In some of the last days of November we got our first real bit of snow. All told it was just a couple inches down in the valley but there has been some serious accumulation at higher elevations. A lot of SNOTEL sites are reporting well over 100% of normal for snow water equivalent, at least on the Western side of the Rockies. Winter is off to a good start so far. I grabbed the Leica and the 50mm Zeiss Planar and a roll of Kentmere 100* before we headed out the door for a walk.
There is always something so beautiful and moving about a walk in a freshly snow laden forest. There is a stillness, a quiet to everything even when the snow really starts coming down as it did toward the end of our walk here. And there is this sense of freshness to everything, not just in the way that everything feels somehow cleaner with a dusting of pure white snow. I mean in the sense of that peculiar experience that the German philosopher Martin Heidegger calls aletheia in his later philosophy, the coming forward or presencing of beings in their particular manifestation, the experience of Being in the fuller sense of the term. The forest of fall gives way to winter in the fine dusting of snow, and before our eyes the world manifests itself to us anew. Perhaps that very stillness of the winter forest is a condition for that mysteriousness (re)presencing of things. Maybe therein lies the magic, or at least some sliver of it.
Obscure and notoriously impenetrable German philosophers aside, below is a handful of other images from that walk.
*Kentmere 100 shot at 400 and developed in Ilfotec-HC 1+31 for 14.5 minutes