I spent an hour this morning walking through parts of Carleton College’s Arb taking photos and reveling in the beauty of a frosty fall morning. It actually wasn’t the first frost — that was a couple of days ago — but this was a hard frost, around 20-25 degrees F.
Last year I took a few photos of the first frost (they sucked, mostly) and I’ve been looking forward to this year’s ever since. It’s a peak SOS (Shot of Solitude) hour in which I’m more focused than usual on my surroundings, my brain chatter relatively quiet.
I’ll narrate a few of the photos but you can also just scroll through the entire gallery.
* I’d never notice these dead weeds if they didn’t have white hats on.
* This walnut tree was not only shedding green leaves at a rapid rate. It was also dropping a walnut every 30 seconds or so. At first I thought someone was hitting golfballs in the pond. Note the splash rings radiating out in the water.
* I don’t usually have much luck shooting into the sun because I have no clue what I’m doing; but I got lucky with this one, whisps of fog forming on the ponds midst the frost-covered islands.
* I’ve never taken a picture of a sundog before.
* I think this is the only house within the city limits that’s adjacent to the Arb.
* I normally don’t see a red fox but once every couple years, usually scooting across a county road. Today, I met one on the trail and had my camera ready. Too bad I didn’t have a monster zoom lens.
* “Where does the frost go, Dad?” “Well, son, as the sun rises, the the tree shadows get tired of protecting the frost so they abandon it. The frost dies because it can’t keep up. Moral of the story: You can’t be spoon-fed all your life.”
* With such a hard frost so early in the season, the green leaves, mainly from the walnut and ash trees, were piling up everywhere, a somewhat unsual occurrence. These made an interesting pattern on the black path. These covered a truck downtown. And these piled up in front of our house.
So I now have a photo gallery section to the website, which I’ll keep adding to.