RASC – Vancouver

I can see Grouse Mountain from my back lawn, and it beckons to me, so I decided to ride up the service road from the top of Mountain Highway while the weather was sunny but cold. I decided to go to the extra trouble of adding a camera to my overloaded Roach pack I use with a water bladder for hydration.

The ride up was remarkable for a few reasons: It was very quiet up there, save a few workers fixing the road after it presumable had a lot of traffic on it for the installation of a wind turbine to generate power for the ski operation.

Once past all that, not a soul to be found. I found the going tough for a while, as the bare road gave way to snow with two rutted tracks with bare earth an

d ice in them. It got easier, though slow, once I reached an altitude where the snow cover was complete and very hard. In the middle of the road were a number of tracks, including larger ones I think came from a cougar.

I took a few photos going up but I came across something I don’t see very often out in the west, even in the winter.

Sundogs are a from a group of atmospheric phenomenon derived from the reflection/refraction of light through ice crystals. Last year, I saw a frost pillar that was remarkable for its sheer vertical size.

The weather was cold and very dry, so the ski hill was running its snow-making equipment full-bore, letting the ice pile up.

I always assumed that making snow this way resulted in the formation of ice droplets with little crystalline structure. The size and brilliance of the sundog is quite something in person.