The Quiet Picture

I talked about the Moose Lake hike a while back. Another favourite hike I have is north-west to the Kvarnsjön lake, then south to Ryggskog and home via Gäddtjärnen. I used to do it a lot when I was still skiing, but not so much now that I’m snowshoeing because it’s a tad long for that. But when you’re on foot, it’s possible to take the road from Ryggskog back to Loos so it was easy to make the decision today to do this hike.

Photographically this route is not quite as good as the Moose Lake, but yesterday I went to Älgsjön and had very little to show for it, so today all I wanted was to have a nice hike and maybe take a few snapshots along the way. And the hike certainly started well, I got a real kick out of the wide open spaces and the new snow. It was snowing and there was almost no contrast at all, so the trail is barely visible in the picture.

When I got to Kvarnsjön, I had a look at the Storryggsån brook that runs into the lake from the west. During milder winters this brook is almost always open, but now it’s been covered with ice since December. I found a great opportunity for a panorama though, and there aren’t a lot of places around Loos that would work as a panorama quite as well as this. It was still snowing but the sun was starting to come out, which provided an interesting light on the landscape. I found a few other opportunities as well, but they would have required digging my way through the deep snow. I had already done one 50m detour and my legs were screaming for oxygen afterwards, I’m really not cut out for hiking knee deep… but following my own tracks back was easy. I can see the benefit of snowshoeing in a group – people can take turns in doing to the hard work. Anyway, I missed those other opportunities I speculated about because my legs were still shaking from the first effort and I had to leave some energy for the hike to Ryggskog.

The trail from Kvarnsjön to Ryggskog is not used a lot. I can’t remember if I’ve ever seen a snowmobile here, but they do drive the route occasionally because the tracks are there. Except now of course, nobody’s done the trail since the snowfall started this week, so I had to pulse through the new snow. It’s uphill almost all the way to Ryggskog, but I love the forest that this trail runs through. It’s a fairly dense forest, mostly pines but a good dose of spruces as well (which is the norm around here). Because of the closeness of the trees, you’ll often see snow here when it’s already fallen down from the trees everywhere else. I haven’t found a way to photograph it so I could do it justice, but as an experience to hike through this forest it’s just simply wonderful. For me it’s a mile of pure winter bliss! And today it felt like it was better than normal… I don’t know if I was stopping so frequently to catch my breath or to enjoy the sight and silence!

I had high hopes for great winter scenery, because it’s been snowing for a couple of days solid now. But alas, I had a really tough time finding subjects. A few twigs sticking out of the snow turned out to be the highlight of the day… Oh well, one more to add to my minimalistic snow abstract collection.

The snow cover is probably about one metre on the marshes. It’s all powder – there hasn’t been any thaw since December to create an icy layer, so it’s tough to walk in the snow even with snowshoes. I sank to my knees wearing the snowshoes, but I guess it’s better than sinking to my hips without the snowshoes. Knee deep, you can still move… hip deep, and you’re pretty much stuck! Despite the generous snow cover and recent cold weather, there’s always a small element of risk to sink in a water hole. This particular water hole here was easy to avoid, but some small holes are covered so you have to watch out for those depressions in the snow to avoid wet feet. So every time I ventured outside the trail, I was just a little bit nervous… I do not like wet feet in cold weather!

Sometimes four seasons isn’t enough. When the sun breaks out from its winter hibernation and you feel it warm on your face while the landscape is still covered with snow, that’s what we call the fifth season. It’s that time of the year when you can go skiing wearing a t-shirt and when the sunglasses is a must or you go snowblind. Early February is still winter, but the thing is that I had a fifth season feeling when I was snowshoeing today. My clothes were too warm and I was missing my shades! To top it off, I heard the birdsong that I always associate with the spring winter.

As for the snowshoe hike, it was nice as always, but I’m really struggling with the pictures. I hoped that the fish-eye would inspire me, but nix. I blame the landscape though; even with all the snow we got this week, the trees are looking a bit scabby and in the end it didn’t matter which lens I had with me. Or maybe a little bit – I wouldn’t have been able to take this picture of a pine when the wind picked up the snow from the branches and blew it towards me. Serendipitous perhaps, but isn’t that what it’s about – being at the right place at the right time?

It’s been a cold weekend and I skipped my planned excursion yesterday, so I was really hoping I could go out today. By noon the temperature was up to -18°C so I dressed warmly and set out. And it wasn’t actually as bad as I expected, breathing was my biggest concern and that was no problem at all and as long as you keep moving at a good pace, you generate enough body heat to keep the extremities warm as well. It’s only when you stop to take pictures that you can feel the heat dissipate quickly… just as well that I didn’t have many photo ops then. Only two in fact, one in the way out and another in the same place on the way home – the light had changed so it was worth shooting twice, LOL.

But yes, I was a little bit surprised that I didn’t have to use the camera more often than that. The sceneries are wonderful to look at, but it just doesn’t quite work in the viewfinder. A little bit too much wind in conjunction with the snowfall earlier in the week so it’s not all photogenic. But it was a nice hike in any case, I was positively surprised to see that the cold temperature wasn’t a problem so if we get another of these cold weekends, I shouldn’t allow myself to be stuck inside four walls.

I did a quick trip to the mountains yesterday, had to check the cabin site because they’re almost finished with the groundwork now (more about that in another post). Since I didn’t have much choice in the date, I was lucky to have somewhat reasonable weather so I could do some photography while I was there.

And the photography started before I even got to the mountains. Road 84 follows the Ljusnan river and there’s a few spots along the way which are quite photogenic in the right conditions, and nothing beats the lay-by just before Hede. I’ve driven past a few times without stopping although the scene was looking incredibly good, so now I’ve made it a habit to slow down before the lay-by in case it’s a worthy opportunity… and this time it was. The river is normally open during the winter, so there’s plenty of potential especially in cold weather.

When I was finished at the cabin site, I still had a few hours of daylight at my disposal so I put on the snowshoes and followed a snow mobile trail. It hasn’t been snowing lately in the mountains either, so the snow was old and had crystallised in the cold weather. By crystallising I mean that the top layer of the snow had frozen and these crystal structures were sticking up… the phenomenon itself is not unfamiliar to me, it happens every winter, but what stunned me was the sheer size of these crystals. They were formed like birch leaves and were easily the size of them, so I started calling them ice leaves. The wind was picking up and the “leaves” were falling at every gust of the wind, you could hear the faint tinkle when they hit the ground. Amazing thing!

One of my favourite mountains is Ånnfjället, it has a very characteristic profile that looks good from any angle. It’s also visible from much of the road between Mittådalen and Funäsdalen, so it was the obvious choice to concentrate on during my short trip. The setting sun was fading behind the clouds, but there was just enough light to provide some contrast for the clouds of snow that the wind was whipping up on the mountain. I was hoping for the sun to come out for a glorious sunset, but that didn’t happen so I gave up and drove to Funäsdalen to get a good cup of coffee and drive home.

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It has taken me half a day to process the HDRs (all of them from that lay-by in Hede). I didn’t use a tripod (lazy, lazy and more lazy) so I relied on quick shutter speeds and IS to keep the picture reasonably steady for processing. But it turned out that none of my four different HDR programs were able to align the pictures correctly (even if they were off by only a few pixels) so I had to manually align everything and then run them through the different programs to see which one gave me the best result, because I wasn’t happy with anything I was getting out of them. In the end I settled with LR/Enfuse or otherwise I would still be processing them. The worst part is that I needed to process every series of shots to be able to determine which ones were worth keeping, and when I finally had the results I threw away half of the work I put into them. Oh well, what are Sundays for anyway?

My favourite winter trek has got to be the trail to the Älgsjön lake. For starters, it’s just the perfect distance for a snowshoe hike, maybe a tad short but it’s also nice to come back home and have some energy in reserve. In the summertime there’s a road to Älgsjön, but it’s not really the lake that’s interesting, it’s the trail there. I take this trail many times every winter, and somehow I always come back home with pictures. It’s never the same – the conditions are different, the time of day is different, every winter is different… if you didn’t find anything interesting, then you were just staring at your feet all the time.

When you come to the lake in the winter, you approach it from the north. There’s a marshy area just before the lake, so the low winter sun shines right on your face and I swear I felt a little bit of warmth… or maybe I was imagining it, having not seen the sun for a long time. Normally the marsh is good for me, but this time I left empty handed as the wind had whipped the trees bare and snowless trees in the winter is a bit of a turn-off for me. But if the wind takes, it also gives – I found some lovely snow drifts elsewhere along the trail and that’s all the inspiration I need.

In my skiing past, if I wanted to sap out all of my energy, I sometimes continued the trail to Öratjärnen and Ryggskog but that’s a lot of pain for no gain (=big blisters and no pictures). So Älgsjön is all you need, all the excitement is bound to happen before you get there anyway!