Happy New Year's (continued)

You may recall from my original New Year's post, that I said that the fireworks were short and sweet, and that we must not have had a very large budget for them.  As it turns out, the fire department had placed all of the fireworks in the snow (in preparation for shooting them off later) during the afternoon in the daylight.  When it came time to shoot them off, there was nobody sober enough to find them all in the dark, or remember where they had put them.  As a result, the fireworks that we had at 9pm on New Year's Day (after everyone got closer to sober), were way more impressive than the small sampling that we got the previous night.

This picture clearly doesn't do it justice, but I'll try to walk you through it anyway.  When the three of us had gone for our walk in the storm, you could hardly see anything.  After a short break, Rory and I went to climb the mountain to the cross.  It took us about an hour, since the conditions were so harsh, and every route that we tried required a certain amount of crawling (that's right, crawling).  But, during the hike, all of the loose snow had blown away, and we were left with nothing but a howling wind.  Not only that, but once we got to the plateau right before the final stretch, we realized that the wind was even worse.  I was kneeling on the ground by a rock (for stability), and trying to keep the angle right, unsuccessfully.  This was Rory not leaning into the wind, but just struggling to stand against the force of the wind (with a pretty nice background).  I was actually giving him quite a bit of credit here, because I spent most of my time at the peak on the ground.  It was wicked!
Watch your back Russia... we're coming for you!

Stay tuned.