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 

Stormy Evening at the Majorville Medicine Wheel

A stormy fall evening at the Majorville Medicine Wheel in southern Alberta.  I took this photo many years ago, using a Pentax 645 medium-format camera with a 45mm lens and Fuji Velvia transparency film.  The wind was blowing so hard, I literally had to hold down my tripod with both hands so it would not blow over in the wind.  Even though this was not a really long exposure, the grass in the foreground was still blurred.  

The thing that really makes this photo stand out is the intense, vivid colours in the sky as the sun was setting below the edge of a chinook arch.  I've been back to the medicine wheel site many times over the years, but I have never seen conditions like repeated - definitely a once-in-a-lifetime experience.

This image was recently selected by Ducks Unlimited Canada to accompany an article on the great conservation work they have been doing in the area of the Majorville Medicine Wheel.

Majorville Medicine Wheel, Alberta