What a night
.
We got to Vermont around 2 am. First thing we did when we arrived was, of course, slide off the road and get stuck in the snow
. But like,
really stuck. The road was solid ice with a thin coating of fresh snow, but it thankfully had about 8 feet of buffer between it and the woods. This buffer was the perfect width to accommodate an SUV, and was conveniently occupied by about 6 inches of wet snow. Into this mush we slid, stopping only in the last second inches away from a couple of very solid looking trees. Forest on one side, solid ice on the other, 8 miles down a Forest Service access road, 2 am in the middle of nowhere. Oh yeah, and -2 degrees
.
So we did what we had to...
After about half an hour of pushing and shoving (and once our driver figured out the difference between drive and reverse
) - success!
We then hiked to the lake shore to try and find the aurora. There were some tracks in the snow, and we debated for a while if we should follow them to get to the bear and what appeared to be a three-legged dog. We though the wiser of it and instead went directly to the lake. It was quite cloudy, although some of the brightest stars were visible. After letting our eyes adjust to the complete and utter darkness for a few minutes, we started noticing a relatively bright area due north. At we stood there watching it, it slowly changed shape and intensity. Getting really excited, we quickly took some long-exposure shots to see if it really is the aurora (the camera is more sensitive then the human eye in situations like these).
Lo and behold, there it was!
We shot for a while, experimenting with different compositions, seeing how we could work the interesting features of the frozen lake into our foregrounds.
After a few minutes of this, it hit me that the aurora for some reason looks fairly similar from shot to shot. Not identical, mind you, but fairly focused from the same two points. I took out a longer lens and took a closer shot - and whaddya know!: instead of shooting the Aurora Borealis, we were shooting the Fauxrora Spotlightealis
After having a good laugh, we figured we'll see if we could still get anything interesting out of the frozen reservoir (photographically I mean, although some people were all for trying their hand at ice fishing). It was quite tough, as it was absolutely pitch dark.
Soon it got even colder, and then it started to snow. Hard. After a while of this we decided to pack up our cameras and collect our remaining toes and head back towards the car and call it a night.
All in all it was - as we all knew it may be - a photographic bust. We did however have a tremendously fun time, and learned some new skills. Among others, we learned not to stop while driving uphill on ice, how closing the hatch of the car helps to keep the warmth in, and some very weird things about the Monster energy drinks logo
. Some of us even learned how to focus their cameras...