High Plains Drifter

Winter shooting and camping at Great Sand Dunes National Park. It was another one of my 3-day weekends off work the weekend of February 5-7, and I wanted to get a winter shoot in somewhere in northern New Mexico and/or southern Colorado since I was scheduled to be in Clayton, NM for a photography talk on Thursday, February 4th.  It turned out that my scheduled talk in Clayton was put on hold due to a snowstorm, however the storm was expected to clear in time for the remainder of the weekend to be rather nice.  A couple weeks prior, I invited my good friend Michelle Douglass, who lives in Aurora, CO, to join me on this short little trip.  We decided to make a camping trip out of it, and since I had never done any cold weather camping before, I figured this would be a pretty cool (no pun intended) experience, since we both obviously love nature/outdoors and whatnot.  I met up with Michelle around mid-afternoon Friday 5th and we were essentially the only people in the park outside of perhaps a couple other hikers.  After setting up camp we did a late afternoon/evening shoot on the Medano creek bed as well as some landscape scenes from just a mile or so south of the park entrance.  The following morning we awoke to a morning low of about 12°F.  I was a little more prepared than she was for the cold, and the camping was Michelle’s idea :)  At any rate, it was fun, and we had some decent light for sunrise, although it could have been a little better.  After breaking camp, we hiked up the big 600 ft. dune, known as High Dune, near the main dune walk-in entrance area.  I enjoyed the lenticular cloud formations on the peaks of the Sangre de Cristos to the northeast of the dunes.  It was a very enjoyable couple of days with Michelle at the dunes!  After the hike, we had lunch at an Italian/pizza place in Fort Garland and then parted ways.  An album of images is below, enjoy!

Overnight freezing fog and very cold temperatures yielded amazing rime ice across Southwest Kansas on January 30th! I left Dumas, TX very early in the morning on the 30th after documenting and photographing the record snowstorm across the region just a couple days prior.  My route home took me through Guymon, Liberal, Meade, and Minneola along Highway 54.  Through this entire route, the rime ice collected on exposed objects was rather thick.  I decided to stop and photograph some of this in the near-full moonlight at a rest area along Highway 54 northeast of Liberal.  Morning twilight then grew as I drove through the Meade and Fowler areas, and the rime ice became much more evident.  It was a rather amazing winter scene, so I was just hoping that it was still this good as I drove into Minneola.  Sure enough it was.  I spent a good 45 minutes to an hour driving around town photographing this amazing accumulation of rime ice, mainly on the trees.

Images 1-4: Moonlight landscape of the rime ice at a rest area along the Cimarron River a few miles northeast of Liberal

Images 5-7: Images taken in Minneola just before the first light from the rising sun hits the tree tops in town

Images 8-13: First sunlight hitting the trees with a wonderful warm pink and orange hue

Images 14-15: Zoom-in of the thick rime ice accumulation

Images 16-18: Looking down some of the residential streets in Minneola.

Images 19-22: Various other images of the rime ice in Minneola.

Images 23-27: I ended the shoot photographing some of the interesting frosted grass and this thin, golden vertical rod sticking out of the ground with rime ice accumulation.  It was interesting to note that the accumulation was on the west facing side, instead of the traditional north or northeast that is usually seen with rime ice formation in Southwest Kansas given the typical wind direction associated with freezing fog events.

Image 28: Small tree on my lawn back in Dodge City frosted with rime ice.