And boy was it a doozy. On Wednesday snow filled the air all day, coming down heavy, but with the wind howling and gusting to over 60 mph, not much snow covered the ground here in town. It was a different story in the mountains, where the trees and vegetation seemed to be coated with snow and ice. I had hoped to pull off by the side of the highway and hike down to a creek which I assumed would be magical--it probably was--but I kept thinking I'd find a better spot to pull over, and pretty soon I was out of options. I'd entered a section of the forest where the road becomes a narrow series of hairpin turns that goes on for miles (arriving eventually at the Gila Cliff Dwellings, if anyone is interested; I wasn't) with no place to pull over or turn around during the mildest of seasons. It turned out the road hadn't actually been plowed yet but was in the process of BEING plowed, so I got stuck behind the snowplow, two sand trucks, and a few other passenger vehicles. Soon other cars and trucks arrived behind me, and there we all sat.

I finally spoke to the driver behind me, asking him not to pull forward, and executed a death-defying 21-point turnaround on a road about four feet wide, with lots of folks looking on. This is a mild exaggeration, but not much of one. I returned to the relative safety of the rocky area pictured and got out with my dog Ted for a 15-minute walk and photo shoot. For Ted it was a bladder-emptying walk. A friend was hiking with her dog in the canyon at the bottom of those cliffs and later told me she only saw one other set of tracks out there: those of a mountain lion heading in the same direction she was.

My camera was acting oddly, as if it had had a mini-stroke, so I had to focus manually for some of these shots, always a crap shoot with me. I hope this does not diminish your enjoyment of these photos.