On a knife’s edge

On second thought, that title sounded too dramatic. But I let it stand. After all, a day in a ski resort can be made or broken by the weather. You can call it a delicate balance between fog and snow, or a knife’s edge between bad weather and glorious skiing. We were told that in the in late April the ski resort of Shymbulak near Almaty has great walks with views of the Ile Altau region, the southernmost part of the Tien Shan mountains. So we took the ski lift up to the top, meaning to reach the 3000 meter mark and then set off on an easy jaunt. That was not exactly what happened.

These two photos of have a different colour cast. Initially I thought that was because the weather changed between the shots, which, as you can see, it did. But they are taken with different cameras and the difference in colour cast remains through the whole set, irrespective of the slight changes in weather and sun through the day. So it is due to difference in the two lenses. The one on the left is more blue because it is taken with my phone camera, and its lenses do not have the anti-UV coating of the other one. Since I wore UV protective glasses at that height, I saw something closer to the colour in the photo on the right than to the one on the left. Artistically, which do you like?

Our car took us to the Medeu sports complex, which is at an altitude of about 1700 meters. That was a climb of about 1000 meters from Almaty. A cable car then took us to the second stage of the climb, which is the main ski resort of Shymbulak. At this station we changed to another cable line which took us to the top elevation of 3200 meters. It had been foggy when we started and the fog only became thicker as we climbed. It was so bad that I picked up the Kazakh word for fog, tuman, by just listening to people around me. At the top it resolved into heavy clouds from which snow was beginning to settle gently. The weather was so cold that the snowflakes were dry. The snow on the ground was dry and powdery, perfect for skiing.

I’d been ready to shoot slopes full of greenery, so I’d started grumbling about the weather as we left, and by the time we reached the top my grumbles had turned into bitter complaints. The Family, on the other hand, was thrilled to bits. She’d never expected weather like this on this trip. I stopped my grumbling once I noticed the delicate texture of the fresh snow: look at the ski tracks in the photo on the left above and you’ll see what I mean. It was exactly this texture that made me buy my first camera. I still find it amazing that frozen water can be so delicate, and so hard to capture in an image. And the second photo shows you what I meant by knife’s edge: the weather so delicately balanced between horrible and beautiful that it depended entirely on your state of mind to call it one way or another.