This photograph was taken from the summit of Round Bald near Carver Gap off the Blue Ridge Parkway. Up until this moment, it had been a cloud-locked day, windy and frozen, as frost built up on our jackets as we hiked in near-negative temperatures.

I had been hoping to capture the frozen world at six thousand feet in the form of big expansive views and snow-covered trees, but instead, it was very grey and filled with rim ice so thick the plants looked alien. After hours of walking and refocusing on capturing just how unnerving the weather and the trail were at the time, the clouds lifted suddenly and briefly from the mountaintops, and I sprinted back to the summit line just in time to catch this shot before being covered up again in a blanket if clouds and ice.