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The blog’s been pretty street-photo heavy these days, and by street I mean hard, real hard. So I thought it might be a good idea to soften things up, take my sassy new camera to the beach, and try to find some corners I hadn’t peered into yet. And what do you know, I did!

That’s all for now, folks. It’s 1:51 am, and Papa Bear needs his beauty sleep.

Looks like my friend Foster Beach is finally beginning to thaw.

Those may appear to be normal waves, but it’s actually all an incredibly thin layer of ice floating on top of the water — melting remnants of a time many hours prior, when it was still cold enough to freeze the rippling waves on their way to the shore.

The ice was barely perceptible at first — I didn’t even realize until I got much closer to the water. But the seagulls delicately perched on it should have been a give away. Seems like as good a place to eat a diet subsisting mainly of McDonald’s fries as any.

One of my favorite parts of photography is its ability to capture a moment forever (or at least until you accidentally spill beer on the memory card anyway) — so I ended up with something of a fetish for shooting pictures of the beach this winter. Taking pictures of the icy lake, desolate and motionless, is the closest I’ll ever come to traveling through time… unless that fucker on eBay ever gets back to me… Regardless, the beach was frozen, trapped in the past, and then my photos froze the beach, frozen in time, in time. It’s metaphysical as hell, and if that doesn’t get you giddy and excited, well… I guess… you’re less of a nerd than I am. Congratulations, jock.

If Chicago is hell (and it very well could be), then it has officially frozen over.

I thought the lake looked eerily foreign the last time I went over there, but as the weeks passed and winter showed no sign of relenting, the beach practically turned into a replica of Pluto. And that’s kind of cool, since I heard it’s really expensive to go vacationing there this time of year.

I ran into a longtime Chicago resident out there who said he hasn’t seen the lake this iced over since the mid 80s. WTF global warming amiright lolol

Indeed, the lake is downright arctic right now. And about as dangerous as an expedition to the real thing, too. Its frozen depths nearly claimed my real dedleg right here.

Check out how far past the piers the snow and ice stretch — most of the year that’s all liquid water. Both of these shots were taken considerably past the shore. There is no sand underneath all that ice — just a frigid, watery grave. In some spots the ice is thicker than a concrete wall, and three steps later it’s far too thin to support any weight. As you just saw I was lucky enough to discover that first hand.

As I’ve already noted… the terrain out there was fucking treacherous. Coming down a frozen hill, I had to go into a controlled slide. All my survival training is finally paying off. I decided not to include any photos of me drinking my own urine or eating maggots I found in a rotting polar bear carcass, but I’m good at that shit too. 

This pile of metal… shit had been almost completely consumed by snow. The waves that normally crash against it all day slowly built up, freezing and thawing and freezing again, until it resembled a set piece from fucking Hoth. Fortunately, there were no Bantha sightings.

The East Coast might be getting all the blizzards this year, but Chicago’s winters are never to be outdone. There might not be 20 inches of snow on the ground in the middle of the city, but it’s been cold enough to freeze a lake nearly the size of West Virginia. Which is just a few notches below “cold enough to freeze your boogers,” for anybody out there who wants to get technical.

Welcome to the end of the world.

Just kidding, it’s only my old friend Foster Beach again.

I once read a quote about photography to the effect of “if you look into the viewfinder and see something you’ve seen before, then don’t click the shutter.” I’m paraphrasing, and I don’t remember who it was that originally coined that bit of wisdom, but I found it pretty impacting (although I guess not quite enough to actually remember anything specific about it).

Whether or not I always follow that advice is a separate issue altogether, but I try to keep it in mind since, shit, it can’t hurt. And on this particular day, I think I almost hit it. Although I’ve been to this spot so many times before, this time it looked otherworldly. And I hope the photos capture that… it’s a nice place to visit, but I wouldn’t want to live there.

I was anxiously waiting for winter’s icy hammer to fall for a while before the blizzard we had last week. After an altogether disappointing summer, I’d been expecting the worst for months, but instead, we had a long, drawn-out fall. In the midwest, that’s about the best you can hope for. Nonetheless, earlier this month I knew our days were numbered, so I headed over to the beach before it turned into a skating rink.

There’s a fence around the entire thing now, which I think is less of an attempt to keep people out so much as a warning that you really don’t want to go in that water. Sometimes you’ve got to protect people from themselves, nah’mean?

And yeah, I guess you’d have to be a pretty big goon if you went diving there at any time of the year. Swimming rocks!

The beach is changing into its winter clothes. In the winter, a glacier forms here along the shoreline. It’s pretty scary because it’s wet, huge waves are constantly being hurled against it, and most of all, that water is death itself, but the glacier is still awesome anyway.

But let’s not get ahead of ourselves.

I had somehow never noticed this sign until about a minute before I took this picture.

This water’s looking fucking cold these days… not that it’s ever that warm.