A cold morning walk to a high mountain lake with a pair of ice skates. It was only months after this photo was taken that I realized the strange shape of the shadow cast. Ha! A shadow-puppet’s silhouette is not always representative of those entwined hands which do the casting!

Oh silhouette, no more than an outline, two dimensional and monochromatic, void of any internal detail and the colorful palette that the icy reflection holds; the Payne’s gray sierra, cobalt blue sky, and a hunter’s wood enjoy their secrets there.

Or perhaps this simple fig leaf occulting the morning’s light is more telling of a boner of a choice and an internal struggle within?

Sure, skating on ice alone, remote and alpine, can be foolhardy at best and just plain stupid in hindsight’s worst, no argument there. But was the decision to do so, so wrong that I cast, in shadow, such an objectionable shape?

To skate alone often is just asking for a cold, slow death kind of trouble; frail cries for help echo off tall granite walls, unheard and waning as cold takes its toll. A slow slip beneath the icy surface and then refrozen over, nothing to note of your presence but a pair of boots, side-by-side, and a backpack with some water and a few uneaten snacks on the shore…but a dick move it is not, that’d be a stretch. So what then?

Why did I go alone? Why do I? Surely I could have asked others to come along and join in the fun? Ah, now we’re getting somewhere…

Selfish prick.