New York: Day 5

This is my favorite part of the forest. It reminds me of so many places. The first glimpse of Narnia in the Lion, The Witch and the Wardwrobe, the silent deadly forest in the Ardennes where the battle for Bastogne occurred in Band of Brothers, and the "Forest cathedral" described in the Red Badge of Courage.  It's a storybook kind of place. The snow makes it absolutely enchanting to walk around in.

This is my church.

There was no sign of anything living out here. It's as if the whole place is sleeping. It's silent, wonderful and dreamy. Absolute peace and tranquility. Due to the total absence of moving creatures, I guess I should be working on macro shots instead.

Some berry things on a branch.

These are some odd flowering plant that never loses its flowers. They just turn brown and dry up in the cold and then turn pink again in the spring. They grow in clumps like this.  Everywhere in this forest, one gets a sublime sense of not dead, but a sort of dormant beauty. Just patiently waiting for spring.

I like to brush these pine branches with my hand and watch the soft powder fall to the ground in a tiny blizzard.

This is an exposed hillside where the wind constantly blows from one direction. Look at how the snow is on the side of all the trees. It's magical.

These pines make an indescribable sound when they flex in the wind. Sometimes it sounds like a groaning or a screech. Other times you hear sharp cracks like rifle shots. It can be startling if you're unfamiliar with the sound.

Something passed by here. I didn't leave these tracks.  It might be a "coyote-dog". Grandma's woods is home to a pack of coyotes that mate with stray dogs. Sometimes I can hear them howling as it gets dark.

Still no luck with the infrared scout camera. We think the extreme cold is making it shut itself down. (It dropped to 5 last night).  I moved it indoors and put it near the bathroom window, but that also failed. The infrared flash bounces off the window and back at the lens, making the whole scene a whiteout.  I guess I'll have to use it when I come back up in the summer.  What a bummer.But at least we know it works, as I captured my own face a few times when I was trying to reset it.

We were going to come home tomorrow, but there is yet another lake-effect snowstorm on its way... so we will just have to come home sunday.   I have been doing some sketches and keeping my blogs updated though.  Tonight I am already in my PJs, sipping some hot tea and watching Cold Mountain.

One more day. I wonder what tomorrow will bring.

New York: Day 4

New York: Day 4

A visit to the farm

Today we paid a long overdue visit to my uncle's house and one of my cousin Emory's farms. They live about 2 hours away from my Grandma's house (up here they measure distance in hours).  It is a very long, boring and monotonous drive through flat country and quaint little podunk towns, with peeling paint and collapsed barns. I couldn't make this drive by myself. It's too long and not exciting enough to keep me alert.

On the way there we saw an interesting sky phenomenon.  Sometimes cited by quacks on the internet as signs of UFOs, this is called a Fallstreak hole.  Water droplets in a cloud crystallize into ice faster in one area than the clouds around it, thus the weird 'hole' punched in the sky.

"Look! An alien mothership just disappeared!" - said no scientist ever.

This is not the first time I have seen bizarre cloud patterns in upstate New York.  Check out this super cool optical effect I saw once, on a day when it was 10 degrees below zero. A prismatic halo around the sun.

Picture taken January 1, 2013

(The above effect only happens on days when it is below zero at high altitudes.
Moisture in the clouds turns to tiny ice crystals, which refract the sunlight
into a rainbow spectrum when the sun shines through it.
I've seen this before in other places, but not anywhere near this dramatic)

We arrive at the dairy farm. This farm is only being rented through the winter. It has over 200 cows which are the chief milk supplier for Byrne Dairy which stocks grocery stores all over the region (the place where Grandma always bought her milk) Needless to say, it's an impressive operation.

We drove up the long dirt road to get to the farm right as my Uncle drove a tractor in front of us. He's pulling a grain spreader to these two barns across the field where the maternity ward and the calves are.

Inside this corn crib is about six tons of corn grain. My Uncle says these cow eat about 2 tons a day.

And here's the moneymakers.

This is what the farm uses instead of silos. Long trenches of poured concrete,
with grain pushed into it by bulldozers. Then the pile is covered
by a plastic sheet and weighed down by hundreds of spare rubber tires.
I asked him where the tires come from. He tells me the gas stations
and car repair places throw away tons of defective or punctured tires,
they just give these to him for free by the truckload.

Finally, the Byrne Dairy tanker truck comes in to load up hundreds of gallons of milk.