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8:09 Sunrise

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The morning dawned bright and clear on top of Granite Butte. The sun doesn't make it above the horizon until after 8AM this time of year. When I arrived on the summit the evening before, visibility was limited to 50 feet. But now the freezing fog had settled into the valleys, trapped below an inversion layer. Underneath that fog is Montana's capital city of Helena. Between shooting meteors all night and keeping the wood burning stove going, I didn't get much sleep. But a sunrise like this makes it easy to wake up. The weather can be extremely harsh up here. It was at a pass 16 miles away where the coldest temperature in the US (outside of Alaska) was once measured at -70°F. While it wasn't quite that cold on this morning, I was still glad to have a fire lookout tower to stay in and escape from the nearly incessant wind.

Copyright
Kevin Palmer
Image Size
5719x3818 / 11.2MB
Keywords
Contained in galleries
Landscapes, Montana
The morning dawned bright and clear on top of Granite Butte. The sun doesn't make it above the horizon until after 8AM this time of year. When I arrived on the summit the evening before, visibility was limited to 50 feet. But now the freezing fog had settled into the valleys, trapped below an inversion layer. Underneath that fog is Montana's capital city of Helena. Between shooting meteors all night and keeping the wood burning stove going, I didn't get much sleep. But a sunrise like this makes it easy to wake up. The weather can be extremely harsh up here. It was at a pass 16 miles away where the coldest temperature in the US (outside of Alaska) was once measured at -70°F. While it wasn't quite that cold on this morning, I was still glad to have a fire lookout tower to stay in and escape from the nearly incessant wind.