Well, there it goes

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It should be obvious by now that one of my favorite spots to catch a sunset is at the north corner of the Double Ditch historic site north of Bismarck. A familiar foreground object in my photos is a large wooden fence post marking the boundary of the park. It looks like I’m going to have to find a new one.

Last August, while poking around beneath the cliffs of Double Ditch, I noticed that the collapse of those cliffs had finally encroached on that fence post. Even now, more large chunks of cliff nearby have cracked and separated, soon to tumble to the river below.

It seems as though this process has finally begun to claim my favorite fence post, as it no longer stands so firmly at the northwest corner of the park. It has begun to tilt at an ever greater angle, the fence it supports going slack. I presume it’s only a matter of time, some spring melting, and maybe a little bit of rain before the earth supporting it finally gives way.

This is a stark reminder of an even bigger problem; Double Ditch has been receding for years. The area above these cliffs used to be a popular recreation spot. At some point a wire fence was erected to prevent this, as the banks had become so unstable. The road, which used to make a loop from one end of the park to another, was cut off and no longer exists from the south end. As time goes by, I fear we may lose access to the west end of this park entirely. I hope that doesn’t happen any time soon.

Good morning, sunshine

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I don’t know about you, but I’m loving the fact that the sun is coming up earlier in my day. You’d think I’d be trying to capture as many of those photons as possible on the sensors of my cameras, but life’s been a little too busy for that lately. I hope to be able to acquire some photograhic gems at some point in the near future. All work and no play, they say…

The hottest cheerleaders in Class B Basketball

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It was a nail-biter, but sadly the Shiloh Skyhawks girls’ basketball team did not come away with the overtime win tonight. It was a packed house at good ol’ Mandan High, and enthusiasm was running high on all sides.

Part of that high energy was the cheer team for the Shiloh ladies: these dudes. I don’t really know what to say about them other than that they took team spirit to the max, and offered ample support to the girls on the court tonight!

A little dash of color

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Sometimes winters in North Dakota can be a little dreary. Okay, maybe “often” would be a better term. Or “annually” perhaps. In any case, the sun does occasionally break through the gloom and splash a little color on the barn. I thought I’d share.

Restrictions, you say? They’re coming next week…whatever they are (Load)

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The City of Bismarck has put out a notice that load restrictions on the city’s roads will start next week. It gives me the perfect opportunity for a little good-natured ribbing over the “Restrictions in Effect” signs traditionally seen around Bismarck this time of year. Restrictions of what nature, you ask? If your only source of information was these signs, I suppose it’s anyone’s guess.

I first saw these signs go up a few years ago (and every Spring since) and thought they were pretty funny. It’s because of the load restrictions I mentioned, but the signs are omit that detail. It’s only after someone figured out what was missing (maybe they read this blog) and wedged a little “Load” in there that the signs made sense:

This is how the corrected signs look. I am still occasionally surprised to find an unmodified one posted. As you can see in this previous post, I was almost second-guessing whether I’d even seen the signs without the word “Load” inserted. If there are any of the original vague signs remaining, someone’s going to have to dig through a drawer for another “Load” sticker!

So we didn’t get the snow…but there’s still hope

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Since Bismarck-Mandan got cheated out of the heavy snow that was so ominously forecast, I thought I’d share a few pictures I took of the nasty spring storm we received in Bismarck-Mandan back in 1997. This was a particularly wicked storm, as the snow was very fine and icy. It packed in so tightly that the roads had to be cut open with snowblower-equipped payloaders, instead of simply plowed.

At the time I lived north of Century in the vicinity of Montreal Street. Since only the major roads were cut open, I had to hike around six blocks down to Century Avenue, where the big KFYR-TV 4×4 engineering truck was waiting to transport me to work. As you can imagine, we were pretty busy in a news capacity at that point.

It was a surreal walk down to Century Avenue. The snow was taller than even full size pickups parked along Montreal Street, and as I walked down the road I noticed that I wasn’t leaving any footprints. The snow was made of such fine snow crystals and packed so tightly that I wasn’t breaking through the surface. Every now and then I’d see part of a pickup cab poking up through the snow, but for the most part I couldn’t even tell where the street was, much less where cars were parked.

After the roads were beginning to clear, a crazy friend picked me up in his Escort GT and we went out to document the whole thing. At this time I had merely a little Canon point-and-shoot film camera, but I think it tells the story:

The perspective on this one is slightly misleading, since I was sitting in a compact car. But you get the idea.

As you can see from the walls of snow lining Century Avenue, these roads were literally cut open, as plowing would do no good. Not only was the snow too deep, but it was fine, compacted “sugar snow” composed of tiny little crystals. It was rock hard.

Since we were already into Spring, the sun started to work on the snowbanks right away. They’re melting down pretty quickly. We weren’t in a particularly low-riding car, but even along the Expressway the snow was taller than we were.

The fence along the Expressway was almost completely hidden by snow. Lots of places were packed in completely as the snow settled in and froze solid.

It was a Saturday storm, and I remember being quite put out at having some of my motorcycles stranded at the Hall of Ports for the annual Freedom Riders Motorcycle Show! At least I got to bring home some trophy hardware later.

Anyway…if you’re feeling slighted by the lack of tall snowbanks (especially after all the hype over the last few days), maybe this will help get you through it! And at least we’ve still got wind…

All the angles

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How many crooked things can you find in this photo? No, there are no politicians hiding in the background!

It’s sad to chart the progress of dilapidation in many of my more prized photo spots. I’ve always had a fondness for the “Fallen Farms” series of photos (see the Categories list on the right), and many of my favorite subjects are in various stages of leaning and even collapse.

That’s one of many reasons why it’s important to document these structures: not just for artistic value, but because they may not remain for long. It’s noteworthy to observe what happens to a house, even a relatively recent construction, when it becomes uninhabited. It’s as if the former residents took something intangible with them, something that kept the structure intact by their indwelling. As many of these structures collapse and disappear, they take something intangible away from the North Dakota landscape as well.

Winter windmill

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I used to post a lot of windmill photos. Well, I used to post a lot of photos in general, but these days I’ve been doing more work-related and Daddy-related activities. That won’t stop me, though.

I was all lined up to do a brief photo trip today when I realized that my little guys wanted to go sledding. In an instant I sacked said photo trip and donned my snow gear for some sledding, sliding, and snowball throwing. What a blast!

To satisfy my urge to share a photo with all-y’all (my Texan wife swears that’s a word) I grabbed this one. I snapped it on my way back from a freelance photo shoot north of Bismarck, so it certainly isn’t stale. By the way, I don’t do freelance portrait photography; I freelance industrial photography to pay the bills while doing the landscapes and other stuff in my free time. That available free time is harder to come by these days, but I do still find an occasional opportunity for windmill photos to share!

Conrad and Dorgan: No longer masquerading as North Dakota residents

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Now that he’s no longer carpetbagging for a North Dakota senate seat, Byron Dorgan can finally be honest about where he’s really lived for the last twenty years: Virginia. The former senator’s home has been featured in Home & Design magazine.

It may be news to you, but the meager apartment buildings above are where Senators Conrad and Dorgan claimed to live “on paper” so they’d be eligible to run for office as representatives of North Dakota. I lived in one of these buildings, and (if the Senators’ appliances were the same olive green as mine) they were hardly what one would expect of a United States Senator. No worries, though…I never ran into either of them while living there, and I doubt these apartments were more than a technicality to facilitate their re-election. They are the addresses they used to claim residency.

This ornate hand-written address label no longer exists, so I suppose the Senator and Kim have moved on. After all, there’s no reason to have a North Dakota address anymore. Certainly these lavish accommodations in no way compare to their Virginia mansion.

In case you’re a new reader, you probably don’t know that former senator Kent Conrad actually owns these two buildings via an LLC that he formed. If you only frequent North Dakota media, you probably don’t know that Senator Conrad was under ethics investigation for a sweetheart mortage deal from Countrywide Financial on this property, which consists of sixteen units in two buildings, even though the company’s policy for the rest of us is to finance nothing larger than a four-plex. Democrats even went to the point of changing the locks on committee room doors to prevent Senator Conrad’s conduct from being discovered!

Isn’t a corruption investigation involving a United States Senator from our state newsworthy? Apparently not. Oddly enough, KFYR/KXMB/WDAY seemed uninterested in this circus; same with the Tribune, Forum, or other state newspaper groups. In fact, this scandal didn’t seem newsworthy to them until after a Democrat committee chaired by a co-conspirator let Kent Conrad off the hook. THEN it was front-page news. If I was an assignment editor or news director at one of these organizations, I’d be asking myself some tough questions after either missing this or willfully ignoring it. If some blogger with a few minutes of spare time and a Google search can come up with piles of relevant information but their newscasts and printed pages contained nothing, isn’t that cause for a little self-examination?

Oh, and about Senator Gaylord “Kent” Conrad: don’t think that he was left out of the “expensive east coast mansion” situation. He has a million dollar house on a Delaware beach that didn’t show up on his financial disclosure reports.

I wonder if newly-elected “independent voice™” Heidi Heitkamp is paging through the real estate pages out there on the east coast?

Winter wire

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While on the way back from a photo shoot last Friday I stopped to check out an interesting former Cold War site near Regan, North Dakota. On the way I spotted one of those things that seems to just jump out at me: a disconnected power and/or telephone pole.

Combined with the angle of the sun and resulting shadow, the brilliant blue sky, and a few J.J. Abrams-style lens flares, and I had a nice little souvenir of my trip to bring home to Photoshop.