Category Archives: Weather

Catching some rays amid stormy skies

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A different kind of ray appears during stormy situations, one that I think is far more beautiful than simple sunlight. The dark clouds form a perfect contrasting background for the light rays escaping the gaps therein. Any humidity in the air gives more life to those rays as they punch through the gloom, and then there are always birds sitting around staring at it and tweeting. That’s where I come in.

For the vertically oriented, here’s another take. These birds sat still for me for several minutes, finally scattering when I turned the truck around to head back toward home. The stoic tree, however remained.

A break in the clouds

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I see it’s supposed to be cloudy and miserable this weekend, so I thought I’d brighten up Friday a bit with a sunny scene from the Badlands. I took this photo last Friday. What a difference a week can make. Actually, considering the weather that blew in about twenty minutes after this photo was taken, I guess one could say what a difference a few minutes can make! That’s life in the Dakotas.

Wednesday night sunset, after a brief encounter with a dust devil

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This was the view that greeted me after I came home from a long day trip to Pierre, South Dakota for a video project. I love our HD gear, and I probably should; I selected which gear to purchase when our company decided to go HD! We did mostly driving today, however, with a very little bit of shooting in between. I did stop to take one still picture though:

There were a few of these “dust devils” visible in a field along Highway 1804. They hung in the air long enough for me to go through the internal “do I, don’t I?” before finally pulling the Suburban over to the side of the road to get the shot. Our project manager thought it was cool and our client didn’t mind, so I grabbed my trusty camera and snapped a few shots before moving along.

Several hours of driving, a little bit of shooting, and a pair of pretty decent photos. Yep…good day.

North Dakota high tide

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I got the opportunity to poke around the Apple Creek area the other day and scope out the ol’ stomping grounds. For instance, there’s a Great Blue Heron living near the 66th Street bridge that has eluded me for years, and he made a fool out of me again already this Spring (as if I need help for that). This time around, however, much of the area is under water, or at least it was several days ago.

I didn’t get any earth-shattering photos of this, but there were people lined up along the ditch beside 66th Street, fishing the high water in the ditch. Carp up to three feet long were everywhere! One of the ladies in our office came back to work after her lunch break, saying they were spearing carp “as big as me!” over at the golf course. Amazing.

My hope is that this will be a good year for the wetlands of the Prairie Pothole region. I suspect it’ll take more than spring flooding to accomplish that, however. We’ll have to wait and see!

Kick out the jam…it’ll all pan out

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In my last post I mentioned visiting a friend who lived just downstream from the ice jam north of Bismarck. I didn’t get much of a view of it from Fox Island, as it started downstream from the lookout, but from my friend’s backyard the view was a little bit better. I grabbed my camera and banged out a few shots, which I assembled into the panoramic shot you see above. It’s actually pretty hard to see much, although the ice does pile up more on the right side of the shot.

Obviously the photo for his post ain’t the real deal, man…unless you have microscopic vision! The real version is 6000 pixels wide, weighin in at 1.75mb. I don’t want to force anyone to have to download a 1.75mb picture every time they come to this post, so instead I’ll post a link:

Click here to view/download the panoramic image (1.75mb).

If you want to save it to your computer to view in something other than your web browser, simply right-click on that link and use “Save As…” to download a copy.

This is the ice jam that everyone feared during last week’s flooding; the idea was that if this ice jam were to let go, it would send a surge of even more ice and water into an already bad situation downstream. For a while the word had actually gone out that this ice jam had let loose, but fortunately that turned out to be untrue. So far it remains intact, and hopefully it won’t cause any further problems once it lets go. In the mean time, however, it is starting to back up more water and ice behind it, causing distress for residents living upstream.

What a difference a few months makes

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Double Ditch is one of my favorite sunset spots, particularly this spot next to the fencepost on the north end of the park. The warmth of those summer evenings sure seems the antithesis of today’s scene.

This ice jam is quite nasty, and we sure hope it stays right where it’s at for a while. The last thing we need right now in Bismarck-Mandan is more ice and water coming down the way!

There were plenty of folks with the same idea I had. Double Ditch is a great place to go for some open air regardless of the season, but a spectacle such as this brings even more visitors. You can see some of ’em at the lookout point in the upper right of this picture.

This ice was crackling while I stood at the shore level. That’s kind of spooky considering the force involved in such a wall of ice. I saw that firsthand at the Heart River last week at this time. Again, hopefully this ice jam stays jammed until the river clears up downstream a ways.

I stood in a friend’s back yard today, on the shore near the start of this ice jam. The water level has gone down nearly six feet at his place. He related that these ice jams break free quickly but take a little while to work their way downstream. Sometimes they jam up again. In any case, we’re all hoping for the best here. With more snow on the way, I’m not sure Bismarck-Mandan is out of the woods yet on this whole flooding thing.

Since we’re talking about ice…

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I can tell from my site stats that when people come to this blog, they usually view a few pages. I don’t know how far back they go, but probably not far enough back to find some of my favorite photos and/or posts. This ice talk, along with the fact that I have NOT risked getting in the way of law enforcement and emergency crews in order to get photos of the flood or ice jam, gave me the idea of reposting this icy encounter from last year. I hope you enjoy.


Ice, Ice, Baby (Originally posted March 1st, 2008)

I have this crazy friend (okay, I have several, and they have me) who told me how cool it is to drive out on the ice of Lake Audubon. Not only is it a big lake, the ice is very thick, and there are islands to explore. Because boats are not allowed out there, the only way to get to these islands is to drive there during the winter. They’ve got beavers, coyotes, and who knows what else on them. I decided to take him up on the idea of a voyage out there. We didn’t see any critters, and the clear skies turned cloudy on us, but we did come upon a HUGE pressure ridge. Enormous slabs of ice had pushed straight upward in a line stretching almost completely across the big lake!

The sky took a dramatic, ominous look as we climbed up onto the ridge. There was no danger of breaking through the ice; it’s frozen so thick this year that people are bottoming out their ice augers trying to get a fishing hole! The point of the ridge that we chose to explore was on the shore of one of the aforementioned islands as well, not in deep water.

I’m close to six feet tall, but this blue slab of ice was about 1.5 times as tall as me. I climbed up on the ridge to get a decent look at it. I’m told that before the last warm-cold cycle, this ice was all colored blue and lit up on a sunny day. It’s as if Superman dropped a crystal from his ice house, if you know what I mean!


Another spot of color out on the open (albeit frozen) water was this green pool of water. While the ice itself is frozen to a thickness of a few feet, the surface does tend to melt on those warm days. It refreezes when the temperatures drop again, but on a day like today we had plenty of water puddles on top of the ice. We lamented that fact as we walked over to the ridge, as we weren’t wearing waterproof shoes! We parked quite a distance away and walked, in case the ice was weakened near the pressure ridge. We needed the car to get home, after all.

One of the things we really wanted to see was wildlife. Aside from a glimpse of a running coyote on the horizon, we saw nothing. Of course; the presence of a camera jinxed it, I’m sure.

This is a really cool trip if you have the opportunity, especially if the lake and the sky comply. In our case, we were fortunate in that the ice is incredibly thick and stable. The sky is pretty dynamic, of course, and I’m glad that it clouded up for us instead of the hard light of a clear, sunny sky. Despite the absence of critters, we call this trip a success…thanks to the sight of this giant ridge of broken ice.

This post brought to you by “global warming”

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I sure picked a good year to finally buy a snowblower! Apparently the flooding that’s plaguing much of North Dakota has been blamed on global cooling warming climate change by President Obama. He couldn’t be more wrong, but he’s got an agenda to advance and he’s sticking to it.

According to the Heartland Institute, climatologist Patrick Michaels states what North Dakotans already know: we get more snow during colder winters.

I remember much more snowfall when I was a kid. The earth went through a warming trend in the 90s, and snowfall tapered. What do you know… temperatures have since dropped despite (weather recording stations being placed next to heat sources indicating otherwise) and snowfall has increased! I know that the global warming crowd and the innocent young idealists they’re propagandizing think this is all new, but it’s life the way it used to be in good old North Dakota. You think we got our reputation for nasty winters with weather like we saw back in the 90s? I don’t think so! Those creampuffs better get used to some real North Dakota winters, read the history books to find out that yes, we did have blizzards and floods before Al Gore began pushing his misguided theory, and stop blaming it on a “scientific” hoax.

Heart River flooding / ice jam

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Quite the crew of spotters I have…two of my friends and my mom called to let me know that the Heart River was jammed full of ice. I was already out and about running errands while my beautiful wife and dashingly handsome boys took their much-needed naps, so I headed out with my camera to join the dozens of gapers investigating the carnage.

I don’t remember seeing the Heart like this since I was a high school kid. There was one time back in the 80s where the ice chunks were much larger, much thicker. Quite frankly, I’m not sure we’ve had the precipitation for something like this during most recent winters.

I actually managed to get this shot without a constant stream of cars in the near lane! That was no small feat; it was a near traffic jam on the bridge for the entire time that I was in the area. I wondered if all Mandan residents got a notice to report to the bridge! By the way, this bridge has a name. Do you know it?

The churning wall of ice and debris clearly had enormous force behind it, and was mere feet from the bottom of the bridge. The log in the foreground was absolutely enormous, but was being tossed about like a rag doll in the ice. It was spun around a couple of times as the ice worked its way past the concrete bridge support, but never lost speed in its trek down the river channel. It’s spooky to consider those forces working on someone unfortunate enough to fall into this mess. They’d be crushed in seconds.

Just south of the bridge, bordered by Highway 1806, this field is now under several feet of water. The bridge in the background is rarely above water; the area below it is for overflow in cases such as this. I used to climb around, hang from, and do other crazy stuff on this bridge as a kid. Most of the time there was only sand below it. Now there’s plenty of ice cold water.

This bridge is next to the Fort Lincoln Trolley station on south 3rd. There were plenty of people as foolhardy as me walking across this bridge. It was very disconcerting to look down between the railroad ties and see the massive wall of ice and debris mere feet below, especially after observing the tremendous force packed between those icy chunks!

One of my favorite angles, although I took many. This is a fun little bridge, even when there isn’t chunky, churning danger below. I’ve got a soft spot for old bridges, though, as the whole Memorial Bridge affair has demonstrated.

Wide angle, anyone? I love my 10-22mm wide angle lens for things like this. It helps give a little bit of perspective to the amazing flow of ice.

Hay Creek seems to be throttling up pretty well too. I found Divide Avenue blocked this evening as well, and it has a high-speed river charging across it. Once the waters subside, I wonder how much damage the road will have sustained.

Just to make things interesting, we’re about to get some freezing temperatures with rain turning to snow Monday. The weather in North Dakota is living up to its reputation this spring!

The fog comes on little cat feet.

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The fog comes
on little cat feet.

It sits looking
over harbor and city
on silent haunches
and then moves on.


I first read this poem by Carl Sandburg back in third grade or so. It’s hard to remember when, exactly; I was in private school and would go to the 7th or 8th grade for some of my classes, as they allowed students to progress at their own rate. As a result, things tend to blend together in my memory. Then I moved to North Dakota and got rubber-banded back to my current grade in all classes. Sigh…what a buzzkill. Anyway, sorry for dragging you through my childhood. How about that fog photo?

There were two belts of fog tonight: one started above the open channel of the Big Muddy and expanded until it covered the entire river, and the second engulfed east Mandan along I-94. It was downright thick, folks. I was able to hike out along the rip rap lining the boat dock south of Merriwether’s. Actually, I hope I was above the rock; I’d hate to think I was standing on frozen river, as that’d be pretty hazardous! Just kidding…I was standing where the weeds stuck up through the snow.

I tried a number of different exposures and framings, but the fog was advancing rapidly. I settled on this shot since a good portion of the bridge was still visible. It wasn’t long before the entire thing was obscured and I was free to hike back to my warm truck for the drive home to my warm bed. That’s where I’m heading now!