Wells National Estuarine Research Center at Laudholm Farm, ME

Yesterday the temperature got up into the high teens so we threw our snowshoes in the trunk of the car and drove down to Laudholm Farm (The Wells National Estuarine Research Center) for a couple of hours. The Friends group there rents snowshoes so the trails are, by now, well packed and pretty easy going. We climbed the snowbank around the parking lot and headed out parallel to the woods that line the drive coming in. I was immediately struck by the shapes of the winter trees against the snow…certainly not skeletal, and not quite nude…but something very like both. The birch is one of my favorite trees at Laudholm…birches in general, and this particular majestic birch that lives along the boardwalk trail. I have photographed it now in every season. The birch shot is a vertical sweep panorama, sweeping the camera from fully over my head pointed straight up, down the trunk of the tree to the base…pretty tricky while standing on 5 feet of snow in snowshoes. 🙂

Sony HX400V, sweep panorama as above, and in-camera HDR for the other shots. Processed in Lightroom and assembled in Phototastic on my Surface Pro 3 tablet.

As I surmised after my first slog around the yard with them, I am really enjoying being able to get out into the snow covered landscape on my snowshoes. I have not gotten out as often as I might like, since the temperatures, often with significant wind chill, have not been inviting, but each experience has been both rewarding and refreshing. I am not very adventurous on them. I stick pretty much to the established trails and don’t do a lot of trail-breaking, but even so, they take me to places I just could not get to without them, and it has (again as I surmised) made a difference in my attitude toward this winter. The temperature might keep me housebound but the snow does not. This is good.

Because of course there is a stark, is might be so bold as to say, a spiritual, beauty to the winter landscape. Skeletal is wrong word for the trees exposed in winter because the trunks and branches are so obviously still alive, waiting, biding their time, resting even…and we don’t see skeletons until after death. There is nothing dead about winter trees. Naked comes close…since, at a stretch, they have shed their summer clothing of leaves…but that is not quite right either because the leaves are way more than clothing for the tree…they are way too alive…way too much the tree itself to be considered merely clothing. It is perhaps, as though we are seeing the spirit of the tree…the strong solid core that will burst out, in weeks, with new life. And we are seeing the spirit trees against the backdrop of landscape transformed and simplified by its blanket of snow…again as though the clean clear spirit of the land itself is exposed. We might have to bundle up in layers and strap snowshoes to our feet to get out, but if we bring our winter eyes we see the beauty…and is so alive! We see through to the spirit, and have reason to give thanks and praise to the creator, in this winter landscape. Happy Sunday!