Cold At Last: Winter Transformations at Moreau Lake

Whoa!  Big change from just a few days ago when temps approached 60 degrees! But when I woke up Monday morning after a clear cold windless night, I was startled to read the thermometer: SEVEN DEGREES ABOVE ZERO!!! I'm so glad my pal Sue Pierce and I had agreed to meet at Moreau Lake this day.  We'd bet we'd find new ice on the lake, and we were not disappointed.

Although the lake was still open in areas out toward the middle, along the north-facing shore the ice had formed crystal clear and hugging the shore.  Not quite thick enough to walk on though, as my tentative step revealed: CRACK!

This is exactly the kind of ice that thrills Sue and me: clear as glass and prone to capture stacks of silvery bubbles as organic material on the bottom releases gases.  No bubbles as yet had been caught within this thin-as-crystal coating, but this ruddy oak leaf sure looked pretty captured beneath a finely etched glaze.

Here was an ice formation neither Sue nor I had ever noticed before.  Where tiny twigs protruded above the thin ice, frosty disks with spiky edges had formed around each twig. And what were those spidery lines that were swirling around that middle twig?

A closer look revealed that feathery threads of waterfowl down had caught in the twigs and been captured and held within the thin layer of ice.  So pretty!

A large flock of Canada Geese had congregated on patches of open water, and they sent up quite a cacophony of cackles and hoots as they visited with one another.

It was fun to see some of the flock waddling about on the ice sheet that rimmed the open water. Sometimes they'd slip just as you or I would on that slick water-covered ice.

Sue noticed that some of the waterfowl at the edge of this flock were quite a bit smaller and whiter of head than the geese, and they also would disappear suddenly beneath the surface from time to time.  I'm glad my camera's zoom could see these diving ducks better than my eyes could, or I would never have known that a few Buffleheads were sharing Moreau's open water with all those geese today.

Here's the snow-covered trail we took as we walked part-way around the lake. A sleety wintry mix followed by snow two days before had whitened the evergreen boughs and caused them to sparkle in the sunlight that made it through the trees today.

A snow-covered fern. I believe it's a Marginal Wood Fern.  Sue and I like to test our knowledge of plants in their winter guises, but this fern doesn't look much different in winter than it does the rest of the year.

The dried seedpods of Spotted Coralroot, one of our native orchids. I doubt I would have been able to ID this plant from these remnants alone.  But we found it right where we'd seen a large patch of Spotted Coralroot last fall.

Same goes for these pods of Pyrola.  No doubt it is Shinleaf Pyrola,  since that was the species we'd found growing here along this trail last summer.

When we reached the building that houses the locker rooms for the swimming beach, I was struck by this pattern of icicles dangling from the eaves.

As we walked across the bridge that divides the main lake from the back bay, we noted that the main lake remained wide open at this south-facing end of the lake, while the bay just beyond the bridge was completely frozen over from shore to shore.

I  was fascinated by the ice formations along the railings of the bridge, lacy half-melted snow remnants above and crystalline needles below.

It was barely noon, but a low Solstice sun cast a golden glow on the steep forested banks that line the back bay, the smooth ice below the banks capturing that glow in a shimmering reflection.

Despite that golden sunlight and because clouds were moving in and the wind picked up, we were beginning to feel the bitter cold that hadn't climbed much into the double digits.  Time to pick up the pace and hurry back to the warmth of our cars.  But we drew to a halt when we found some patches of pretty frozen bubbles close to the shore.  They weren't the stacks of silvery disks we had hoped to find in this glassy ice, but they were pretty enough to cause us to pause to enjoy them.