A Good Word For Winter's Cold

The sun was shining and temps were climbing, and lots of folks I greeted at church yesterday smiled and enthused, "Isn't it wonderful that it's not so cold now?"  And I smiled and nodded and muttered,  "Mmm . . ., NO!"  I appreciate that not everyone loves winter's cold and ice the way I do. I do love the drama of below-zero days, and I don't mean frozen pipes and skidding into ditches. I mean the drama of frazil ice heaping up on the Hudson River banks north of Warrensburg, which can put on quite a show.  We had a couple of below-zero nights and sub-freezing days last week, which sent me and some other ice-loving pals up to Warren County to stand on The Glen bridge over the Hudson, to watch the frazil forming right before our eyes in the upstream rapids.

What's frazil ice, you may ask? It's a special kind of aerated ice that forms in rapidly flowing rivers in very cold weather, when the water is super-cooled and the air is well below freezing.  We could see the rapids just upstream, splashing droplets into the very cold air, where the immediately froze, and dropping back into the flowing water, they cohered with other frozen droplets to form mats of slushy ice, called "frazil."

We could see these rafts of newly formed frazil flowing under the bridge we were standing on.

Crossing to the other side of the bridge, we could see that the frazil rafts remained loose and flowing rapidly downstream.

Following the flow of the frazil, we drove downstream to a site on the Hudson that's known as the Ice Meadows.  In this stretch of the river, frazil ice gets deposited on broad meadow-like flats, sometimes to such a depth that the frazil heaps mount right up to the riverside forest, even pushing over trees in the process. On this day, we found that the slushy pans of frazil had congealed to the point where the river's flow was dammed, and rising water deposited the now-whitened chunks of frazil to a location well up on the shore, but not yet to the forest edge.

Just to compare how dramatic these deposits of frazil can be, here are two photos I took of this same location a few years ago,  when the ice completely filled the river basin and pushed well into the woods (see below) . . .

. . . and mounted so high on the shore that this six-foot fellow could not reach the top of the heaps!

This week, the ice heaps were not nearly as deep, but still were impressive, covering the entire ice-dam-swollen river's surface with chunky white deposits, except for a few narrow channels where water still flowed.

And lucky for us botanizers, some of the spring-watered streams that emerge along this stretch of the shore had washed the snowcover from portions of the riverside meadow.  What may look like nothing but dead dry grass to most folks held lots of fascinating treasures for plant nerds like us.  This is Dana (pink hat), and Sue (black parka), and Skye (plaid jacket).

We were especially fortunate to have Skye with us, since he is a genuine botanist, and he could reliably help us discern the most interesting of the plant remains here.  And there were quite a few of them. Due to these very ice deposits,  this particular stretch of the Hudson shore is famous for offering habitat for a remarkable variety of native plants, including some of our region's rarest.

Cranberry (Vaccinium sp.) is hardly considered a rare plant, and masses of their tiny-leaved vines spread across these rocky flats.  Where the snowcover was washed away, we could find many examples of the persistent leaves.

I know that my friends found remnants of quite a few other plants, including a couple of orchids.  But this is the only orchid remnant I managed to photograph (my camera's battery did not like the cold). The pods of this Small Green Wood Orchid (Platanthera clavellata) could have belonged to some other orchid species, but the remains of a single mid-stem leaf helped us distinguish this species.  I know that several remains of some Ladies' Tresses (Spiranthes sp.) were also found at this site.

Well, even winter-lovers like us do get cold if we stay out long enough in frigid temps and biting winds,  and our grumbling stomachs were telling us it was time to drive back to Warrensburg and find a warm spot to have lunch.  Lucky for us, we could easily speed south along the river road.  That was not the case in 2013, when frazil heaps completely blocked the road. That was quite a dramatic year for frazil ice!