snowy roads and frozen cameras!

Yesterday I was riding my dirtbike all over the place just exploring the mountains around here. I never run out of new things to see, it's insane! Mt Defiance is one of my favorite places to ride up to because it's almost 5,000 feet high, and I can get there from my house in under an hour. The view from the top is so incredible. Yesterday was different though because Defiance got it's first snow this week, and there was a lot of it! This is my bike when there wasn't that much snow yet and I was cruising along no problem-

But another 500 feet up there was at least a foot of new soft powder snow, and it was impossible to get up this hill. As you can see from the tracks, I tried many times. I was so close to the top too! Looks like I need a snowmobile. :)

I've been wanting to shoot some star trails lately and finally was able to get out and shoot last night. I dusted off my old films cameras (Nikon FA and Contax 645), grabbed a few tripods, and headed out in the cold... brrrr. I set up the cameras at around 9PM and let the exposures go while I went down to the office and worked on stuff until 4AM... then headed back out to the hills at around 5AM before the sunrise. The shots on film might look cool because the exposures were like 7 hours long! But, it got so cold that all the cameras iced over, including the lenses... so that might mess it up a bit. :)

Here is one shot of Mt. Hood from last night. 20 minute exposure with my Canon 5D. Anything longer than that looks bad with a digital camera and the battery will die quickly too (hoping this will change sooner than later though).

Now I've got more work to do but am pretty tired after just 2.5 hours of sleep.