Nine days inside the fog
A winter walk along the north Atlantic coast, where the weather picks the route and daylight lasts five hours.
- Published
- 14 February 2026
- Where
- North Atlantic coast
- Photographs
- 11
- Reading time
- 9 minutes
The forecast on the first morning said visibility of forty metres, improving later. It did not improve later. For nine days I walked a coast I could mostly hear rather than see, and I stopped trying to photograph the view.
What I photographed instead was whatever the fog gave back for a minute at a time: a cliff edge, a wet road, a line of spruce that appeared and was gone again before I had the camera up. These are those minutes, in the order they happened.
The road ends where the water starts
The coast road runs out at a turning circle and a painted sign that nobody has repainted in years. After that there is a sheep track, then a fence stile, then nothing but the sound of the sea somewhere on the left.
I had planned twelve kilometres a day. On the second day I managed seven, most of them spent standing still, waiting for the next gap in the cloud to tell me whether the ground ahead went up or dropped away.
Fog changes what a camera is for. You stop looking for the big view and start noticing edges: where the grass ends, where the rock turns wet, where a tree becomes a shape and then a tree again.
“By the fourth day I had stopped waiting for the view. The fog was the view.”
From the notebook, day four
Days three to seven, one frame each
Drag the strip or use the arrows. Select a frame to see it large.
A cabin, a stove and nothing to do
Two days of rain kept me in a boathouse cabin at the head of the lake. The owner left a key under a stone and a note asking me to keep the stove going for the pipes.
I read, slept and cleaned lenses. In the evenings the cloud lifted just enough to show the far shore, a dark line with snow above it, and I made one exposure each night from the same spot on the jetty.
Looking at those frames now, they are the quietest in the set, and the ones I return to most.
On the ninth night the wind turned north and the sky cleared in about ten minutes. I stood on the jetty until my hands stopped working, and walked out to the road the next morning in full sun, which felt almost rude.
Ingrid Solheim, February 2026
- Camera
- Fujifilm GFX 50R
- Lenses
- 45mm and 110mm
- Distance walked
- 142 km in nine days
- Days lost to weather
- Two
