Why am I even surprised?

After all the weather predictions and talk of fronts and whatnot, guess what I woke up to this morning? That's right: sunshine. So, after catching up on some of my t.v. viewing, I went for a little drive. First stop, the parking lot across from one of my favorite chocolate shops, which happens to be located close to the Battenkill tributary known as the Roaring Branch. And by "close" I mean the "make sure to engage your parking brake so your car doesn't roll in" kind of close. In the second photo you can see part of an old mill that's now used as a shop:





After taking these photos, I went further up the mountain onto Kelly Stand Road, aka the road I was driving when I idly commented to some friends that if I was going to murder someone it'd be a great place to hide the body/bodies. It's a road that winds its way through the Green Mountain National Forest between Arlington and Stratton, and I suspect I'll be taking quite a few trips up there over the course of this project. I didn't go all that far up into the woods, as it's a limited-access road during the winter months. But I did, miracle of miracles, find a spot wide enough to pull over. Better still, it was directly across from a wooden footbridge. I could see footprints on either end of the bridge, suggesting it had been safely traversed fairly recently. So I cautiously made my way out a few feet and took some shots. The river is narrower and weaker the further up the mountain you go, so there was a heck of a lot more ice at the edges:



Close-up, the thick ice looks like some sort of alien landscape. Or maybe that's just the sci-fi geek in me: