Frosty Morning

It was a beautiful sunny morning with frost on the trees near the house.  I haven't had my macro lens out in  quite awhile, so I took a few quick shots before we left for church.  They turned out quite well for all the time I put into them!

 When I look closely I'm always amazed at how the frost crystals stick out vertically from the twigs.

The frost on the trees made the yard very pretty in the early morning sun (that's the corner of our log cabin showing on the left).

On frosty mornings like this, the birch tree out front always looks beautiful against the sky.

The close-ups here are frost crystals on young silver maples trees close to the cabin, the green background is the colour of the cabin itself.

Frost on the side of the tree trunk.  Within an hour or two it's all gone, evaporated by the sun.

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Georgian Bay

It was a sunny day last week (we've had several of them recently), the day we went out owl hunting - successfully finding a snowy owl!  Later, down in the harbour in Meaford I found the ice had gone out and Georgian Bay was a deep blue, almost black line of water against the horizon.

My usual stopping point west of the harbour was snowed in, as it has been all winter.  I climbed a 6 foot snowbank to get this picture, and you can see by the bench in the foreground how deep the snow is, while those benches further out are kept clear by the howling winds off the bay.  And behind them is the blue-black water of the bay, though the ice will move around a lot yet before melting.

Further to the west there's just a little inshore ice, and you can see the Niagara Escarpment continuing in the distance, heading for Owen Sound.  Up there on the distant hill is the Land Force Central Area Training Centre (a name no-one remembers), locally known as the Meaford Tank Range, established during W.W. II, and still in very active use (though not for tanks).

Right down in the harbour the retired Coast Guard ship the Westport sits on its formal drydock beside the harbour.  This ship was retired in 2003, and serves as a museum locally.  I must go check it out in the summer.

Nearby are rows of large sailboats dry-docked for the winter, their cables snapping against masts in the wind the day I took this picture - one of the few pictures I have that has a distinctive sound associated with it.

And just west of the harbour a small bay is still ice-covered, but criss-crossed with fracture lines; behind the ice is that blue-black water of the bay in the distance.

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Personal Photo Challenge

I've been participating in Donna's Personal Photo Challenge, and this month's challenge was words and letters, as in signs and books and other unique alphabetical what-nots.  Not the least bit like what I usually photograph, but I usually learn something from these new challenges, so here goes.

I had a few minutes to wait for my snowshoeing buddy in Meaford the other day, so I took the chance to check out the signs.  The 'big apple' is a well-known landmark, right on the main street.  It's often used as a meeting point, as in 'Meet at the big apple!'.  But it's for sale - not without some controversy I'm told.  Meaford is a town directly north of us, on the south shore of Georgian Bay.

I hopped out of the car and heard music coming from somewhere close.  Looking up I spotted the two speakers on this lamp post, providing music for passers-by (along with a sign supporting the local hockey team).

Down the street was this sign which I thought stood out rather abruptly on the main street.

I liked this sign on a popular local restaurant.  I've been past it dozens of times, but never looked up carefully until I took this picture - I didn't realize it had an actual leaky canoe above the door!

Right beside the big red apple tourist booth is a statue of a scarecrow (Meaford has a great scarecrow festival in October).  I couldn't resist adding it, though there are no letters on this one. With the flat gray light I had to adjust this image a lot to get the texture, but I thought I'd try, so here it is.  What do you think?  I'll put the scarecrow festival on my photo list for the fall.

These were all shot on a Nikon D3000, with varying focal lengths, at medium speeds, and f14, ISO200.  I used to avoid editing photos at all, but now I adjust most of them a little, usually just adjusting the contrast, clarity and sharpness.  I use Lightroom for that, and my cardinal rule is to try and keep the photo looking as close as possible to what I actually saw out there in the real world.  The bottom photo I did adjust a lot, in an attempt to show up some of the contrasting texture on the sculpture.  Sometimes I find that reducing the exposure but increasing the fill light helps do this.

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Duntroon Highlands Nordic Trails

Yes, the sky really was this blue.  It was an awesome day for another cross-country ski, with the sun out and the sky deep blue all day.  We decided to try a new place east of here, near Duntroon, the Highlands Nordic Trails, which have a very good reputation.  We weren't disappointed.

These trails are located part way up the long Niagara Escarpment slope, and at a few points like this Lookout, you get an amazing view.  The trails do head uphill quite a distance after you start though, and then you wander in a series of loops back and forth on the slope and are rewarded with the long downhill at the end.

 

With the long uphill slope to get started, I was left in the dust pretty fast!  I enjoy the downhill runs, especially long ones, but uphill is just plain slow.  A lot of the trail was through beautiful hardwood forest as here, and the trails were groomed nearly 15 feet wide, with both a classic track (on the right), and space for skating.
 

The remainder of the trail we skiid was through old meadows coming up in young trees, or along scenic fencerows like this.  There are both numerous levels of difficulty and numerous loops, so you have a big range of choice, from easy beginner to advanced black diamond hills (that's not for me), and from short to long distances.

 

This is a big outfit that serves as an outdoor education centre the rest of the year, and caters to cross-country skiers in the winter, including a lot of school groups.  Their signage and maps are well done, as they need to be for younger skiers, and there's a store, cafeteria, ski rentals, etc.

The best view was from the lookout, where on a day like today you could see 30 or 40 miles in the distance.  I liked the scraggly branches of this old tree in the foreground.  I also enjoyed the long downhill run after this, back to the chalet.

A closer look at the view shows the wide expanse of Nottawasaga Bay, the southernmost bend of Georgian Bay, all frozen and white at this point.  Along the shore in the forest on the right is the popular resort Wasaga Beach, one of the longest sand beaches in Ontario.  Collingwood is just out of sight to the left.  A very satisfying adventure, and then believe it or not, my friendly ski buddy treated me to lunch at the locally popular Ravenna General Store.  What a great winter's day - perfect weather, good company, and great excercise!

With skies like this how could I not link to:

Sauble Falls Skiing

Another place I've tried skiing this year is at the Sauble Beach XC Ski Club, just upriver from Sauble Falls, near the shore of Lake Huron at Sauble Beach.  The ski trails run through forested sand dunes a mile or so behind the beach, so they're up and down, up and down, and more up and down.

One main loop of the trail is quite flat, well groomed, and wide, with a double track-set ski trail so you can ski side-b-side.  It was a nice day, but fairly late in the afternoon when I got there and I was all alone.

Much of this forest was white birch, along with some spruce and balsam, which always gives the woods a nice atmosphere I think.  And some trees had some really large curly peels of birch bark hanging from the truck.

Once I got off the 'Easy' basic loop, there were some interesting hills on the intermediate trails through the forest which I enjoyed (below).
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These trails were well cared for, and well blazed, the bright red blazes for the 'Easy' trail, which you needed to take for a distance to return to the parking area. 
 

My verdict was that these were very nice ski trails, and well maintained; there was even an outhouse.  But I prefer bigger and longer hills, so I'm still ranking my closest club, Glenelg, as the best.

Someone certainly didn't want us missing the blazes!

My internet service has been abominable for two days now, and it's taken ages to get this post up.  I hope they get it fixed soon; it's amazing how dependent on it we've become!

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and

Skiing at Glenelg

In between photography at Blue Mountain and staying inside because it's -20°C with a wind chill, I have managed some good cross-country ski outings on several different trails.

At Glenelg Nordic Trails, our local and best ski trails, I made it a goal this year to ski every trail.  There are several steeper ones I've never tried.  This one was the steepest, but I survived!

This part of the trails wanders through some pine plantation, and I was struck by the difference between the well-thinned and managed red pine stand (above), and the younger white pine stand (below).  The red pine tend to be 'self-pruning', ie. the lower branches fall off.  And you can see that they've been thinned - an entire row is missing between these trees.

The white pine stand nearby is much younger, not yet ready for thinning, and very crowded.  They also tend to retain their branches, and therefore catch the snow to look very different from the red pine above.

Further on, around the edge of a field, where the meadow takes over from the swamp, are a group of tamaracks.  One of them had a lot of cones down at a height I could photograph.  And the chickadees were nearby, eating the seeds as fast as they could go.

This landowner was obviously doing everything he could to keep any nesting bluebirds in his birdhouses safe from marauding squirrels.

And there were still lots of snow sculptures in the swamp, huge clumps of snow caught on branches on on leaning logs.

A Sunlit Morning

Driving down the road nearby a few weeks ago, on a bright sunny morning when we did have a little new snow, I was struck by the beauty of the snow on the branches in the woods, bright white in the morning sunlight.

It was actually a very bright beautiful sunny day here today as well, but bitterly cold, with minus 20°C and a breeze that made it much colder.  We have another wind chill warning tonight; those seem to come when the wind chill hits -30°.  I'm ready for some nice sunny and -5° winter weather!

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