A couple quick winter photos

With the end of term on Wednesday of this week, I have been busy with grading assignments and writing reports. I still have quite a lot to do. I’ll keep it a short post today. I’ll just share a bit of the winter that has now arrived.

I grew up in Minnesota, where there is typically snow on the ground from December until March. While colleagues here in Norway have been saying winter has been here already for weeks, to me, until there is snow, it still feels like fall. Well, last week, we got short but beautiful snowfall. And because it has stayed cold, the snow has stuck around, crusted over, grown icy in places, so that we need to wear spikes on our shoes to walk down the hill to work in the morning. It’s winter now.

For our students, who are coming from all over the world, there are always some for whom this is their first experience with snow. Typically the first snow of the year brings snowball fights between classes and an air of celebration. This year, the snow fell on the weekend, so I didn’t see them at it. I imagine that in the student village, things were riotous. Where I was, it was just twittering birds and puffy flakes.

Snowflakes falling over a distant forest.

Days are quite short. Official sunset today, December 3, 2023, is at 3:27pm, but the sun is disappearing behind the mountain quite a bit earlier than that, perhaps around 2:00 in the afternoon. But the twilight this time of year is long and slow, colors of the clouds taking on a bit of pink and orange, lingering.

Sunrise in the morning follows the same, slow course. Last week, I had a late start one morning. I took this photo of the mountains walking in to work at 9:41am. The moon is hovering there, just past full. You can see the ice creeping over the fjord. And the mountains are alight. That’s the main point of this picture.

The moon above snow-covered mountains that are lit up red by the sun.

Another morning, a few days prior to the one above, walking down for first block, I saw this incredible liquid reflection on the fjord in the process of freezing. I had never seen it glisten like this–and although the photograph is grainy for the low light, you can still see a bit of the way it looked. Beautiful.

The moon reflected on water over snow-covered mountains.

We’re preparing to go–this coming Friday, we will head down to Bergen, to fly out Saturday morning at 6:00am on our way towards Billings, Montana. It will be good family time. I’ll write again from there.

I’ll close with a series of four pictures from a quick morning hike, when I had a free block from teaching. The light is still the horizontal, yellow light of sunrise, although these four photographs are taken between 10:47 and 11:02am.

Wishing you well, and thanks for stopping by to read,
Jimmy