Denver Post photographer RJ Sangosti thought seven weeks of snow had pushed him to a creative breaking point. But then he started to notice the tiny bits of beauty in the blanket of white that has draped Colorado since before Christmas.
Here is the story of how this elegant pictorial essay about snow, ice and frost bloomed from his frozen neighborhood:
When my pager went off an hour before my alarm I knew snow was to blame. I had watched the forecast the night before and knew it was going to hit us again. The message on my pager read, “We need weather photos early and often.”
I put on some clothes, heated up day-old coffee in the microwave and headed out the door.
I didn’t make it far. My truck, which is 10,000 miles away from retirement, would not start.
I called a cab and waited an hour or two before the car showed up to take me to the plant where The Denver Post is printed and where the newspaper’s photo van is parked.
The van is the butt of many jokes at the Post, but after spending a great deal of time in it after Hurricane Katrina, I love it.
I knew the van would get me where I needed to go as I drove around looking for weather photos – people shoveling their driveways, traffic backed up, kids sledding, and on and on. Even though my day had a hard start, it turned out to be a good day at work.
I grew up in Gunnison, so I know snow and have been happy to see Denver having a white winter for a change. But when this routine kept happening over and over for seven weeks, I started to go a little crazy.
It was like the movie “Groundhog Day,” where one day is repeated again and again. Before long, my pager wasn’t even going off before dawn because every one of us knew we needed weather art, “early and often.”
I was starting to think I couldn’t take it anymore.
But then one day I walked to my mailbox to get the mail and noticed beautiful ice crystals formed on the handle. That was when I realized I wasn’t really seeing the beauty of the snow, ice and frost, and from that moment came this group of photos depicting the details of why many of us live in Colorado.
TO THE THAWING WIND By Robert Frost
Come with rain, O loud Southwester!
Bring the singer, bring the nester;
Give the buried flower a dream;
Make the settled snow-bank steam;
Find the brown beneath the white;
But whate’er you do to-night,
Bathe my window, make it flow,
Melt it as the ice will go;
Melt the glass and leave the sticks
Like a hermit’s crucifix;
Burst into my narrow stall;
Swing the picture on the wall;
Run the rattling pages o’er;
Scatter poems on the floor;
Turn the poet out of door.
From “A Boy’s Will,” 1913
