We Will Always Journey

We Will Always Journey

From my collection:
Emerquinox
Spirit of Alaska ~ Alaska North Star Winter Scenics

Copyright © Sharon Mau 2009
All Rights Reserved

Emerquinox is a word I coined when I combined the words Emerge and Equinox

The Great White North

I took this photo in deep winter 20 January 2008 midway between Fairbanks and North Pole Alaska. In summer this area is a peat bog. It is actually quite deep as in late Autumn I have watched a cow Moose submerge herself and swim in the pond at sunset.

Near the Chena River, in winter it is used as a ‘highway’ for mushers and their dogsleds and also for snowmachines. I removed the natural blue hue with a white balance adjustment. Then I desaturated selective colours pulling down the yellow, magenta, and green. With a slight adjustment on contrast, I then used the lasso tool and selected only the sky to remove the digital noise as I had my ISO setting too high at 400 and, along with the cold, this created too much noise with the original photograph.

The temperature on this day had actually warmed to about 10F. Within a week it plunged again to appx minus -47F.

Canon EOS DIGITAL REBEL XTi
Shooting Date/Time 20 January 2008 16:41:50
Tv( Shutter Speed ) 1/125
Av( Aperture Value ) 5.6

“Permafrost, perennially frozen ground that maintains a temperature at or below the freezing point for at least two years. Vast tracts of permafrost lie across Alaska, Canada, northern Europe and Asia, and Antarctica. About 80 percent of Alaska’s land area contains permafrost.

In the Interior region, vegetation must adapt itself to short, warm summers and long, cold winters. Trees grow slowly, and their root systems must be shallow because they cannot penetrate the permafrost.

In Alaska, permafrost occurs as a continuous sheet north of the Brooks Range, extending from a few inches below the surface down to as deep as 1,000 feet. As one goes south, however, it gets progressively thinner, the melted layer on top gets thicker, and holes or gaps begin to appear in it.

Permafrost may extend to depths of more than 500 m (1,600 ft). Clues to the age of the permafrost of the Northern Hemisphere lie in the numerous discoveries of mammoth remains embedded in frozen ground. Mammoths became extinct about 10,000 to 15,000 years ago, coincident with the end of the most recent ice age. Some scientists, however, think that much of today’s permafrost may have formed as long as 120,000 years ago.” Source: Wikipedia

“As with all great journeys, the vision is the beginning
Dreams of all the possibilities,
of the many paths widening to the future
Of all the great and extraordinary things our mind can imagine
The persistence of our own opportunistic souls reaching for what is yet unabridged
An unconscious decision to struggle forward yet again
And without even knowing of our focus
We start forward
All of our past, our teachings, our experience are brought into play
The trials of our past giving us the tools that we need to find our way
Our way to fulfilling this newest quest for our dream
No obstacle too great,
no argument rebuff
The journey begun, we will not allow defeat
We can only see the unfolding, as it will be
And as always,
the goal is reached
And there,
sated in the peace of our newly added thread in the web of our life
We rest
And the vision comes again”
~ by Steve ‘Easy’ Whitacre 2005

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