I love fog. There are usually a few days each year, in the late winter or early spring, when we wake up to find the landscape around our house shrouded in mist. In a really good fog we can’t even see the road, and our property becomes a wooded island far from anywhere.

I wrote about one of these a while back and showed you some of my photos, and now I want to share some new ones, taken just a few days ago. I’d predicted we’d get a foggy day soon, because we still had lots of snow on the ground and the temperatures were slowly inching up into the 40s and 50s. I’m no meteorologist, but I think that’s a pretty good recipe for fog. So when we had a foggy day last week I high-tailed it over to the park as soon as I could, knowing that the 500-acre lake would make for some interesting shots. I removed my 400mm birding lens and put my wide-angle lens on the camera for some landscape photos.

Within the first 100 feet of the entrance road I spotted this turkey strolling along beside me. I grabbed my little point-and-shoot camera and got a couple shots off before he fled into the mist. Turkeys are very skittish; I’d think such large birds would be a bit braver. But maybe it’s because they’re hunted and they know humans are bad news.

I walked out among the scattered trees in a big field, looking for some good ones to shoot. This park is one of my favorites, and I usually feel that I know it pretty well. But walking in the fog made it all feel new and different, like someplace far from home where something magical could happen. It almost wouldn’t have surprised me to see a unicorn walk out of that mist, that’s how other-worldly it felt.

Did you know there are various types of fog? I didn’t either. According to the National Weather Service, there’s advection fog, radiation fog, upslope fog, ice fog, freezing fog, and evaporation fog. So I’m thinking our fog was the advection type, caused by warmer air moving over the cool snow on the ground and ice on the lake. (If you want to read more about these types of fog, here’s where I found that info.) The National Weather Service website ends their fog page with a warning about driving in fog, saying that it’s important not to use your high-beam headlights in fog because your visibility will be reduced even more. I did know that. (Jeopardy, here I come….)

My family had a very scary experience while driving in heavy fog on a vacation many years ago. We were on the freeway with my dad driving–he’s an excellent and safe driver, so we were going verry slowly and keeping plenty of distance between us and the other cars. But suddenly a pair of headlights came out of the fog headed toward us — another driver had somehow gotten disoriented and was driving on the wrong side of the freeway. I remember how our hearts jumped into our throats as we watched that car pass beside us, knowing that we’d narrowly escaped tragedy as the other car disappeared into the mist behind us. A foggy day is not a day for driving, that’s for sure!

The fog comes
on little cat feet.

It sits looking
over harbor and city
on silent haunches
and then moves on.

~ Carl Sandburg