Occasionally, when I’m romping through the snow, my hands will thaw for just enough time to pull out my camera. They quickly freeze again, but, if I’m lucky, I find an image in the stillness of the softly falling snow.
At the end of 2020, I found myself on the eastern shoulder of Mont de Grange, in the French Alps. It was raining when I set out from the valley floor, but there, five hundred meters up the mountain, snow drifted through the understory, frosting needles and leaves. Between my boots ran the slow babble of a snowmelt brook on its bed of freckled pebbles. All else was silent, a fitting foil to the end of a trying year.