Round Robin: Snow and Other White Stuff

For the Round Robin Challenge: The White Stuff, I asked to see photos of anything white. My inspiration was a trip up Mount Lemmon a couple of weeks ago, for the purpose of visiting snow. I'll show you the best of my photos from that day - unfortunately taking from a moving car using an iPhone - but let's start with a few other examples!

A year ago I photographed a different kind of white stuff: ice coating a tree outside St. Michael's.

Monsoon clouds, July 2013. Clouds are never really just white, are they?

I grew up outside Syracuse, NY, where there is lots of snow and ice - not necessarily at Christmas, but frequently from October to April. When I got married, I moved to Columbus, Ohio, which is a lot like Syracuse. When John came into a little bit of money in 1986, we drove around the country looking for someplace it wasn't winter. Tucson is where we ended up. It only snows in the city once every two or three years, and never stays on the ground more than a few hours, or overnight at most. And if it gets to be winter, and one finds oneself missing snow, it's just an hour's drive away - up Mount Lemmon!

Okay, it's not quite that easy. There's no snow on the mountain without a storm to drop it there, and when that happens they block access to the mountain (except to local residents) until the roads are clear again. A few weeks ago, the conditions were right. I had seen snow on the mountain from afar, and the road had been blocked. But time had passed, and the road was open again. So I drove Dad up to see it. And it turned out, I was far from the only person with this bright idea!  One stretch of Mount Lemmon Highway was lined with the cars of other people, who had all come to "visit" the snow!

We didn't check out the right hand fork at the very top of the mountain, site of the southernmost ski resort in the continental U.S. It didn't matter. Several miles below that, around the next bend from all the cars, was a winter wonderland of sorts. It wasn't exactly Vail, but it wasn't bad! People were flocking to the spot to play in the snow. What I especially like about this particular picture is the dusting of "white stuff" on the jackets of some of the snow bunnies!

Rounded patches of white stuff on the road testified to the throwing of numerous snowballs.

Some people had climbed the hillside, probably with the intention of sliding down again.

And I particularly enjoyed seeing this couple. "Look, honey! I made a snowball! Do you want me to throw it?"

Karen

Now let's see what "White Stuff" the other Robins saw!

Linking List
as of Monday, January 27th, 2014

Karen - Posted!
Outpost Mâvarin
http://outmavarin.blogspot.com
http://www.facebook.com/mavarin

Freda - Posted!
Day One
http://fredamans.blogspot.ca


Ellen - Posted!
Ellen's Phlog
http://ellensphlog.blogspot.com/

mande **Welcome, new paticipant!** - Posted!
Simply Learning to Explore and Use My Camera
http://simplyturtlepictures.blogspot.com/

Carly - Posted!
Ellipsis
http://ellipsissuddenlycarly.blogspot.com

So Falls Niagara Falls

Carly was curious about my other shots of Niagara Falls in winter, which date from February 1986. I think John took most of them, possibly all of them. Here's some of what I have floating around on my hard drives. They have mostly been posted before, but six years ago and longer.

I think it was -11 degrees F that day, and windy. Miserable weather, but well worth it to see this! This was during our "driving around the country, looking for someplace it wasn't winter" trip. But when even the Florida Keys were rather chilly, we drove north to where it was really winter. We saw the Falls, visited my Dad in Syracuse for his birthday, and ended up photographing snow sculptures in Montreal.

My favorite moment was when we stood on the river itself, just a little upstream from the falls. There was a little island that the water would normally rush past, but it was so heavily frozen that the snow and ice extended past the land. Daringly, I stepped out on the frozen patch of river, perhaps a few hundred feet from what you see here. 

I think my pseudo death defying feat was somewhere near this spot!

I think of this as the "grotto" shot. I remember looking through an observation window in a gift shop or museum or something, and seeing nothing but ice.

 I later did an FX version of the lamppost shot above, lighting the inside with fire.

All of the photos were originally developed in some other city after we left the Niagara Falls area. They came out all gray and awful. Fortunately, that's fixable to some extent with modern photo editing software!

Karen

EMPS: My Favorite Animals - in the Snow!

You know that my entry for Ellipsis Monday Photo Shoot #80: Animals is going to be about my dogs, don't you? Short of paying admission to the zoo, I'd be hard pressed to see much other than dogs, birds, and maybe a cat of two this weekend. And besides, Cayenne and Pepper are quite my favorite non-human animals, and I haven't done a photo set on them in a while. Tonight: Cayenne and Pepper in the snow!



As I mentioned in my previous entry, I took the dogs up Mount Lemmon on Saturday, hoping to show them some snow. Well, I found it!



The dogs haven't encountered significant snow since we got them in 2008, so I was curious to see their reaction. Neither one was phased by it. They didn't play in the snow, or sniff at it (well, it only smells like water, right?), but they didn't particularly avoid it, either. Here they are in the lightly packed snow piled up by the wall at San Pedro Vista. I had more trouble with it than they did - I kept sinking in!



Pepper was too busy looking around to make her way back down the ridge of snow with Cayenne and me, back to the parting area.



Then she had to play mountain dog, and scramble down a fairly steep bank! But it suited her, the snow. If she really is part Finnish Lapphund, as we suspect, it's the kind of weather she was bred for.

Karen

More Ups and Downs - Mount Lemmon in the Snow

I felt a little guilty that I didn't have any downward-looking shots last night in my entry for the Round Robin Challenge: Look Up/Look Down. So on Saturday afternoon around 4 PM I set off with the dogs for Mount Lemmon and the Catalina Highway. After all, on a mountain road there's plenty so see, both looking up and looking down. Besides, it was another chance to try to get the dogs someplace there was snow, and tp see how they would react! (More on that in the next entry.)

From Mount Lemmon Highway

What I found is that you can look down (and more to the point, aim your camera downward) at almost any pullout or vista point, but the photo won't necessarily make it obvious that what it sees is below you. The guy in this first shot, for example, is probably about thirty feet below me as well as in front of me. Not easy to tell that, is it? This was taken at Molino Canyon Vista.



And here's the view down to Molino Creek.



By the time we reached the Bear Wallow/Bear Canyon area, there was a little snow at the side of the road, accompanied by signs warning of ice. Patches of highway were wet with runoff from melted snow. At Windy Point, there was a fair amount of snow, and a mini-pond of runoff at the edge of the parking lot. Here we are looking up at the distinctive rock formation that's one of my favorite Windy Point landmarks.



Late afternoon shadows and the reflection of snow created problems with some of my photos, with the upper parts of them overexposed. But here is a view down to another part of the same road - whether ahead or behind I'[m not quite sure.



At San Pedro Vista the dogs and I had to climb a not-fully-compacted snow bank to get to the view downward.



There were lots of little cataracts on both sides of the road, created by runoff from melting snow. This one was at Marshall Gulch, the snowed-in picnic area just past Summerhaven at the top of Mount Lemmon.



Here's a view down to the creek that runs along the road at Marshall Gulch.



Another view downward, mostly, at Windy Point at sunset.



Looking down toward the city at dusk.

Karen

1966 and All That

The abandoned railroad bridge in Manlius, 1971

When I Googled for The Magic Toy Shop last night, I happened across a link for a YouTube clip from the same Syracuse broadcaster about the Blizzard of '66. I've written about that storm before, thus:

In late January 1966 I was a little short of nine years old. The Blizzard of '66 was a big deal at the time, as big as the Great Blackout of '65 had been. That Sunday morning, we could see it was more than just a snowstorm. My dad drove up to the P&C in Manlius right after the snow plow made F-M Road temporarily passable. Dad's Rambler American was part of a line of cars that followed the plow into the village. Dad wanted to stock up on bread and milk, in case we couldn't get out again for the next several days. I didn't understand why he was doing it. I figured the P&C wouldn't even be open, because this was in the era of Sunday Blue Laws. But I guess the P&C opened for blizzards, even on a Sunday, because Dad returned with the bread and milk, and a story about how many other people were at the P&C doing the same thing.

The oldest photo I have to illustrate this memory, seen above, is from five years later, when I got first a hand-me-down cheap plastic camera from my dad, and then his old Instamatic, which believe it or not was a step up. (My next camera was a Poloroid One Step, but I think that wasn't until college.) I've never had anything but my memories to go on in writing about the Blizzard of '66 - until now. I don't know whether the following has been online all along, waiting for me to notice. I suspect not.


(Left: a lamppost at Niagara Falls, February 1986)

First: a photo gallery on Syracuse.com. None of the shots are from Manlius, as far as I can tell, but several of them might as well be, especially the ones of sidewalks hemmed in by walls of snow. I'm not going to infringe on their copyright by posting one of the pictures here, but do go take a look!

Next: the YouTube clip. It confirms my memory: the warning came the last Saturday in January, and the storm really hit on Sunday. We were all snowed in for a week. The reporter mentions that the facilities for digging out improved dramatically in succeeding decades.

There's also someone's 8 mm footage of kids playing in the snow, but the picture quality is so poor that it's not terribly illuminating.



That's it for tonight. I had a three hour nap earlier, and I don't want to waste it by staying up any later! But having had my memory jogged last night about the blizzard, I wanted to share my finds with you.

Karen

Finding Cybersnow

Weekend Assignment #178: It's hot. Everywhere. Really hot. Counteract it with a cool and refreshing photo or story of winter. Yes, we've done something like this before. And, if you recall, it worked. Also, it's easy and it's too hot to do anything complicated. So let's do it again (just, you know, don't reuse stuff that you've already posted along this line before).

Extra Credit: Would you rather be too hot or too cold?

Um, you do know I live in Tucson, right? The fact that it sometimes doesn't snow here for several years at a time, coupled with my propensity for overkill in doing these assignments (and the Monday Photo Shoot, Round Robin, etc.) means that I have pretty much shot my wad on snow pictures. And Tucson winters may be relatively cool, but they don't exactly tell the story of winter coolness. (By the way, the car thermometer at lunchtime today said 101 degrees. At 7:15 PM it was down to 96 degrees. Top that, you folks Back East!)

Still, I took lots of photos when it snowed in January, and I've scanned in our photos of snow in the desert from 1986 and 1987, and I point a camera at the Catalinas whenever snow can be seen from the city below. I've labored over scans of badly-developed photos of half-frozen Niagara Falls from February 1986, and a winter carnival in Montreal. I've even cleaned up faded photos taken in Manlius in the early 1970s. None of this really helps, though, because I've posted them all. Click on the label "Snow" in my sidebar, and you'll see most of them. Still others are in old AOL-J entries in Musings. Given all the times I've done entries about snow, are there any photos left on the subject that I haven't posted? Any at all?

Yes. But it took some doing to find and prepare them.

First I did a little survey to see what I had that I might not have posted yet. This involved both opening photo folders on the new computer (which currently has almost every image that's on the external hard drive) and Googling "mavarin snow". As I expected, the Manlius ones have all been posted at least once, ditto the Niagara Falls ones and the Tucson White Christmas ones.

January 22, 2007. From Wilmot Road.

Ah, but the January 2007 "weather" folder had lots of photos. Maybe I hadn't quite used all of them! So I made a chart:

Picture Project	Jan 07/weather
Title	features	Used
snow4513	car window, early on
snow4517	car, falling snow	Snow! 1/22
snow4524	night, aloe	Snow! 1/22
snow4527	car office night
snow4528	car office night	Snow! 1/22 (raw)
snow4529	car office night, back window	Snow! 1/22
snow4530	night tree	Snow! 1/22
snow4531	night trees	When Cold 1 2/7
snow4532	night tree, yard, underlit
snow4533	night trees, yard	Snow! 1/22
snow4534	firecracker, night
snow4535	yard, car, night	Round Robin blog
snow4536	firecracker day	When Cold 2 2/8, DF 4/3
snow4537	trees day	Snow by Day 1/23, DF 4/3
snow4539	mountains day	Snow by Day 1/23
snow4541	mountains day
snow4542	mountains day
snow4543	mountains day, road	When Cold 2 2/8
snow4545	mountains, day
snow4547	palms, day	Snow by Day 1/23
snow4548	parking lot, day
snow4549	parking lot, day
snow4550	mountains, parking lot, day	Snow by Day 1/23
snow4551	aloe, day	When Cold 2 2/8

Also January 22, 2007. From the ULC parking lot.

Which allows me to come up with two more semi-decent photos for you! (Above.)

Snow-dusted desert plants, Grannen Road back yard, 1987

Next step was to go through actual physical photos. Fortunately, the bulk of our snow-related photos are in binders, and they're kept in our library these days. Two of the binders provided one previously unscanned snow photo each. Success! Not wanting to use them both up at once, I'll leave the one with the balloon for another time.

A chess motif in snow, Montreal, February 1986

Ah, but I really hit the jackpot when I found Binder #1, which had the Niagara Falls and Montreal photos! There were three Winter Carnival sculptures I hadn't scanned, plus an alternate view of a fourth one. Photo by JBlocher (that's John, folks).

Jenny frolics in the frozen North, February 1986

And I have fond memories of Princess Guinevere of Westcott St. (a.k.a. Jenny Dog) frolicking in the snow. They were on the roll that came out gray (with gray snow!), so they're not very good. But I managed to salvage this shot, more or less, and one other.

Niagara Falls, River and frozen tree, a little less gray

And yes! Best of all, I found one, count 'em, one! Niagara Falls shot I hadn't scanned before. Well, all right, there were also a couple of shots of the Niagara River, but I didn't bother with those tonight.

I'll save them for the next time John Scalzi longs for snow.

On the extra credit: it occurs to me that I have now lived almost as long in Tucson (21 years) as in metro Syracuse (22 years). I've been away from those miserable winters for a big chunk of my life, even if you count the slightly less miserable Columbus winters (1979-1986). But I'd still rather be hot than cold. Now, if we're allowed to do something about the hot or cold - dress warmly or get under the A/C, then maybe...no. Still taking the air conditioned hotness over the seven layers of clothing coldness.

Karen

Dead Flowers

Your Monday Photo Shoot: Take a snap of some of the latest blossoms and blooms near you. If for some reason it's still too chilly where you are, one, you my sympathy, and two, go ahead and use a picture from your archives. But everyone else should go out and take a fresh picture if they can.

Oh, this is so not the year for flowers in Tucson! Remember that rare Tucson snowfall I was going on about in January? I loved it, but it was devastating to a lot of the plants around here. Here's the bougainvillea in front of our house as of last summer:


But here's the same plant in January 2007, right after the snowfall:


And here it is as of today: dead, dead, dead. There aren't even any buds or tiny new leaves to offer hope of the plant's survival:


Similarly, there's an office building at Fifth and Wilmot where I've photographed flowers before. Last summer it was positively lush:



But look at it now:


Yes, one of the palo verde trees is in bloom. But look at the brown bushes. Bougainvilleas, I think. Dead, or nearly so.

One more. Back at the house, we have a firecracker bush, a kind of hummingbird plant (which is to say, a plant whose tiny, bright flowers attract hummingbirds). It's grown and spread considerably over the last decade, even poking runners under the yellow wall John built. But this, too, was covered in snow in January:


It's not dead, but it hasn't exactly recovered, either.


Personally, I don't mind the dead flowers. I'm just not a flower person; in fact, I'm allergic. I'm sure people and companies around here will replant, and maybe next year the right weather at the right time will produce a lush crop of spring flowers. But it's all one to me.

Still, if you like flowers, I hope you have lots of really nice ones to enjoy, like John Scalzi's extraordinary cherry blossoms. Happy Spring!

Karen

When I Was Cold, Part Two

Hmm. Now that it's time (past time) to write this entry, I'm not sure I have any stories about being cold that I haven't previously told online. In past entries I've written about:

Figure 1: The abandoned railroad bridge in Manlius, 1971. Newly re-edited.

• Walking home along the abandoned railroad tracks from my guitar teacher's house, and how cool water felt hot on my half-frozen fingers afterward (Figure 1)
  
• The Blizzard of '66, when we were off from school for a week, built an igloo, or a least a tunnel, and had plowed snowbanks five feet high
  
• Waiting in another blizzard in the early 1970s while my brother finished his biology lab
• Cracking a rib after sliding uncontrollably down an icy path at Syracuse University, and crawling across a steep and icy sidewalk outside my dorm to get to the street

Figure 2: Half-frozen Niagara Falls, February 1986. I think the
temperature that day was below 0 F. Yes, it was also windy.

• Driving around in early 1986 looking for someplace where it wasn't winter, and ending up in Montreal and Niagara Falls, where it was really winter (Figure 2)

Figure 3: a spit of land above the falls. Newly re-edited.

Figure 4: probably not the patch of river I stood on

• Standing on a frozen patch of the Niagara river, just above the falls (Figures 3 and 4)
  
• Getting ice in my freshly-washed hair as I walked to my boyfriend's house
• Our first and only white Christmas in Tucson

Figure 5: the firecracker hummingbird bush on January 22, 2007.

Figure 6: the drive to work on 1/22/07

Figure 7: by lunchtime on the 22nd, most of the snow was gone

• Our rare Tucson snowfall in January, 2007 (Figures 5-7), and discussing same with a security guard outside Unnamed Largish Company at 1 AM
  

Figure 8: a icy grotto is really an observation window at Niagara Falls

Well, then, what's left?

• I'm not sure I haven't told this before, but I didn't find it in a quick search, so here goes. There's the time I stood in front of University College, where my dad was the dean, waiting for a bus home to Manlius. Dad would have picked me up had I been able to call and reach him, but I was afraid that if I left the bus stop the bus would come, and I wouldn't be able to catch dad on the phone. So I stood there for an hour as late afternoon turned into evening, watching the time and temp on the MONY Plaza tower: 11 degrees, 12 degrees, 11 degrees, 10 degrees, 9 degrees...! Turned out a least one of the buses had broken down.
  
• John and I used to go to record shows (where we sold records and posters and buttons) in a 1962 Ford Falcon van. This was circa 1982, and the van was anything but airtight, and the heaters didn't work any more. One memorable trip was when we drove to Monroeville, PA in February, freezing all the way. Before we started back we went to Monroeville Mall (huge place, with a skating rink!) for some "moon boots"and down jackets. John found his moon boots, but I had to settle for something less stylish.
• (Posted this to John Scalzi's By the Way as a comment, which doesn't count as my having told the story:) Once when I was in about fourth or fifth grade, we have a snow day for blizzardy weather at 23 degrees below zero. My memory says that was before wind chill, but I don't trust 9-year-old Karen to have that detail right. The next day it was still windy and still cold, but not as extreme. It couldn't have been more than 0 degrees. We not only had school; we had an "outside noon hour," in which all those little girls in dresses and tights (and little boys a bit warmer in pants) had to go outside and shiver for half an hour. The gym teachers put many of the kids in a kickball game to warm them up, which is the least sadistic thing I remember Miss R. ever doing. The day after that we had no school, but I had already prepared some hand-written protest signs in case the school pulled that thoughtless stunt again.
  

Enough! It's past my bedtime. Sleep well and warm!

Karen


Related entries:

Winter Wonderlands, 1966, 1976, 1986

The Lost Railroad and the Land of Salamanders

Snow, Rare and Otherwise

Snow by Day; Not Too Fine a Mess

Snow!