The Quiet Picture

It was another cold night so frost and ice was guaranteed. I wanted to shoot some ice bubbles and formations, kinda like those I shot last year. So I drove to the same lake as last year, but I found that all ice is not created equal. For one thing, there wasn’t as much ice on the shore as last time. And the little ice I did find was totally uninteresting so I decided to check out a smaller lake, because I knew that the small ones have full ice cover by now. Well, I still struck out on the ice patterns, but I found something else. The shaded part of the shoreline was still covered with frost while the frost on the other side had melted during the sunny periods (half overcast today), creating this nice contrast. White pine here, green pines over there. Although the picture I posted on Google+ illustrates it better than this one, but I don’t want to post the same picture in both places…

The weather forecast said it would be -4°C degrees in the morning. Bah. It was -8 when I got up, and -5 when I left. Not that I’m complaining, because it meant that there was frost everywhere. In some places the frost was so thick it looked like snow.

I had a plan, at first check out Svartåmyran because it was open enough for the sun to reach it in the morning, and it was a sunny day – no a cloud in sight. It didn’t quite work out though, I took quite a few pictures but in the end I deleted almost all of them. All hope was not lost though, the second part of my excursion was my old favourite, Svansjöbäcken. I haven’t been there all year but I was really hoping to find an icy lining to the water… but it turned out that there was quite a lot more ice than that. It wasn’t just a lining, it was a full ice cover everywhere but in the waterfalls.

So you’d think that I was disappointed, but no such worries. What makes this place so great is that there’s more to it than just the water, so I turned my eyes towards the forest instead. There’s a lot of old fallen pines around and now that they had a frost all over them, it wasn’t hard to find something interesting to shoot.

But all that standing around in the frozen moss, my toes were freezing. Seriously. The kind of thing that hurts when the circulation comes back. Note to self: the hiking boots are not rated for four seasons!

Been a warm autumn. Despite the cold nights we had in October, and the little bit of snow that came and went, there’s not a sign of winter yet. The days are just getting darker, that’s all. Even in the mountains it’s warmer than usual, the first cross country skiing race should go off in Bruksvallarna next weekend but I reckon the only way they’re gonna pull it off is if they had stored some snow from last year (they do that in some places you know). The only snow I saw was on top of the higher mountains and even that was melting, it was patchy and not very pretty. I walked around in some boggy areas and felt that the moss pillows were hard under my foot, so there has been some colder periods to freeze them. There was also a little bit of ice left on the small and shaded tarns. The kind of thing I’d expect in September, really.

But at least the weather was nice up there, with a little bit of sun. At home it’s just foggy and damp and the day was too dark for photographing the birds, but what else is there to shoot these days anyway? I had to go up to ISO 800 to get any decent shutter speeds, not a favourite thing to do but since the fog was providing a light background, it was possible to pull of some pictures like the squirrel closeup. Unfortunately I didn’t have a chance to flip the camera for a vertical (the squirrel would’ve been gone long before) so I just barely got the ear tufts in the frame and was happy with that. Added some canvas afterwards, no problem with that when the background is so even. And the crested is a bonus, nothing spectacular but I’m still just a little bit thrilled for getting any pictures of it at all. The crest says it all – it’s damp in the forest.

We are now in the time between where autumn comes to end and the waiting for the snow begins. The nights are cold and the weather forecast said that it would be a sunny weekend, so I was really looking forward to a morning shoot at my favourite tarn of the year (it keeps changing, because the tarns are so small that the photo ops are soon exhausted). When I got to the place, I sure wasn’t disappointed. There wasn’t as much ice on the water as I thought there would be but as long as it was calm, the open water worked just fine. The moss was almost frozen and half the time it carried me without breaking, giving me this surreal feeling of walking on water and then on the next step an actual feeling of walking in water when the crust broke…

As the sun climbed higher on the sky, it started melting the frost and the magic. It was surprisingly warm, actually, but I knew that I had already taken my keepers so my heart wasn’t in it any more and I left. But I will tell you one thing… my disappointment at missing most of the autumn colours is gone. I couldn’t possibly have any regrets after a morning like this!

I’ve never done a hike in the mountains in October before, so it was exiting to see what the day had in store. It turned out that it was all good – the first snow had fallen in the tundra and apart from the occasional snowfall that flew past in the heavy wind, it was a sunny day which allowed us to see the landscape in all its glory. The colours were muted under the thin layer of snow and all the features of the landscape were highlighted, giving it a very graphical quality that you normally don’t see.

We hiked up to the Lill-Skarven fell because there’s a road that takes almost up to the tree line, thus sparing us from wasting time and effort on climbing up the boring part through the forest. Once you’re up there, it’s easy going until you’re at the foot of the mountain but it’s not such a bad climb anyway. It was cold though, so much so that the water in the tube leading out from the water bladder in my backpack was frozen! The October weather is nothing to toy with, the wind was biting through my supposedly wind proof clothing but by the afternoon the sun was sufficiently warm to melt the snow on the ground and the ice in the water tube. But the slight discomfort aside, it was an amazing hike. There’s nothing like the first snow in the mountains!

A little bit crazy. It’s October and it’s so warm that I was walking around wearing a t-shirt. The jacket was just too much! This must be a first, I sure can’t remember an October when it’s been this warm. So it was nice to walk around in search of autumn colours, and it should’ve been easy because we actually have them (unlike the mountains). I tried it in the morning, and then spent most of the afternoon on it, and got nothing! It was getting so ridiculous in the end that I could just laugh at it. I visited a lot of spots that have been productive in the past, only to discover that pine and spruce are the dominant trees everywhere, and in those places with some birches the leaves had already dropped. So I was driving… and driving… on roads that are lined up with birches in beautiful yellow colours, and didn’t take a single picture of them. Because I didn’t want to shoot a birch by the road, I had higher ambitions than that. And got nothing.

Note to self: Find birch locations next summer.

I didn’t have any hikes planned for today, just prepared the cabin for winter and then left. But I did drive via Funäsdalen instead of taking the gravel road to Hede, because I was hoping to see some snowcapped mountains along the Mittådalen road. What took me by surprise was to see that the lakes were mirror calm, even though the morning was late. We’ve had a lot of these calm days on this vacation, it seems like either the wind is blowing very hard or then it’s totally calm; there weren’t many days when it was something in between. Would it be too much to ask to get these calm days next year when we hopefully have proper autumn colours in the mountains?

This is the last “real” day of my vacation, meaning that it’s my last chance for a hike. I was going to go to the Lövörgraven ravine at Kappruskaftet that I was my original plan yesterday before I got the call from the camera club, but now when I parked the car I saw a lot of other cars arrive with people wearing hunting clothes and I realised that the moose hunting season had just begun. But no worries, I knew another ravine with no risk for me being shot so I drove towards Flatruet instead and hiked to the Öjegraven ravine that I thought I had found in the summer. It’s a little bit confusing and you can’t really blame me that I got my ravines mixed up, I mean what kind of logic is it that Öjebäcken runs through Storbäckengraven and Storbäcken runs through Öjegraven? But that’s the way it seems to be, I finally realised that this week when I was studying the ravine descriptions in detail. There are three ravines close to each other in this place, Öjegraven is the biggest and furthest in the west, Storbäckengraven is the next one to the east and Torrgraven very close behind it. I could’ve reached Öjegraven in the summer if I’d just followed the brook downstream instead of crossing it and then going over the field of strange diagonal rock slabs. Those diagonal rock slabs are a precursor to the ravine, it was my initial reaction when I saw them so I should’ve trusted my instinct. But I had dismissed my instinct because I couldn’t see anything further down that even hinted of any vertical cliff walls and now that I reached Öjegraven, I found out why. The ravine starts somewhat abrubtly, so if you’re approaching it from the top you really can’t see it until you’re there. Other ravines like Svartmorgraven and Fiskhålsgraven have rock formations that continue way out, just gradually getting smaller.

Öjegraven is a fair sized ravine, right up there with Svartmorgraven and Evagraven. It has a friendlier profile though, with a broad and flat bottom where birches thrive and more vegetation on the edges of the ravine. If there’s any drama happening, it’s on the eastern side of the ravine. The western side is somewhat tame with no cliff walls at all in some places, and birch forest growing at the edge. This actually played a trick on me when I arrived at the ravine. One moment I was walking in birch forest, and the next there was nothing – the ground just disappeared ahead of me! I had to stop for a moment and let my pulse calm down while I processed the information. Through the birches I had seen that the ravine was down to my right, so I was just aiming for that, without realising that the ravine makes a turn so that it was right in front of me where I was. But when I got over the initial surprise, I had a pleasant walk up and down the ravine. If I would have to describe it with one word, I would say “nice”.

A nice place and a nice way to finish my holiday!

I was going to hike to one of the ravines today but then I got a call from some members of the camera club who are on an annual excursion in Funäsdalen. Since I’ve been alone for over a week, I was only too happy to get some company so I abandoned the ravine and drove to Funäs to join the club (pun intended, even if I’m already a member). We then headed to Norway, the plan was to see the Syldammen dam and Nedalshytta. Unfortunately the weather turned to the worse almost as soon as we were in Norway, but something else happened as well – the birches had leaves! Unbelievable. As we were driving towards Nedalshytta, the colours were a little bit on and off. Some forests were bare but some still had some colour.

It was very windy and drizzly at Syldammen, not very easy to shoot with the Tokina wideangle with a protruding front element which is impossible to protect from the water drops flying around so I wasn’t getting anything done. Then we drove to Nedalshytta and sat down for coffee and waffles. Coffee was excellent, I drank too much of it… waffles were ok, but can’t hold a candle to the ones at Djupdalsvallen. It was nice to sit there anyway, talking about cameras and waiting for the weather to turn, which it should’ve done according to the forecast. But there wasn’t even a hint of the sun so we headed out anyway and followed a creek upstream where we had seen a big waterfall from the road. Turns out that we were on the wrong side of the creek so our hike was cut short when we came across another creek that was flowing into the one we were following, impossible to cross. Note to self: follow the creek on the left side to get to the waterfall…

I had an “off” day today. I thought I would get a delivery today but I didn’t, so that was morning wasted. In the afternoon I took some of the garbage left by the builders to the recycling station in Ljusnedal, which then left me the rest of the afternoon free with no plans for it. I decided to explore the area around the viewpoint on the road between Funäsdalen and Mittådalen and try to spend enough time doing it so I could catch the sunset there. This turned out to be a great decision, because I found a lot of nice spots. A part of this area is spoiled by the powerlines and snowmobile trail markings but I found a few spots where those could be hidden from the composition, and then when I continued further north (not venturing very far from the road) I got away from those distractions and compositions were even easier. Not that I took very many pictures for obvious reasons, but I did make a note to come back here under some other circumstances.

So sometimes it helps not to have a plan and just aimlessly walk around. This is one of my favourite roads in Sweden and I’ve driven it countless of times and I’ve stopped at the viewpoint almost half the time and taken a lot of pictures from it. But never before have I actually explored the area… shame on me!

And the sunset? Didn’t happen. Sun disappeared behind the clouds long before and didn’t show up again. More time for me to have my evening tea then.