Like the early Picasso, the Northern sky has its own blue and pink periods… only at the same time.

When winter is deepest and the days shortest, sometime happens that the horizon at sunset turns into two distinct and contiguous stripes of blue and pink (and, pay attention, on the opposite side of the setting sun).

It’s a phenomenon I only met at these latitudes or northward, to which I now associate it as well as Northern Lights, 30 degrees below, dippers on ice slabs and all the other typical products from this spectacular world in white.

Minimalism: I believe the picture speaks for itself, about that. I love this genre: it’s fascinating the way it increases the sensations, while reducing the elements, the opposite of what you are prone to think.
About the mystery… when I was shooting, it wasn’t there yet: the scene appeared to me as expected, a tiny plant rising from the snow as thousands I saw before. Only later, walking back on the trail, the anomaly hit me in its oddity; I guess now it’s the time to say that the photo has been taken along a snow covered river… to be precise, above a snow covered river, with seventy centimeters of snow between the photographer and the water/ground.
How could a small plant exist on the top of such a thick layer of snow? Maybe over a big stone surfacing right in that spot? But what could grow on the top of a boulder? And if it wasn’t growing upon some sort of relief, why it was lying above the snow, and not below as all the plants ten centimeters tall are supposed to behave? The solution to the riddle came once at home, when I had the picture on my monitor; as all the solutions it’s quite trivial when you know it: it wasn’t a plant, but rather the dried inflorescence from an Angelica, a plant which thrives along the rivers and could reach a remarkable size, in this case enough to make the flower stand out of the snow (and I should have known better). The white carpet was at the perfect height to give the flower the appearance of a whole, tiny plant in itself, so deceiving the mind, as usual (too) ready to turn to ready-made categories in order to explain what it sees. The mystery vanishes, but the strange circumstance remains.