Wednesday, December 25, 2019

Winter Solstice at the Majorville Medicine Wheel

To celebrate the winter solstice, I'm posting my favourite solstice image, from the winter of 2014. After a fairly harrowing journey across the open prairies, plowing through snow drifts that were a couple of feet deep in places, I made it out to the Majorville Medicine Wheel site shortly before sunset and hiking up the hill with my camera and tripod.
The Majorville Medicine Wheel is a circular structure of stones constructed some 5,000 years ago on a hilltop overlooking the Red Deer River in south-central Alberta. On a nearby hilltop is another, smaller, stone structure of unknown age, and on the shortest day of the year, the two stone structures align perfectly with the setting sun.
On this visit I was fortunate that the sun managed to briefly peek through the clouds on the southwestern horizon before it set, making for a much more dramatic image. My positioning for this photo doesn't really show the precise alignment of the structures, as I was trying for a more "artistic" representation of the scene, and not wanting to aim my lens directly at the sun.

Sunset at the Winter Solstice, Majorville Medicine Wheel

More images of the enigmatic Majorville Medicine Wheel can be found on my web site at:  Majorville Medicine Whee at www.ImagesWest.ca 

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