Adventures with Ice

Most sensible people head south when the weather turns cold. Not me. I'd heard that with all these below-zero days, the frazil ice had built up in the Hudson all the way to The Glen (about ten miles north of Warrensburg), so I had to drive up there to see it. Here's what the river looked like today from the Rte. 28 bridge, looking downstream.

For comparison, here's the same scene three days ago. You can see the loose, slushy frazil flowing downstream, since it had not yet clogged up the river.

A distinctive property of this special kind of fluid ice (which is formed in agitated water from droplets freezing in the air) is the way it can clump together and accumulate downward until it completely dams the flow of the river, causing the water level to rise and deposit the masses of ice along the shore. By the end of winter, these ice deposits can reach a depth of ten feet or more.

When deposited along the shore, frazil ice looks like snow, although its crystalline structure is quite different from that of snow. Looking straight down from the bridge, I could see how the fluid ice had swirled around the piers of the bridge.

If you click on the above photo, you might see the trail of clustered footprints bounding across the ice. Here's a closer view of them.

While looking down at the river from the bridge, I suddenly noticed a dark furry creature climb out from a hole in the ice near the bank and bound across the ice and run under the bridge. For an instant I thought I had witnessed a squirrel escaping from drowning, but then I realized that it must have been a mink. Of course, my camera was still in my pocket!

I decided to return to Warrensburg along the west side of the river, hoping to snowshoe out onto the river banks where I find such a marvelous variety of rare wildflowers in summer. I wanted to photograph the site and compare those photos with what the banks look like in summer. Unfortunately, I never made it. The road was slippery and my car skidded into the ditch. From this photo, you'd think I could just drive out of the snowbank, but my wheels were stuck down deep in ruts and the car wouldn't move.

Thanks heaven for TracFones and AAA! And wasn't I lucky I could find cell service there? Just barely, but enough to summon help, which arrived in less than an hour. Turns out, there must have been something hard under all that soft snow, since my car's radiator is now leaking fluid and my heater doesn't work. Uh oh.

Ah well, maybe it was my guardian angel who pushed me off the road to keep me off the river bank. Walking on frazil ice can be very dangerous.