After breakfast with some friends last Saturday morning, I ventured south toward the river bottoms to see what sort of photographic opportunities were presented by the morning fog. It was still during the 6 o’clock hour when we wrapped up breakfast, so I was able to get ahead of the sun and sky a little bit. I stopped by this bridge near the entrance to Fort Lincoln and decided perhaps a refreshing morning hike up to the blockhouses would be a perfect way to enjoy the morning.
At first, I expected the blockhouses to be above the fog, since their elevation is so high above the river level. I was wrong…when I got up to the top of the hill, I saw that they were socked in with a thick blanket of fog too. In fact, when I was taking this shot I could see the airborne droplets dashing past my face between my camera and me. It was strange but intriguing, something I hadn’t witnessed since my days of living and working at very high elevation in Montana.
The sun was working on punching its way through the fog, but thankfully I had a pretty good window of opportunity before the morning blanket started to burn off with the rising sun’s rays.
As you can see, from the top of the blockhouse there wasn’t a whole lot of visibility at first.
Slowly the fog up at my level began to dissipate, leaving a thick covering over the river valley below. The sky above was perfect, a beautiful blue and crisp with the morning.
For a brief while I had a little companionship. I have an agreement with the birds; it’s not complicated, but it’s hard to explain. He didn’t care for the idea of me putting on a larger lens to get an extreme close-up. I guess that was the last straw. He left as suddenly as he dropped in.
The sun climbed steadily higher, and with that it dissipated more and more of the thick fog below. As the fog began to recede, the flooding of the Bismarck-Mandan area began to reveal itself.
Soon the view of airborne water was replaced with the view of ominously expanding riverbed water as the Missouri continued to rise and reach out further and further from its normal channel. Vantage points like this are important because they can give a good frame of reference as far as the amount of water we’re dealing with right now.
The fog was suddenly just…gone. The thick covering was replaced by amazing blue skies and a warm, friendly sun. This allowed me to take some photos and video of the blockhouses with brilliant green grass and stunning blue skies. I did plenty of that and then pointed the truck for home.
As much as I like to sleep in, as a photographer I appreciate the morning. You can’t duplicate morning light.if I hadn’t gotten up early, I’d never have seen any of this. As luck would have it, I was able to play with my cameras quite a bit before the clouds rolled in. That’s how I like it.
