When I look back at my pictures now, I ache like I have never done for the astonishing beauty of trees captured by snow in a struggle with the wind, the unbearable beauty of softly curving craters disappearing in the threatening snow. The green mountains of summer are comfortably sublime--I understand I am insignificant compared to those undulating peaks and ridges I see expanding off into the horizon--but there is a special otherworldliness to the same peaks under meters of snow. I guess maybe it is my predilection for mystery, for the things I can't understand, that makes me desire with an erotic urge for the painful cold of the snow that obscures, more than anything I know, the timely and the worldly.

I know that's all too much, overstating it. But I can't deny that my