Photography, Poetry, Travel

A Fistful of Arctic Light

SNAPSHOTS foggy photo challenge

I was once caught up in a fistful of light, a cradled cupping of arctic summer, clutched in fingers of granite and knuckles of boulder-strewn snow,

a tenuous moment amidst eons of ice, a winking of blue, exposed amidst the shifting fog and the tumults of time.

In a blink, I slithered free, slipping down a mud-clawed slope of such great magnitude that the human mind could never fully comprehend its vastness.

The abode of the gods above.

A starker world below.

A landscape more attuned to the nuances of black and white.

And yet, a part of the same mountain.

Unified, and yet visible only in parts at a time.

A delight of the senses, an expansion of the mind.

A rarefied breath of the heavens. A vision to ponder when I lay in my bed at night, still gripped in a memory of that ethereal light.

I captured these photos from the deck of small catamaran last summer in the long light of a near-solstice summer evening in Alaska. After leaving Icy Strait Point (a curiously empty ghost town because of the pandemic), we headed towards the mouth of the Inside Passage.

I had my 500mm fixed lens on my Nikon z7II and I pointed it towards the ephemeral openings in the fog, which drifted through the towering peaks overhead, not really sure how these photos would turn out from a moving boat.

To me, these images are hauntingly beautiful — a reminder of the last wild places on earth, glacial slopes so vast that it is nearly impossible to understand their scale, or their ancient origins.

I like to imagine what it would be like to really be up there, maybe like a bird, able to really see what a place this untouched by human hands is like. It both captures and defies the limits of my imagination.

Erika Burkhalter is a yogi, neurophilosopher, cat-mom, photographer, and lover of travel and nature, spreading her love and amazement for Mother Earth’s glories, one photo, poem or story at a time. (MS Neuropsychology, MA Yoga Studies).

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Poem and photo ©Erika Burkhalter. All rights reserved.