Catch Up Time

We made it home by 3.30 pm yesterday. It was snowing quite heavily across the Peak District as we came north from Ashbourne. It's all gone now though as it's a wet, grey day in the Peaks and about 7C outside.

Had over 2150 emails in the inbox on our return. Mostly spam but a couple of hundred ones for me to look at, including some orders. Have just cleared the rubbish and am working my way through the ones left.

Had 47 rolls of Ilford FP4 processed by Chelsea Photographic in New York. They did an excellent job for me, including turning it round at no notice within 24 hours. That makes a total of 78 rolls processed and just 22 New York rolls left. Will either process myself or take over to Harman / Ilford for their pro lab to do. Managed to identify all rolls from the notes I took at the time of exposing each image. The city shots are easy but separating dozens of rolls taken at 7 ski areas was challenging at times!

Had some hassle at Denver Airport but all US airports did hand searches of my film when asked so that I could avoid them being x-rayed. In Denver they believed that x-ray machines were no more damaging to films than the radiation received when flying at 36000 feet. I tried to tell them the effect was accumulative so avoiding x-ray machines was beneficial for my films but they didn't seem to appreciate this and searched me, my clothing, my camera gear in the Peli case and everything in my rucsac. It only took about 10 minutes but they made their point! Complete contrast to the last time I went through Denver, it just depends on the individuals concerned.

In the 3 weeks that we were away we had 4 nights and most of 4 days in New York but most pictures were taken on just 2 days which had stunning light, but we did many miles of walking. Most of the time was spent in Colorado with friends Rob and Annie from Boulder, although we didn't stay that many nights in Boulder. We had 7 days at 7different ski areas: Keystone, Vail, Wolf Creek, Crested Butte, Monarch, Winter Park and Copper Mountain. Of these we had 2 days with bad weather (low cloud and snow) - Vail and Wolf Creek. In fact the weather at Wolf Creek gave 54 inches of snow on the slopes in just 3 days. Telluride which was on the itinerary but which we couldn't fit in this time, had 78 inches in the same 3 days! We also had 3 days snowshoeing; around Durango Forest while Durango was snowed in - we couldn't go anywhere else even if we had wanted to!, Rocky Mountain National Park where I took photos from the middle of the ice that covered Mills Lake and finally a return to Brainard Lake in the Indian Peaks Wilderness for shots of the mountains from Red Rocks Lake before we snowshoed up to Long Lake. We also had 3 walks around the Great Sand Dunes National Park, Boulder Flatirons and the Mount Sanitas area outside Boulder. The only day we didn't walk, snowshoe or ski was when we travelled from Durango to Gunnison ready for skiing Crested Butte the following day.

A great time was had by all and lots of photos for the image library. The only downside was the air travel - all the hanging around, hassle and concern that my film could be damaged doesn't make it a very relaxing time for me.