My drive home from Viddler HQ in Bethlehem, PA takes me over the northeastern-most tip of the Pocono Mountains – an area called Pocono Summit. During my drive home last Thursday I remarked that “The snow covered pine trees at the top of Mt. Pocono really deserve to be photographed.”
I consider this an opportunity missed.
What reminded me of the fact that I missed this opportunity was a recently published entry from Henry David Thoreau’s journal, a journal I suggested that you subscribe to, about his thoughts on snow covered trees. He makes it all too clear that there is only a very small window in which you can enjoy such things.
“I am afraid I have not described vividly enough the aspect of that Lodging Snow of the 19th and to-day partly. Imagine the innumerable twigs and boughs of the forest (as you stand in its still midst), crossing each other at every conceivable angle on every side from the ground to thirty feet in height, with each its zigzag wall of snow four or five inches high, so innumerable at different distances one behind another that they completely close up the view like a loose-woven downy screen, into which, however, stooping and winding, you ceaselessly advance. The wintriest scene, – which perhaps can only be seen in perfection while the snow is yet falling, before wind and thaw begin. Else you miss, you lose, the delicate touch of the master. A coarse woof and warp of snowy batting, leaving no space for a bird to perch.”
Next time, I’ll be sure to take a photo.
2 Comments
Thank you for sharing, I didn’t realize there was a Thoreau journal to go read and subscribe to. And I am now subscribed.
I think there is something really special about the look of trees with snow on them. There’s a soft spot in my heart for pine trees covered in snow. I’ve made an effort to get out as many times as I can remember, to photograph the snow and woods this winter, in both digital and b&w film.
Hope you’ll be able to drive through that area again and snap some photos.
I headed over the Pocono’s earlier this month. We where heading back to Akron OH from NYC and Wine Library.
It can get pretty hairy up there in the winter. But the views when it was not a white out where stunning. The best we shot where some highway pics (sub par at best).
Thank for the tip on Thoreau’s journal.
Drive Safe!