A surreal moment from my trip to Sundance.

On one night, An unfortunate confluence of ride and lodging accommodations with bad timing forced me to traverse on foot a full 1.5 miles through the snow-entombed massif of Park City. The "dancing sun" was noticeably absent,  the snow-reflected moonlight instead providing bright but pale illumination.
Working my way back to the hotel where my ride awaited, I walked along a shockingly well-plowed bike path. The locals were clearly used to the heavy snowfall, even if it was record-breaking this year. The path often cut into the giant heaps of snow as well as the earth itself. Almost all of the path I took was flanked by 30-foot walls of concrete, stone, or snow. Sometimes I passed through tunnels riddled with the most politely artistic graffiti ever.
Rounding one particular bend, the crashes and roars of a machine began to enter earshot. A local would have identified the sound immediately, but it was only clear to me what it was once it entered my view: an excavator, digging out a workplace parking lot. 
Lit by the white floodlights of the nearby building, the hulking machine toiled away as I passed far closer than any real safety laws would allow, its driver barely a shadow in the dark. With the added height of the ledge it stood upon, it towered over me, far more than any other construction machine I've seen in Ohio. In the cold, dark world where this beast was doing what it was made for, ignoring my tiny existence, I may as well have been passing by a grazing woolly mammoth. I found myself childishly imagining what it'd be like to be an explorer on a distant planet or foreign wilderness, to pass by lumbering megafauna that, if they didn't want to eat you, could still crush you if they felt like it.