January Thaw

Winter arrived about the usual time this season, but with some bite.  Through the latter half of November, all of December, and most of January it has been cold, with lots of snow.  For the last week and a half it has been unusually mild, and a lot of that snow is disappearing.  This is somewhat depressing as it just makes for a mess and we all know that there is a lot of winter left.  It was been mild for the last ten days or so, but these past couple of days the temperature has been up around +9C during the day, and it has not dropped below the freezing point, even at night.  It was been breezy as well.  About a week ago we hit not only a temperature record for the day but also a wind record with gusts of 120km/h recorded.  This is the equivalent of a category one hurricane.  Needless to say that wind combined with the mild temperatures has significantly reduced the snow pack.  The winds have lived up to their translated name... chinook... meaning Snow Eater.

I went out for a drive on Saturday afternoon.  The skies were mostly overcast but every once and a while the sun popped out for a bit and teased me.  Of course every time that I found something perhaps worthy of a shot with the big camera, the clouds rolled over and thickened up.  It was a mess, lots of dirty water running everywhere, lots of mud, and a lot of that ugly dirty snow.  Here is a shot of some of that meltwater and the related ugly conditions on a small pond out in Elk Island Park.

After rolling through the park I headed north and scouted around for a while.  I stopped by at the old house that I have been shooting for the past couple of years.  This is the unfinished one that sits there forlornly in an abandoned farm yard.  The yard has now been gated and posted so I had to shoot it from the road.  It looked like the sun might pop out briefly for me but after waiting in the wind for a while, I gave up and shot this image in the flat overcast light before moving on.

I scouted around for a while before eventually making my way back home.  I came across this neat looking but somewhat overgrown little brick house.  I think it's brick, although often houses of this era are wrapped with an asphalt based shingle-like material with a fake brick pattern.  The light was really flat, the snow really ugly, and the day coming to an end when I finally found this one.  I took a record shot but will return in better conditions and see if I can find an image here.