I was sitting in my office at home on Saturday afternoon when Mike texted me that he was done shooting for the day and that it had been very productive.  Indeed I would later see his work for the morning and consider it some of his best I have seen so far.  He asked if I wanted to go out Sunday morning and I jumped at the chance.

As Maria was to be in school I signed up the kids to come along, dug out the Mini so that Maria could drive it, and got ready to go.  When asked where we might go, I thought of the possibility of catching the melting snow and thought Rockville and Albright WV would be good possibilities.  Mike was good with that so we made plans to meet in the morning.

In the morning I took the Mini to the bottom of the driveway so that Maria would not have to bob-sled her way out, and took off.  We met Mike at the BP, took a side-trip through the Burger King drive-through, then headed down the road to the Bruceton exit.

It soon became apparent that we probably would not be driving down the dirt road to the bridge over the river where we've gone in past years.  The snow banks were so high I could not have even pushed through with the Wrangler, never mind today with the Commander...

We stopped along the way because the view on one side of the road looked interesting.

We moved along, with a large tractor backing up quite a distance to let us get by.  I liked the colors and light, and made this without getting out of the Jeep.

In the area known on the map as Harmony Grove, I pulled over to let a truck pass and to make some images of the church there.  What I didn't bargain for was the wide variety of subjects we found during this stop.  First the road itself, then the sky, church, and farms.  Quite a treat...

We drove a little further but the road to Jenkinsburg Bridge was quite a bit more narrow and largely untraveled.  I would have liked to go down there, but not with the Commander.  It would have been a no-brainer with the Wrangler.  So we turned around a doubled back, giving us a chance to see the scenery from the other direction.

Bird on a wire...

We came to the river crossing at Albright.  But not before we passed a hawk feasting on the top half of a deer that had fallen through the ice on the Cheat River, unable to get back out and dying right where it was.  I have pictures but it's not pretty...

We stopped at the gas station/quick-mart to get a snack, then went a little further to the other side of the river where Ted stopped to make some pictures of the power plant.  I got distracted by the little tracks in the snow made by balls of ice rolling down the hill (from the snow plow on the road).

On the way up the hill to Kingwood, I spied a draw on one side of the road so parked and walked back to make a couple images.

And the trees...

 

That was pretty much it for me though we did stop at Dent's Run.  Mike coaxed some incredible shots out of that stop.  I got some flat colorless stuff that I didn't even find worth posting here.  At that stop, Ted discovered that the film had not gone through his camera when he rewound it back into the spool.  That is one of the greatest pains of a photographer - to learn the last few dozen images made did not get recorded.  He was greatly dismayed and struggled to channel is frustration.  Mike and I both echoed his pain, having been there ourselves.  I have even suffered it with digital, once dropping a CD onto the ground and damaging it beyond repair before I had dumped the images to disk. 

Overall, it was a good day, with the weather just perfect, and the light providing a variety of options.