In the previous post I talked about the blizzard-without-snow that attacked northern Minnesota with 50mph winds out of the northeast yesterday (March 22nd-23rd). I knew I had to get to Tettegouche where the waves would be awesome. In the parking lot, a fellow photographer turned me on to a fairyland of ice sculptures created by the coating of every needle, branch, shrub and tree with three to six inches of icy spray. It was a bushwack and a treacherous shuffle on glare ice once there. The other photographer had screwed sheetrock screws through the bottom of his Sorels to get better traction. I lacked such lifesaving devices and fell hard twice. Extreme caution was necessary as this ice sculpture garden was atop a 60 foot sheer-drop cliff and even the ground was solid ice.

Photographically, this was one of those cases where you just don’t know where to start…The possibilities for compositions was endless. As usual, my favorites were more of the detail images instead of the wide views. Even though I was atop a 60 foot cliff, spray from the waves below regularly coated me and my camera. I kept a chamois cloth in my pocket and used it every minute or so.


I really liked the overlapping icicles…but the color was blaah gray. So in Aperture I tweeked the color balance to the cooler side to get a nice blue.