusting of snow and descending clouds. Even its driver is farther away. The setting is so perfect that it might as well be a Wrangler advertisement.
Summer Wonderland
It’s a pretty weird sensation to leave home where’s in the mid-80’s and sunny in the morning and end your day in the snow… in June.
Wyoming Wides
Along Interstate 80, stretches of winter Wyoming are wide and barren like I wouldn’t have believed.
In a few stretches, mountains or wind farms crop up in the distance.
But it’s perhaps this image of an orange house, like something from a mid-twentieth-century landscape painting, that best captures the experience.
Little Building, Big Facility
Across the frozen expanse of Wyoming in December, signs of life and industry have the strange look of an off-world colony. If not for the tiny building in the foreground, the image would be totally devoid of reasonable features at human scale.
Wyoming Homestead
Even on this bright afternoon before a winter blizzard clamped down on central Wyoming, the cold and isolation of the state is astonishing. Each homestead seems mostly isolated, and the rolling hills give the illusion that the curvature of the Earth has been flipped inside-out. First settlers on a ringworld?
Alpine Hotel
It’s too bad the conference I was attending wasn’t scheduled for deeper into the skiing season.
Decaseconds 