Thank you so much for watching! I hope you get less rain and more snow than I did. The Lofoten Islands are beautiful in the snow!

Hi Lam - I think you are correct. For busy Summer weekends and for the Horsetail Fall weekends in February, I think they still leave the gate open for vendors and for guests who might be arriving late when there is no one in the booth. At the beginning of this video, I actually drove in around 5 AM, before they had closed the park due to the heavy snow and no one was in the booth. If it's a hazardous situation, I think they usually close the road much further down and the CHP or park Rangers will usually be there to turn people away. On the day I got snowed in, I left after I heard what was going on from a Ranger and didn't try to stay overnight. All the guests were being asked to leave at that point and couldn't come back until the heavy snow threat had been lifted. - I just checked and the NPS confirmed you can still enter the park without a reservation on busy weekends, but they say you need to arrive before 5 AM or after 4 PM.

Thank you so much for watching, Su!

Thank you so much for watching, Su! :)

Thank you so much for watching! 🙂

Thank you so much for watching! You're going to love it there! :)

me too planning to go to Reine on Jan❤

@@karifer70 I hope you have a great trip! Hopefully your trip will be in the last half of the month when you can get a bit more sunlight during the day.

@@WJMPhotography thanks so much 🤗😘

@@WJMPhotography thanks so much👋❤️

Thank you so much for watching!

Thank you so much for watching!

Thank you so much for watching!

Thanks for watching and for the encouragement! :)

Thank you!

Thank you so much for watching and for your words of encouragement! :)

Thanks for watching Loren. The San Juans were amazing and I'm hoping to get back up there again soon. I'm sorry to hear that it's harder for you to get around now. I hope your health improves soon!

Thank you so much for watching and for the encouragement! I just subscribed to your channel as well. I'm so jealous that you live in Ireland! I am definitely coming back, hopefully sooner rather than later!

@@WJMPhotography you're always welcome!

Thanks Richard! It was definitely worth the drive over from Bushmills. I was bummed that the property owners had put up a barbed wire fence to keep people from coming on to their property and was sorely tempted to just climb over it, but I wanted to respect their wishes and stayed off. I'm sure they were worried about liability. It looks like you LIVE in Ireland. If so, I'm so jealous!

Thank you so much for watching, Laurie! :)

LOL...They definitely were not! Thank you for sticking around to watch that at the end! It took FOREVER for them to get off the road, and right after them it was sheep. I guess you can never really be in a hurry if you are driving through the Irish countryside!

Thank you for watching! The amount of snow that came down in 2019 was amazing. I hope we get another Winter like that again this year. :)

Thank you for watching! :)

Thank you so much for watching! :)

Thanks Greg! We need to go there next Summer!

It didn't occur to me either until I started researching for the eclipse. So much potential on that island! I think Gord had been there for years but has just made a dent. There is SO much amazing looking coastline, and so much of that looks like it's either private land or under-developed. Between the lighthouses, sea stacks, waterfalls and icebergs in the Summer, it just looks amazing!

Thanks Mike! So glad I was able to see SOMETHING after flying across the country to be there. That eclipse was definitely creepy!

Thanks Gord! I will definitely reach out on my next trip. I remember you staying something on one of your posts about April being cloudy 6 days out of the week for the whole month, so I will definitely try to aim for Summer or maybe Fall and avoid the Spring. Such an amazing island!

What months would you say were best to visit please Gord ?

Thanks Richard! It was kind of a bummer that most of my shots were from the same day, but that was literally all of the light I had to work with while I was there. Hoping to return with some better conditions in the future. :)

Hi Ada - I use a combination of Windy and Ventusky to get a look at the cloud forecast and try to match it with where the clouds look like they are headed on the satellite view which is available on both apps. For sunrise/sunset color, I use both SunsetWX (they have a Europe model) and Skyfire on The Photographer's Ephemeris app. Of all of those, I think Skyfire is the only one that I pay a subscription for. Skyfire and Sunsetwx are usually only 50-60% accurate, but both are good if I am trying to decide where my best chance of light will be. :)

Thanks for watching Edith! :)

Thanks for watching! :)

Thanks for watching, Leah! :)

Thank you so much for watching. :)

Thanks Nils! That sounds amazing! February turned out to be a great month to go for me and I hope it will be for you as well!

Thanks STJ! :)

Hi Dave - I hope you get a chance to go! Other than some pretty long traffic jams, I took it easy and didn't run into any problems other than not noticing the ice building up in my wheel wells. I took off one morning and several warning lights went off in my dash as all of those sensors were covered in ice. The car ran fine after I cleaned off the ice. The studded snow tires that come with all rentals in the winter were surprisingly effective on the ice. I had an all wheel drive and I had no issues with sliding on the roads. But I did notice several other vehicles that had slid off the road. Some of those folks were driving WAY too fast and I ended up letting most of those people pass me rather than drive faster on the snow and ice while I was there.

@@WJMPhotography that sounds great. We’ve got a Jeep Wrangler and have gotten stuck in the ice and snow in Colorado a few times, the winch is a lifesaver for sure. It’s good to know that the car was sent out with snow tires on it. Ok, let the planning begin! Thanks for your reply.

Thanks Aadidev! For the weather, I use Windy and Ventusky. They use slightly different models so if I can get them to agree on where the clouds are going to be, the chances for accuracy are higher. For light, I use The Photographers Ephemeris, and within that app, I use Skyfire. I'd say the success rate of Skyfire is about 60%, but if I can see a potential gap in the clouds in the two weather apps and it lines up with what Skyfire is predicting, my chances of a decent sunrise or sunset increase. The radar and satellite options for the weather apps give more accurate information than the models, so it is best to rely on those to see if you can get a sense of where the weather is trending. While I was in Lofoten, it was not unusual to have gaps in the clouds that didn't show up in either Ventusky or Windy. About 20% of the time, it's worth it to head out anyway because the models won't show enough detail. That happened several times over the past couple of years while I was shooting up there. :)

@@WJMPhotography This is more detail that I could've ever asked for, thanks a million!

Thank you so much for watching! :)

Thank you so much for watching! :)

Thanks Masoud! That storm was crazy! The storms and snow created more challenges but this year was SO much better than last year in the rain. The snow makes such a huge difference in the Winter. I hope you came home with some good shots!

Thank you for watching! :)

Thanks Nils! After reading up on it, it seems that there actually might be more snow and definitely more light to work with in March. It seems odd to me that it would rain more in January and February, but that's what I'm reading. However....for me, it would be really hard to pass on that golden light for 6-7 hours in February as the sun stays so low in the horizon to the South. The light was just stunning when I was there. The other surprising thing was that the average temperatures for both months seem pretty close. So...the sun would be higher in March, the days would be longer, but in the middle of the day, the light might not be as nice. I got lucky this year with the snow in February, but if you can catch a day with new snow and that low sun off to the South...February can be pretty spectacular. Thank you so much for subscribing! :)

@@WJMPhotography I had not realised about the differing snow cover between Feb and March, that's very useful to know - I need to do a lot of fast reading!! With the Solar maximum boosting the chance to see the Aurora in 2025 I really want to get booked in now before everyone else does! We had planned to roadtrip around Senja and Lofoten in early 2015 but bottled it and we instead went in May 2016 when the 24hr daylight was another very different experience. We still really wanted to see the Aurora and so booked three nights in Abisko, just east of Lofoten in Northern Sweden and an hours drive from Kiruna airport. The scenery isn't as spectacular (though the "Lap gate" / Lapporten was quite something) and we were lucky to have 2 very bright and strong showings, plus a colourful smudge on the third night. There is supposedly a "blue hole" above Abisko caused by the local geography parting the clouds to give clear skies above - I'm not sure quite how true that is but it certainly worked for us! I'm planning on starting our next trip with two nights in Abisko in the hopes of clear skies and an Aurora to take the pressure off the following week to 10 days in Lofoten! Thanks again for replying and posting such a great video. I really like the presentation style and having watched a couple of dozen videos about Lofoten in winter ove rthe past weekend, your were the ones that stood out. Cheers / Skol!

Thanks Dave - LOL...I definitely did. I've got a ton of photos still to post and over 700 video clips from this trip. I kind of went crazy while I was there, so if there are mountains that I drove by, there's a good chance I either shot it last year or this year at some point. Such an amazing corner of the world. I'm almost certainly going back at some point because there is so much more to shoot!

Thanks Corey - I hope so. We got a butt load of snow again this year, so maybe the conditions will be similar this Spring. But I hope they don't close the park again if and when the water level rises. They just closed the park a couple of weeks ago when they were expecting blizzard conditions like they had up near Truckee. Blizzards and floods...those are my favorite times to be in that park, LOL. I'm sure they have to think about safety, but the park closures seem to be increasing lately.

Hi George - Thank you so much for the correction! I've been wracking my brain trying to figure out where the "Sierras" came from, and I guess it must have come from other photographers who have inspired me to shoot there. Maybe it's because we say "Cascades" and "Himalayas" so it just sounds natural to say "Sierras." I've honestly never thought about the fact that the word is plural, LOL. And in Idaho, I still can't make myself say "Sawtooths." I'll keep saying "Sawteeth" until it comes into style. 🙃

Thank you! I hope you have better weather than I did! You might actually get some snow as I was just below the snow level in mid September, but I think October is still supposed to be too early for snow. I hope you have a great time! It's so beautiful there!