I made my first trip back to Yellowstone since November yesterday. The first set of park roads opened for the spring on Friday, clearing the way for travel between Mammoth and Old Faithful, including the road to Canyon and the North Rim of the Grand Canyon of the Yellowstone. It was a gorgeous day right with not a cloud in the sky until late in the afternoon. The wildlife were out and about en masse and we spotted the Lamar Canyon wolf pack and the ensuing pack of rabid, insane wolf-watchers, countless buffalo, some pronghorn antelope, some elk, a fox, and a bald eagle.

We started the morning driving out to Cooke City through the Lamar Valley. At one section of the road where the Lamar River runs quite close to the Northeast Entrance road, there were two large packs of photographers packed into the side of the road watching the Lamar Canyon wolf pack on a kill on the river bank. We parked and pulled over and, figuring that there was no reason to be standing shoulder to shoulder with 40 other people in the middle of a huge National Park, started to walk down the road away from the crowd. We were immediately yelled and waved at by an amazingly translucent creepy old man wearing an orange flag vest with “Yellowstone Wolf Project” emblazoned on it. He sneered condescendingly at us that we had just entered the “No Standing” zone and would have to return to the pack. A minute later he was back yelling at another couple who dared to try to walk up the road because the “No Walking” zone.

I have no problem with protecting wildlife and managing the human impact on the park. However, one of things that I enjoy the most about the National Parks is that, as long as they aren’t actively breaking any federal laws, visitors are pretty much free to do whatever they want. Not so in Yellowstone near a wolf pack. I have no idea if this guy was affiliated with the National Park Service in any way, but he plainly thought that he was in charge of this wolf pack viewing and appeared baffled that we didn’t know to respect his authority. I have never encountered that kind of managed, controlled experience in a National Park before and it was very off-putting. If I want to view animals from defined areas under the watchful eyes of people on a power trip, I’ll go to the zoo.

Despite our encounter with translucent wolf man, the rest of the day was extremely enjoyable. After driving the Lamar Valley, we hooked south to the Grand Canyon of the Yellowstone and Norris Geyser Basin. There is still a pretty decent snowpack in the higher elevations of the park, but hopefully the rest of the roads will be open soon.

Nobska Light, Woods Hole

Chapin Memorial Beach, Dennis

Little Island, Falmouth

Stage Harbor Lighthouse and Hardings Beach, Chatham

Thousands of people photograph the iconic barn in the summer, but in the winter road closures prevent easy access to the homestead. Scott and I left our cars about a mile and a half over frozen tundra in the pre-dawn cold to access the barn. Our effort was rewarded by a magnificent sunrise that splashed alpenglow over the high peaks of the Teton Range and lit up the low clouds skirting around the base of the mountains.

This past weekend MSI brought the Freeskiing World Tour to Moonlight Basin. I scored media credentials for the event and was able to position myself in the venue and had great positions for shooting the athletes as they tore up the Headwaters terrain on the north side of Lone Peak.

This was the Tour’s first time at Moonlight and everyone involved was stoked on the venue and the resort as a whole. There was a huge local presence competing and they represented their home mountain extremely well. Hopefully this event can become an annual tradition and grow each year. For a full gallery of my photos from the event, check out this page: 2012 Freeskiing World Tour Moonlight Basin Qualifier Gallery.

The Freeskiing World Tour has arrived at Moonlight Basin! The event, a qualifier for the Finals, was supposed to take place in January but lack of snow moved it to this weekend. I’m officially covering the event as a member of the media team and have killer access to the venue.

The Tour is taking place on the Headwaters terrain at Moonlight. I spent all day today skiing through the venue, watching the competitors check out their lines for tomorrow, and trying to scope out reasonable places to shoot from. Racing kicks off at 9:30AM tomorrow and I couldn’t be more excited. Check out my pictures from today below, and keep an eye on the blog and my 2012 Freeskiing World Tour – Moonlight Basin Qualifier page as I’ll be updating that every day with all the pictures.

I was visting a friend in Boston two weeks ago and managed to get over to East Boston to check out LoPresti Park. It’s a waterfront park wicked close to Maverick Square and the Maverick Blue Line T Stop. The park has great views of the downtown Boston skyline across the harbor, stretching from Southie to the Zakim Bridge and Charlestown.

The weather the night I was there made things difficult. It was really windy and snowing for the entire shoot and the movement in my gear can be seen in the final image. The whole panorama I stitched together from my shots stretches the full length of the visible skyline. After stitching, I found the sharpest section (which isn’t even all that sharp) and edited the image down to just that section, which you can see above. You can check out a 2560px wide image on Flickr.

I definitely want to get back here to explore some more vantage points and to try and get some sharper images with a better sky.

Last week I flew back to the East Coast to visit my family for spring break. I’m currently in the process of upgrading to Lightroom 4 and processing my images from the trip (I shot alot and didn’t have one good sunset or sunrise) but I thought I would share my iPhone shots of the trip. You can follow me on instagram with the username frigidlight to see the bulk of these shots, but there are some here that are new as well.

Southwestern Montana got hit with the first real storm cycle of the winter last week. Bridger Bowl got dumped on, with over 40″ of snow in 5 days falling on the ridge. Big Sky received only slightly less. We needed this snow in the worst way and has done wonders to build up our snowpack as we head into the last stretch of the season. The Ridge is finally skiing like it should in late February/early March and all the traverses and rocks are finally getting covered up on Lone Peak.

My brother Dan came out to visit from Massachusetts this past week and came into town just in time to experience the best conditions of the season. We skied at Bridger Tuesday through Friday and headed up to Big Sky for the weekend. I’ll let the pictures tell the story below.

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I’ve always been really interested in mapping and statistics. Ever since I started running and cycling I’ve been keeping an exhaustive training log tracking the distance and time for every single workout. One of the things I was most excited about when I got my first smartphone was the ability to track myself while skiing and be able to catalogue all the stats from my day – total vertical skied, top speed, average speed, total distance, max slope, etc. On my Droid, I used Google’s My Tracks app. My Tracks does a great job at recording a simple path that can be overlaid on a Google map, and generates some statistics. When I switched to an iPhone last fall, I struggled to find a replacement for My Tracks.

The first app I found that did the closest thing to replacing My Tracks was Ski Tracks. This app is designed to track skiing and provides a nice UI while the app is running for watching your stats. It’s somewhat complicated to export the GPS path, but it can be done, and the app seemed to work just fine.

Recently, Big Sky Resort released Big Sky Replay, a branded version of Alpine Replay. The resort was pushing their app hard, so I downloaded it and tested it out last weekend. Basically, Big Sky Replay does exactly the same thing as Ski Tracks. It records your location and generates all the same stats (minus maximum slope angle). Big Sky Replay/Alpine Replay also has an excellent web app to go along with their iOS app. Once the day of skiing is over, the data from the app is uploaded to the website. The web app does a better job of displaying the information gathered and provides a great interface for exploring, run by run, a full day of skiing. It even manages to know the names of the various lifts and will match your location information to the lifts. I still haven’t figured out a way to export the GPS tracks, however.

Yesterday at Bridger Bowl, I ran both apps at the same time, in order to compare the data they gathered and to see how Big Sky Replay would function at another ski area. Big Sky Replay/Alpine Replay seemed a little slow to get started and managed to miss my whole entire first lift ride up the Powder Park Chair. It picked up tracking again at the top of Powder Park and matched all the names to the lifts just like it did at Big Sky. My only assumption on the error is that it only tracks the GPS location when the rate of change changes. This makes sense, because the app provides a breakdown of the day into skiing, riding lifts, and resting time. Jumping on a lift would trigger tracking because the position change would go from slow (while walking around the base area) and then suddenly speed up to lift speed when you sit down on the chair. The algorithm for tracking and determining the type of activity must be set to watch for this change. Since a GPS signal can sometimes take a while to get up in the Bridgers, the app must not have started tracking until I was on the lift already. Then, as the speed of the lift was constant, the app would have not registered a change until I unloaded. This also parallels the experience I’ve been having with the app when I stop to take pictures or do a beacon search. Alpine Replay decides that I’m resting and stops recording the track. It also deletes the track from that point back to the last lift ride, erasing everything uphill of my stopping point in some cases and refusing to start recording again in others.

Here’s a screenshot of the Alpine Replay web app showing my tracks for the day at Bridger Bowl.

You can see the missing lift ride. Both apps also missed the new rope tow to get from the bottom of Pierre’s Knob to the bottom of New Bridger, but since the elevation doesn’t change rapidly and and the speed isn’t that much different from skiing it’s understandable. Also worth noting is that when it makes the GPS overlay, Alpine Replay uses it’s own fixed definition of the location of the lifts. This provides a much cleaner track for a lift ride and helps to cancel out some of the error inherent in GPS units, but when a ski area moves a lift, as Bridger Bowl did with the Bridger Lift, it apparently takes Alpine Replay some time to update their locations, as my track still shows the old location of the Bridger Lift.

This screenshot shows the excellent page on Alpine Replay’s web app showing their report on my data for the day.

Comparatively, here’s Ski Tracks version of the GPS map overlay.

View 2.6.2012 Bridger Bowl in a larger map

Ski Tracks got all of the tracks and lifts as a line on the map, but when you go into the actual run/lift breakdown it had similar problems to AR with the rope tow. Ski Tracks will also combine two lifts together if the time between them isn’t far enough apart/the vertical drop isn’t enough. Riding up Powder Park, skiing the cat track down to New Bridger, and then riding up New Bridger is all assumed to be one lift ride with a dip in the middle.

Here’s the data Ski Tracks gathered during the day.

Overall the two seem to be very close to each other in all the major tracking categories.

• Vertical Feet: 5600 AR/5213 Ski Tracks
• Top Speed: 51.8mph/47.5mph
• Ski Distance: 5.1 miles/5.7miles

Even though they both gather essentially the same data, there are aspects of both that are superior. I really like the cumulative data and web app of Alpine Replay, but the detailed mapping, concise report, and the ability to export the GPS path in Ski Tracks is also really important to me. For that reason, I’ll probably keep using both when I’m out skiing. It wasn’t worth hiking the Ridge yesterday, but I’m also curious to see how Alpine Replay handles a slow, human-powered ascent. Hopefully it doesn’t mark it as resting and refuse to generate the track.

In other news, Bridger was totally socked in by a huge cloud yesterday and the snow was rock hard and scrapy. I skied for about an hour and a half and then called it a day.

I had this shot printed and made into a 18″ Fracture.

Overall, I’m extremely impressed with the quality of the Fracture. The print arrives in very handsome packaging and includes all the mounting materials to hang the print on a wall. The print itself is simple. The image is printed onto a sheet of glass which is then backed with a thin layer of foam core. Fracture claims that their method of printing provides “vibrant, rich, and glossy colors” behind a glass plate that is scratch and fade resistant.

The print that I definitely meets these claims and met my expectations. Color reproduction was accurate, although I feel that the print is a bit dark. It’s always recommended to bump up the brightness of an image before printing it, as most computer screens are backlit, and I think the extra layer of glass might require a extra bump in brightness.

The glass layers does seem to make the colors richer and more vibrant, however, and I could easily tell the difference when viewing the image on the wall. The print resolution was also excellent. I had some concerns that when viewed through the glass the image would end up being soft, but the details and lines of my print were just as sharp as the original file.

Given my experience with this test print, I would not hesitate to order a Fracture again and I’m hoping to offer it as a print option for ordering from this site.