Cold Diamond

A macro photograph of snow on a snow card.

|| Snow is always changing. Snowflakes fall from the sky pointy and perfect, and once on Earth they take on a more practical shape. Temperature, wind, and weight all work to melt, move, form and deform the snowpack. Individual flakes turn into multi-faceted grains; a little round over here and a little square over there. Over time, these grains lock together to form the surface that bears our weight when we take a walk or ski down the mountain. Here’s a small piece of the larger puzzle, an individual grain from the Utah snowpack.

This grain was photographed against a 3mm snow classification grid on a BCA snow card. I used a 100mm 2.8 macro lens, a Canon 580ex in slave mode, and a Canon 7D. ||

The Ride Before the Last

|| Just before the first snow fell in Park City I set out for a ride on Glenwild. Long DH shorts, tall socks, a touch of snow and some mud were the order of the day. A day later we were racing the storm down this very same trail, watching it drop snow in the mountains just West. The small amount of snow seeped into the well-worn trails making everything nice and sticky, so much so that you would lean into turns past the point-of-no-return without fear. Last ride of the season and the best ride of the season, a new reason to live in Utah. ||