Ode to Lake Superior Winter

A photo essay told in vignettes <3

When I moved up here six years ago it was snowing. Ice on the roads and bare dirt and little spitting snowflakes from the sky. It was mid-November, dark already and I wasn’t really sure if I was going to like it here, but I had this dream of a quiet winter that I’d had for years—

bare creaking trees thrashing at night. blinding white carpet of snow. bright blue glare off the open water (there was always water). tracks in snow. long dark nights in a cozy place of my own with ghost stories happening outside the door.

I thought maybe I might find a little piece of that dream up here. Otherwise, it’d have to be Alaska.

Late November: first snow on the Gunflint, out a hike and a drive with still-hot coffee. Didn’t see any moose, but the snow was perfect, blue lakes like a mirror.

January: -40 below. A sunrise so spectacular it didn’t feel real. Hard to believe this was less than a half mile from where I lived, let alone not in the deep Arctic. To me, it was the deep Arctic.

April: Full moon rising over the snowy road. April is still winter up here sometimes it turns out.

January: This is my favorite color of winter light. Warm and sweet peachy yellow. The light that leads to long sunsets and paints everything all pretty and soft. It’s the sort of light that when you’ve been sun-starved, when you haven’t seen blue sky in weeks, feels like maybe the most beautiful thing you’ve ever seen. Like you could drink it.

December: Winter camping. Mostly cold and a lot of work. The photos turned out really cool though. The tent was too big for two people to keep warm alone and it got down to -10. We packed up and skied out pretty early the next day.

December: Winter sea kayak surfing. I don’t like the cold enough to be out surfing in anything this big this time of year, but I’ve got friends who don’t seem to mind so much.

February: February is a great month. It’s cold enough that there’s good ice most places, there’s more light than before, and things are starting to look up all around. Here, we found a little ice cave on the bay.

January: Ice garden and more of that peachy light. I believe it was -10 this day. The plants here get encased in ice from crashing waves and are especially pretty all light up in the setting or rising sun.

January: Blue hour, a different day at -40 below. Hard to imagine that some of my favorite days on Lake Superior are the days it’s so cold it hurts your nose to breath, but here we are.

January: This was actually taken just a few hours after the second, very pink -40 sunrise photo above. Andy wanted to know if I’d ski out to a frozen waterfall with him. It warmed up to about -15. It honestly wasn’t so bad if you kept moving, and it was cool to ski up a river canyon.