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 

Summer Solstice at the Majorville Medicine Wheel

Time for another "better late than never" blog post, with one of my favourite subjects... the Majorville Medicine Wheel, this time at the summer solstice.  Trust me, it's much easier getting to this location in the summertime.

Majorville Medicine Wheel, June 2015

The weather was fairly cooperative this year, with no clouds to obstruct our view of the sunset (although I was hoping for a slightly more interesting sky but I guess you can't have it both ways...)

Sunset on the Summer Solstice, Majorville Medicine Wheel

There were a number of other visitors to the site this year, most of who said they had heard about the site thanks to the article in the August 2012 edition of Alberta Views magazine, which featured a number of my photos.  In years past, we'e always had this hilltop all to ourselves.

Watching the Sunset, Majorville Medicine Wheel

These images were captured with the remarkable new Canon EOS 5DsR, the world's highest-resolution 35mm DSLR camera.  Although it's not apparent in these heavily-compressed and downsized web images, the amount of detail this camera captures is simply staggering.  Here's a crop from the last image above:

(cropped from image above)

Winter Solstice at the Majorville Medicine Wheel

Okay, these photos were actually taken the day before the winter solstice - sometimes our schedules don't allow us to be at a location at the precise time we would like to be...

Interpretive Sign, Majorville Medicine Wheel

This visit to the Omakh, or more popularly called the Majorville Medicine Wheel, coincided with the arrival of my new Sony FE 16-35mm f4 lens, and I wanted an interesting landscape subject to put it to the test.  Getting to the location was a bit of a challenge, as some of the snow drifts I had to drive through were very deep, and proved to be a good test of the off-roading capabilities of my VW Touareg.

Majorville Medicine Wheel in Winter

Majorville Medicine Wheel in Winter

Winter Sunset at the Majorville Medicine Wheel

I had planned to return to the site a few days later, but another snowfall had made the trail to the site completely impassable.  My next visit will have to wait until spring arrives.  

In the meantime, be sure to check out my web site for more photos of Omakh - The Majorville Medicine Wheel at www.imageswest.ca.