A New Year to Explore

Well, darn, i didn't realize till now that i put Kona up as the first shot for two posts in a row. Next time i am 100% positive she will not be featured at all. January is a dark month. It's also a cold month. But like December of 2014, what was normally cold, grey and gloomy was filled with warm days and partly cloudy skies. After all the winters i've experience up here i have decided what i enjoy most, in winter, are mostly cloudy days, not partly cloudy or clear and sunny.

January is cold enough that clear sunny days seem to be mocking you, because there is no heat to the light and the sun spends most of the day shining straight into your eyes just above the horizon. Overcast days are dark with no real indication of sunset or sunrise, and very flat light on the snow. On days with some clear sky but more clouds than not you can see arguably better because the sun is blocked from blinding you and reflects off the clouds making some nice ambient light, often tinted with late day colors.

The windmills of Fire Island are kind of an eyesore since they don't work.

Steam form a powerplant in East Anchorage pushes up through the clouds.

The forests of upper Anchorage.

A great sunset above the clouds at Glen Alps.

There are some avid paragliders who jump off the top of Flattop and glide back down to the parking lot.

I wasn't the only person up there for sunsets. This was a nice fellow with a southern accent who'd recently moved down from Tok.

The mirage of Fata Morgana. A deep layer of cold air near the surface (which also was causing the fog) acts like a refracting lens, producing an elongated and inverted image over and on top of the regular image you normally see.This mirage is named for Morgan le Fay, a sorceress from Arthurian lore. Long ago, sailors worried they were being lured to their death by witchcraft when normal views turned into towering castles and seemingly enchanted images.

To the North, Mt. McKinley and Foraker catch the last rays of the day.

A little glimmer of light about Powerline Pass.

Our January temperatures were also largely above normal and we really never had any snow down in town. So, once again, i got out and enjoyed the nice weather a lot more than i would have during winter blizzards and biting winds. For about a week we had a lot of fog that settled over Anchorage. So when i was gloomy in town i just drove up above the clouds where the weather was usually great.

The morning after the foggy sunset i went back up to Glen Alps for Dawn. Not very hard to make it to sunrise when it's close to 11am. The next day the fog had cleared out for the most part.

Sunrise on Mt. McKinley. There was one man on that mountain.

January of 2015 will be known as the first year that anyone summited Denali on a solo trip in the dead of winter. Only a handful of people have ever made it to the top in winter even as a team and in December Lonnie Dupre began his fourth attempt at doing it alone. It's really a huge deal and on January 11th he successfully made it to the top. (and more importantly, he made it back down.)

Some moose cross a small meadow in the lower right.

Because of our warm weather i wasn't able to spend as much time down on the mudflats as i normally do. They don't usually get frozen enough until we have a few weeks below 10 degrees or a week below zero. I did get a few trips down there and the picture above was one morning around Jan. 21. The picture is significant because it wasn't adjusted using any Adobe products. There is finally a new photo editing competitor to Adobe in the works especially for Macs. It's called Affinity Photo, and i was able to play around with the Beta. I'm impressed, especially if it is only a fraction of the cost of Lightroom and Photoshop as they claim it will be. The program didn't have a lot of functionality but i was able to get some pleasing results quickly (it's FAR faster than Lightroom) by just tinkering around.

Turnagain Arm one afternoon.

With mostly no snow in Turnagain Arm i imagine the Snowshoe Hares had a rough time with not being seen.

Kona looks for varmints on a rainy day.

Some phone shots of a little hike we did along the arm on a snow free day.

For our Anniversary we took a mini vacation to Alyeska Ski Resort in Girdwood. It was foggy there too, but we had a great dinner at the Seven Glaciers Restaurant high on the mountain above the clouds.

It was during that trip that i got a few photos of some convenient Light Pillars. Even before sunset though, the ice in the air was making some weird effects. The hills in the distance looked blurry. Occasionally i see the blurry effect that ice can have on winter landscapes. At first it makes me think i have something in my eyes and i have even rubbed them a few times to make sure my contacts were working properly.

The same hillside at night reveals the light pillars.

The view from Seven Glaciers Restaurant

We had one big cold snap in February before i went on vacation. It was good and cold for a week, then it warmed up to the 30's. I thought it would be cool to go look at Thunderbird Falls, thinking i could get some neat ice pictures. Unfortunately a few days before it warmed up it had been extremely windy and that had blown all kinds of dirt and debris ontop of the snow and ice.

An ice slap from a seep in front of the falls looked like a cave formation.

Thunderbird Falls, not as impressive as i'd hoped. The cool thing was that the upper falls was still falling behind a very thin, transparent sheet of ice, but you could barely hear the bassy roar.