My timing with changing the winter tyres was perfect. I did that on Tuesday and on Wednesday morning we had snow! It’s been so cold since then that it’s still white on the ground. The conditions just couldn’t get much better and I had my head full of ideas, with the snow, and ice on the lakes, and the sunshine, and most of all – full moon.
One thing I like about this time of the year is that the brooks haven’t frozen yet, while there is snow and a lining of ice. I reckoned that Svansjöbäcken would be good for that so that’s where I drove. It turned out that there is much more snow west from Voxnan than we have in Loos and it was pretty close that I couldn’t have driven the Ormsjö road which is not ploughed in the winter. My next car must have a better ground clearance!
It was kind of amazing to walk to the brook. I found myself going knee deep in the snow, it’s not really all snow of course but it’s the soft mossy ground with blueberry bush that makes you feet sink even in the summer. The big problem is that the ground is also very treacherous, because these mosses cover small crevices between the rocks. Add snow, and dangerous only begins to describe it. I realised that the brook wasn’t nearly as photogenic as I had hoped, so it just wasn’t worth the risk. I needed to find something with less bone breaking potential!
It’s been so cold that even Voxnan has an ice cover where the water is not moving too fast. I got a few pictures from Holmsjön, but as a whole this day was turning out to be a lot less productive than I had hoped for. But at least I had managed to kill some time so it was time to drive to Svartåmyran where I had planned to shoot the full moon rise.
When the Hamra National Park was extended to include the Svartåmyran bog, they also started to build a park entrance here, with a short duckboard trail and a watch tower. The project is not finished, but I heard that the watch tower is finally open and this was what I was betting on – get an overview of the bog in the foreground, with full moon rising in the background. Great plan with one major problem. They built the tower among trees… high as it was, I still had some pines blocking a clean view. I managed to find one angle without foreground obstacles, but it wasn’t nice. I waited for the moon and snapped a few frames, but it was far from ideal. Luckily I had done some scouting while waiting, so I climbed down from the tower and tried a ground view instead, and that’s when everything finally came together. As the moon was moving in the sky, I kept looking for new compositions with the frozen bog and pines in the foreground. My feet were cold but I was happy – I got what I came for!