Meet Snow Fog from New Year's Eve that dissipated as quickly as it appeared, mysterious, perhaps, a bit foreboding, but, at the same time, holding secret promise.
Shooting this image using a high ISO without a tripod actually worked out well: the grain enhances the atmosphere.
It's been weeks since I've visited the Mountain.
One of the best (worst) aspects to doing so is that I never know what to expect. There have been times when the town, where I live, was rainy and dreary, whereas higher altitudes were filled with brilliant sunshine, and vice versa.
On this particular occasion, I stepped into heavy snowfall and Cosmic Grayness.
Snow-burdened and desaturated evergreens appeared out of its depths, while the chairs on the ski lift, or rather, their barely discernible pixels, dissolved back into it. Not a mule deer or a raven were to be seen or heard in these seemingly lifeless woods.
Postscriptum: With snow overflowing my boots, I slightly underestimated the knee-deep hiking conditions halfway up to the invisible Heavens, making me work as my dog's personal bulldozer.
Hiking in a lost world drained of color, we passed by the bridge to Nowhere, as we climbed higher and higher.
Indeed, there was Nowhere to go but up.
Lungs hurt from the influx of chilled air, as did our quads from exertion, despite all the diligent stretching.
Boots filled with snow.
I stopped to document the disappearing surroundings with my smartphone only to be startled by a woodpecker perched on a nearby tree stump. But my loyal and long-eared canine did not give me the chance to identify it, scaring it off into the Gray.
On this frozen mountain, this was not the only avian we encountered. What now seemed like a regular fixture, a large black raven dove in and out of the fog, the only thing revealing its presence in the other--hidden--world was its audibly flapping wings.
The snow fog also concealed most of the already meager signs of civilization which is always exciting and unsettling at the same time.
It is particularly unsettling when the aforementioned loyal canine--in possession of the second-best sense of smell of all dogs in the world--stopped, listened, and sniffed the air in a way that was much different from its standard behavior around deer and grouse.
Something more menacing was nearby, and it was almost dusk.
We headed in.
Meet Snow Fog.
He is the frost-bitten version of the Gray, and is, therefore, no less ravenous.
In fact, it is much easier for winter's Gray to eat the entire mountain in one murky chomp, because the Sun rarely makes an appearance this time of the year. And when it does, the latter is brief.
There is simply no one left to fight the Gray.
Except for the birds that travel between these two worlds.
I expected this.
November's new Moon delivered the first major snowfall of the season along with a powerful late-autumn variant of the Gray in the form of snow fog enveloping the mountains and prematurely exciting every single ski bum within a 200-mile radius.
What startled me was not the contrast of the remaining brightly colored vegetation being slowly executed by winter, but a suddenly unconcealed wasp nest sporting a heavy snow cap that managed to hold onto a bare-naked aspen.
That, and a lone mosquito that somehow survived the Blitzkrieg of wind and ice pellets and followed me for a dozen feet sensing nourishment.
The proletarian mud on my boots mixed in with the nobility of freshly fallen snow: Octobrists and Decembrists embedded into a single sole pattern.
I just hoped that my camera battery lasts in the cold.
Yesterday, I found an infographic listing 21 emotions for which there are no words in the English language. Here it is. In it, though not identical, the Japanese "懐かしい" sits next to the Russian "тоска".
Yet sometimes even words from other languages fail.
That is when images step in.
Almost the entire month of September belonged to the Gray, impenetrable and suffocating. Was ruled by it. The latter turned out to be an objective correlative of sorts. A frequent reminder of things gone wrong.
The Gray can be photographed beautifully, in detail, but sometimes simplicity works the best.
But now September is no more.
Like the barely detectable setting Sun, hopeful the Night is.
Always.
The Gray is back.
And it's only natural--Autumn is prime feeding time, as it has to fatten itself up before Winter. Just like the local grizzlies, minus the claws.
Following its standard routine, the Gray arrived the day of September's New Moon and began doing what it does best: gobbling up the Mountain.
Incidentally, the Mountain herself didn't mind: it had so many daily responsibilities of housing all those trees, deer, turkeys, wolves, people, and, yes, grizzlies, that it often felt like a bona fide Atlas. Sometimes, it's nice to take a little nap in all that spa-like fog!
Unlike the last time, I let the Mountain have its "me-time," traveled back into town, and was thus able to capture that rare moment when the Gray's belly burst from all the gluttony.
What you see below is the Sun slowly crawling out feet..errr...rays first!
But this small victory only took place over the main Mountain's little sister. To top that off, it was late in the evening, so the Sun had to be off to bed on schedule!
And the Gray? The Gray is still here the morning after.
...And then around 6 o'clock the next morning, when every self-respecting night owl should have been sound asleep, else defying its very essence, it finally happened.
The Gray gorged up too much of itself. To top that off, the growing belly ache from swallowing the Sun the day earlier was not helping either.
It was then that the Sun peeked out from the blue mountain ribbons. Frankly, it was getting a little tired of going through the same exercise every few weeks with the same result. "Sisyphean labor," it scoffed.
But sometimes, when no one was looking, it engaged in its guilty pleasure of choice--historic existentialist literature. Only a little!
Then the Sun recalled that it was much higher up the totem pole than the Gray--indeed, some would say, at the very top. (The Moon always disagreed.) So, it illuminated the valley.
Though considering the sheer magnitude of the Gray's most recent gluttony, bits and pieces of its shredded amorphous body floated over certain sleep-deprived night owls' heads for hours to come.
They were occasionally pushed over by the Wind revealing the Water. "Divide the task into manageable segments!", the Wind used to say.
Today, the Gray visited "Twin Peaks" again.
Without much hesitation, it gobbled up the mountain. And the entire sky.
This is a little disorienting, you know. You're standing on a mountain, but there is no mountain!
The Gray got greedy and ate the Sun, too, temporarily (the latter always burns through its belly, but it never learns). In the end, the Gray always consumes itself--when its appetite simply becomes insatiable.
Yet unlike its counterpart at the end of the rain season when everything, every blade of grass, sought a glimpse of sunlight, whereas humans were popping vitamin D, this Gray was much needed.
It hasn't rained in weeks, and now the woods will finally acquire that crisp verdant color. Nature, like a woman, must be renewed.
After all, the new Moon is coming.
