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During our week in Utah, breaks in the snow were infrequent; breaks in the clouds were even more rare. When they did happen I broke out my camera to feast on the views. The structure in this photo is a chicken coop. The town was Kaysville.
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We lucked out on our drive to Utah. We experienced about the only two days of non-freezing, non-storming days of the past few weeks. It was very strange to go over Donner Summit at an elevation of almost 7,300 feet near the end of December and encounter lots of rain but no snow (even though there were several feet of snow on each side of the highway).
As soon as we arrived in Utah, though, the storms began again and the temperature dropped. When you aren’t driving in it, the snow can be rather beautiful. Today’s photograph is from the bottom of the dining room window. There is a black balcony that provides a nice contrast to the gnarly, snow-covered trees.
I’m still out of town so I’m borrowing another picture from the Ashland Daily Tidings.
This is a sight that is very, very rare in Ashland. We get snow a few times a year, but when it snows there are clouds. By the time we get clear skies the snow has disappeared or will melt very rapidly. The night prior to the taking of this picture we got snow and then the clouds moved on. The temperature went below 0 degrees Fahrenheit (about -20 Celsius) so the snow wasn’t going anywhere.
While this may look like a sunrise picture I actually took it well before sunrise. I left the shutter open for 15 seconds. If you click on the photo for a bigger view you can even see some stars. The part of town you can see the lights coming from is near I-5, Exit 14 (14 miles north of the California border).
After dark I decided to try my first ever night photography in the snow. The snow was just barely coming down. I was trying to set my camera to take multiple shots with different exposure lengths. The above and bottom photos are the results of one of those attempts–two identical photos taken in immediate succession. My settings were incorrect so both actually fired with the shutter open for 15 seconds each (I think, the bottom photo looks like it got a couple extra seconds but I’m not sure if that is really the case).
What happened in the above photo to render the wavy line of light that didn’t show up on the photograph below? I don’t know for sure.
My guess is that a snowflake wandered through the viewing area in the top photograph. That doesn’t explain why it begins at the light source though. Perhaps the wandering flake just happened to be in that position when the shutter initially opened. Or maybe the snowflake came off the tree and not the light. I don’t know. The light doesn’t really look like what I’d expect a snowflake to look like should one have stopped by to have its picture taken. Let me know if you have any theories.
Now that the leaves are gone from my Japanese Maple the sky must make up the difference in lost color.
I was thinking I may wake up to the above scene this morning. Instead we only got a trace of snow although I’m sure the mountains are well covered by now. I can’t see them through the clouds.
So I dipped into last winter to pluck out the above picture. It is the same view as a prior entry, out my dining room window so that I could take the photograph without getting cold. 😉
The forecast is for more snow today and tomorrow so maybe we will look like today’s photo later today or tomorrow.
I went for a walk yesterday on Ridge Road and took a number of photos from there which I will share with you in the coming weeks. This one is of Mt. Ashland before its first real snow of the season. Now that I think of it, this may be the first picture of Mt. Ashland I’ve posted here. I’ll have to get on the ball and make up for lost time.
The leaves have all fallen during the past few days, but a couple weeks ago you could still see the mountains and fog through a rich display of color courtesy of our Japanese Maple.
