A mountain of junked cars collects snow at Schnitzer Steel, a recycling business on Sixth Avenue North. Click on the arrow at top right for more photos.
The spirit of Christmas was still alive at this house on the South Side.
Tuesday afternoon, I almost felt guilty, staying inside as much as I had over the past few days.
I thought how terribly I’d miss the cold and the snow when the Chinooks returned, as they always do. So I went out looking for lasting images of winter, as reminders of what we had when we don’t have it anymore.
Not that I really got out much, since this was a motorized tour of wintry Billings, but I did have to go out into the snow and cold at least briefly for each photo. To take a series of photos I ended up not using, of the Yellowstone River at the fishing access in Lockwood, I tromped through knee-deep snow in my hiking boots. I should not have been wearing my hiking boots.
The most surprising scene that caught my eye was the ice-fishing tent on the pond nearest the parking lot in the city-owned Shiloh Conservation Area, west of Shiloh Road opposite the giant Scheels store.
I don’t know why I was surprised, since I’ve seen plenty of people fishing out there in the summer, but this just seemed odd. And I guess technically it was, since no one else was doing it. I heard at least two voices inside the tent. I thought briefly of talking to their owners, but my notebook was back in the car, back where I wanted to be.
Something else I had never seen: geese, hundreds of them, gathered on top of a mountain of sugar beets at the Western Sugar plant. I suppose no matter how cold it gets, that giant pile of organic matter is going to be giving off heat, enough to meet the small needs of a downy goose.
To get another series of photos that ended up on the editing floor (because they were all pretty lousy), I went to the spot on the north side of Swords Park where the city deposits snow scooped up from city streets.
Not 15 minutes later, my phone alerted me to a freshly delivered Facebook message. It was from a gentleman I know who happens to operate a city plow. His message said, and I quote, “I hear you were snooping around our snow piles.”
