Sunday, January 13, 2008

More Goofing Off in the Snow

So a photog buddy of mine says, "lets go to Minnehaha Falls and take pictures of the frozen falls!" You really don't need much more of an invitation for a bunch of like-minded camera geeks to go play so a half-dozen of us headed down to the park on what turned out to be a really warm day (40+ degrees in Minnesota in January? we call that a thaw).

I was somewhat limited by a damaged shoulder so I couldn't do all the clambering around that I otherwise would definitely have done. And I'm still jealous about some of the pics that a friend of mine got because clambering is something he does in his sleep. I'll give you a link to his pictures at the end... I'm jealous but they are still some phenomenal pictures! Anyway, here's some of the stuff I got from the day:

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this is the view of the falls from the walkway at the top - park your car and this is what you see.

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yeah - lots of people down there on the frozen creek. Mind you, thawing temperatures and the constant sound of falling ice doesn't instill confidence but.. it's all for the pictures!!

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of course, getting down there wasn't as easy as you would think - the stairs were actualy closed and we had to climb over the chains to do it. This is Tim going down rappelling style - I told you he does a lot of clambering. *wink*

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yeah, lots of us made the trip but you can see there was a lot of open water. The view was totally worth it though.

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Tim struck off on an icey climb to go behind the falls while I was relegated to shots from below in the basin.

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but at least the falls are still really cool!

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yeah, that's Tim in there... too bad he couldn't just slide down.

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really - the ice we were walking on was thinning from underneath and there was a lot of open water.

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open water makes for cool pics though

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so we met up with the rest of the group and headed downstream

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the stairs on the other bank were even worse - but some enterprising kids decided that sledding down in their snowsuits was easier! They giggled the whole way down.

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Kinsey kept taking pictures of us so I got one of him!

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the view back upstream

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something fell through the ice here..

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but the layers in the broken ice were so beautiful! Almost like an agate.

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it was getting dark by the time we made it down to the big bridge but not dark enough for the lights to come on... darn.

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heading back upstream on the other bank

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oh wait!! the lights came on! HAD to run back to get this picture..

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The falls are pretty gorgeous when lit up at night...

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even just heading back to the parking lot had some cool view - this tree lit from so many directions just glowed.

well, that's the highlights folks. If you want to see what Tim got on the same trip, I highly recommend checking out his gallery: http://invisi.us/gallery2/v/invisi/2008/Minnehaha/