It’s spring! There are still piles of snow.
Scene Through the Lens with photographer Tom Gralish.
Maybe because my roots are in the flat Upper Midwest and Great Plains, but I am mesmerized by the huge plies of snow that are plowed into parking lot mountain ranges for a few weeks in winter.
In just the right light, and under certain conditions I feel like I could be looking out at the Continental Divide.
In 2005, I searched everywhere to locate the region’s largest snow mountain. I found it in the Andorra Shopping Center in Northwest Philadelphia where plow operators, rather than creating numerous smaller piles — the norm in mall parking lots across America — kept pushing snow down to one end of the sloping lot.
I visited the “Alp of Andorra” numerous times that winter and enlisted longtime colleague and friend Micheal Vitez to write an “obituary” for the winter’s last snowflake when it finally melted in the first week of April.
» READ MORE: From 2005: Mammoth snow pile succumbs to spring
So when I read last month that PATCO was taking bets on when the humongous snow mountain range in their Haddonfield station’s parking lot would finally melt, I just had to photograph it.
And of course, I just had to go back to photograph a few more times — including yesterday, at the minute of the vernal equinox when the sun “crossed over” the equator putting winter officially behind us with the start of astronomical spring.
It’s still there.
Since 1998 a black-and-white photo has appeared every Monday in staff photographer Tom Gralish’s “Scene Through the Lens” photo column in the print editions of The Inquirer’s local news section. Here are the most recent, in color: