When conditions are right in early winter, fog blowing in from Lake Michigan can coat the landscape with a magical frosting of ice crystals. This panorama features a view across a pasture to a farmers woodlot, covered in frost, about 35 miles inland from Lake Michigan. With the temperature hovering near the freezing point, this scene lasted only a few hours.
By early December, the crowds of visitors that flock to Door County for the summer months are long gone. Many of the boutique shops that fill the peninsula's quaint villages of Fish Creek, Ephraim, Sister Bay and others are closed for the season. Traffic on the county's roads is reduced to just a few local residents. Add in fog, drizzle and snow showers and the Door Peninsula takes on an ethereal quiet and charm. At Anderson's Dock in Ephraim, the deceptively calm waters of the bay lap the newly frozen shore while fog shrouds the forest cover of Peninsula State Park across the water. Meanwhile, on the Lake Michigan side of the Peninsula, strong winds driving up the big lake from the Southeast whip up massive waves that crash into the rugged cliffs of Cave Point....
In the early morning hours of November 17, after an unusually warm and rainy night for mid-November, dawn broke over a fog-shrouded Lake Winnebago. At 6 am, somewhere out over the lake, hidden by the mists, an outboard motor was running. One last fisherman taking advantage of the last mild weather before the lake freezes over for winter.
Our second featured image is of the Fox River after the spring thaw. Downstream of the Lake Winnebago system, the combined waters of the Fox and Wolf Rivers flow past the Thousand Islands Nature Center.
The winter of 2011 was one of the snowiest on record in Northeast Wisconsin. The constant snowfall was a challenge for everyone, including the local wildlife.
At Behreandt Visuals, we spend a lot of time outdoors, walking in the woods and looking for interesting perspectives on the Midwest landscape. This year, what we noticed in particular was the long, deep grasp winter had on the land. It seemed like for months and months the world was encased in a coating of white snow and frost, with only dead, brown stalks and stems left behind in its wake. It seemed to take forever for life to return to the wild.
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