The Green Glow Over Moose Lake
I drove thousands of miles around northern Minnesota this past season to capture fall color. There was a solar storm during the new moon, and the skies are very dark here, so I got to take my first images of the Aurora Borealis. I'd seen it once before in northern Canada, but shooting it along the short of Moose Lake was a completely different experience. Half the lake is in the Boundary Waters Canoe Area Wilderness, a protected area with almost no human activity. As I sat and waited, I was treated to a symphony of animals calling to each other. Loons wailed as they flew over the lake. I recognized the sound immediately after a particularly humorous family trip years ago when my dad decided that buying a cassette tape that features the various calls of the loons was a good idea. I'm not sure which sounds I heard, but I know it wasn't a tremolo (nice work, dad). Then the coyotes started to howl. Which is nearly as creepy as beautiful when you're sitting in the deep black night alone with so little sound that you can hear your own ears hum when the animals fall silent.