Super Moon, Perfect Night for a Hike

Our lucky night! Not only did we have a full moon tonight, we had a full moon at the closest point to earth in its orbit, making it bigger and brighter than any moon we have had since 1993, the last time we had what astronomers call a "super perigee moon." We also had a clear cold night, perfect for viewing this super moon, and it just so happened to fall on a Saturday, the weekend day that Moreau Lake State Park had scheduled a full moon hike around the lake. Perfect!

I had volunteered to accompany the hikers tonight, bringing up the rear to make sure the group stayed intact. Since I, too, had to keep up with the hikers, I couldn't take time to make perfect photographs of this beautiful moon, just snapshots on the run. But some of those shots had some charm, despite their technical inadequacies. Here's the moon just clearing the mountains as we walked through the woods on the western shore of the lake.

I am nearly 69 year old. How many full-moon risings have I witnessed? Too many to count, and yet each time I witness that golden globe lifting itself as if by magic above the hills or the treetops I am stunned with amazement. Tonight the sight stopped me dead in my tracks, where I would have stayed for a much longer time if I had not had to catch up with the hurrying hikers.

Here's the view from the bridge at the far end of the lake, with the moon casting silver light on the frozen surface. (That misty ring around the moon is a camera effect. The real moon was sharply defined against a dark clear sky.)

Returning via the eastern shore of the lake, I was enchanted by the moon-washed landscape of snow-covered lake and dark mountains rising against the sky. When I first looked at my photograph of this scene, it was almost perfectly black. But by boosting the exposure I discovered this grainy image that I thought had a graphic beauty all its own.

Look Ma, No Snow!

Just yesterday I was knee-deep in winter, wading through hip-high heaps of snow as I followed the ice up the upper Hudson River. Today, with the temperature soaring to 70 and a warm wind whipping across the fields in the hills above Saratoga Lake, the snow was disappearing as fast as morning mist on a summer lake. Just look at all that grass!

And look at these sweet babies out enjoying the snow-free patches of grass.

Amphibians On the Move at Wilton Wildlife Preserve

Wood Frog

The weather is warming at last! Close to 70 degrees today, and the snow and ice are melting fast. That means that the amphibians that make their home in Wilton Wildlife Preserve & Park are starting to stir. Having spent the winter in their hibernation sites, they will soon be moving to their spring breeding sites, and the folks at WWP&P are looking for volunteers to help out with a fun and unusual project.

American Toad

Probably by early next week, as the amphibians make their move, the park staff at Wilton are planning to go out to do a count of how many and what kinds of amphibians inhabit the site. The count will take place around 9 o'clock at night, with volunteers assisting in the count and helping the amphibians cross the road to their vernal breeding pools. Margo Olson, director of the preserve, said she expects to find Spring Peepers, Green Frogs, Wood Frogs, Grey Tree Frogs, American Toads, Yellow-Spotted Salamanders, Red-backed Salamanders, maybe even Four-toed Salamanders or Spadefoot Toads.

Pickerel Frog

The park is looking for volunteers who can be on call to come at a moment's notice when observers send out the word that the critters are on the move. If any of this blog's readers would like to join the counting party, please send an email to Margo Olson at mbolson@wiltonpreserve.org and leave a phone number where you can be reached at around 9 at night. Wear rainboots and wet-weather gear and bring a flashlight and a clean bucket.

Spotted Newt

Naturalist Kenny Barnett will be helping the volunteers to search the blacktop and roadsides, assisting the volunteers to identify species, record size and sex, and record if the animals are alive or dead on the road. He will also instruct participants in how to safely transport the creatures across the road, and will lead all in a celebration dance when the evening's tasks are completed. Sounds like a party!

Leopard Frog

Y'all Come!

Further Adventures with Ice

Wow! Shirtsleeve weather today! Well into the 60s, with brilliant sun beating down on what's left of winter around here. Which is plenty. There's still nearly two miles of frazil ice jammed in the Hudson River above the Thurman bridge at Warrensburg, and Evelyn (frazil-ice expert extraordinaire) called to invite me to check out the situation with her. The solid ice holding the frazil back could break in this warmth, and if all that ice started moving at once, it would be quite dramatic. Worth the trip up to Warren County to witness. Evelyn already lives up there, so we agreed to meet at The Glen, about 8 miles upstream from the Thurman bridge. Here, the river was wide open and sparkling under a blue, blue sky.

At the Thurman bridge, we could see the jumbled frazil held back upstream, so we hiked north along the railroad bed to get a closer look at it.

Here you can see the flat solid ice with heaps of frazil pushed up on to it by the force of the current.

We could hear rushing water, and sure enough, channels of open water were coursing through the expanses of frazil ice. With the water pressure relieved this way, it's possible that the frazil won't move in a mass, but simply melt in place as the weather warms.

This photo shows one of the places (across the river) where the Schroon River joins the Hudson at Warrensburg. Is the Schroon contributing its own frazil to the masses here, or is the Hudson frazil backing up into the Schroon? I don't know.

We next drove upstream several miles to a place called Snake Rock. The frazil filled the river almost all the way here, but upstream the water was flowing open and free of ice.

Due to the configuration of the river here, the frazil collects in wide swaths along the shore, creating a particular kind of habitat called an "ice meadow," an open grassland where many rare grasses and other native plants thrive.

Our next stop was another section of ice meadow several miles upstream. Here, vast sheets of frazil had cracked on the shore as the water level had sunk beneath them. Did we dare walk out on that ice? At least, if we went through, we wouldn't drown, since the ice now rested on rock. Break a leg, maybe, but drown? No.

Alone, I wouldn't have risked it, but Evelyn has many years of experience exploring these shores, and she assured me the ice would hold us. And she was right.

Evelyn wanted to visit one more area she calls "Coney Island," a narrow, curvy part of the river where ice tends to collect in very high heaps, sometimes 20 feet high or more. We had to hike quite a distance to get here from the road, luckily most of the way along railroad tracks where the snow had been packed by snowmobilers. But leaving the tracks to make our way through the woods to the shore, I found myself floundering knee-deep in snow many times, despite wearing snowshoes. There's still lots of snow cover left to melt into the waterways and create lots of drama as the waters rise. But today the river was well within its banks, and Evelyn noted that the frazil had not collected here in the quantities it has in other years. That's one thing about frazil -- it's often full of surprises!

On the way home, I found some very high heaps of frazil on the banks along Golf Course Road. The photo doesn't provide the perspective, but I'm guessing the head of a six-foot man would come about half way up the side of that ice cliff.

I know I've shown photos of Small Winter Stoneflies before, but this guy was quite a bit larger than them. I'll bet it's the spring-emerging variety, joining those other unsung harbingers like Skunk Cabbage and Turkey Vultures to assure us that yes, indeed, the winter will soon be over.

We Can Dream, Can't We?

Just to remind myself that Spring will really come, I went back into my files to find a warm-weather photo of this icy landscape I posted yesterday.

Aaaaah!

For Ice Junkies Only

What's a nature-lover to do when most of nature is buried under heaps of snow and ice? Why, you just have to get out there and get excited about snow and ice. And who better to feed one's enthusiasm about the stuff than the "Frazil Ice Queen" herself, Evelyn Greene. (Shown standing here in her element.)

Evelyn earned her title over decades of researching the phenomenon of frazil ice, the particular kind of fluid ice that forms in rapidly moving rivers like the northern reaches of the Hudson. This kind of ice is famous for accumulating in such great amounts that it clogs the river and piles up in massive heaps along the shore. Because of our extraordinarily cold and snowy winter this year, the ice has caused record flooding and has reached spectacular heights of build-up along the banks. So when Evelyn called this morning to ask if I wanted to join her on a frazil-ice jaunt along the Hudson from Warrensburg to The Glen, well, how could I resist?

Our first stop was at the Warren County Fish Hatchery in Warrensburg, where ice jams on the Hudson had caused flooding that reached the trout pens and covered the entire low-lying area with acres of frazil ice. We had heard that this flooding could endanger the young fish, allowing them to become entangled in the nets intended to keep predators out of the pens.

Curious to see if the ice jam had reached the bridge between Warrensburg and Thurman, we hurried to the site to discover the river there still covered with a solid ice sheet, except for a channel of open water along the west bank. The masses of jumbled ice chunks that caused the hatchery flooding must have been stalled upstream.

Ah yes, we could see that jumble of frazil ice upstream, when we peered with binoculars and I zoomed my camera lens.

Here's an even closer view of the wall of fluid frazil, stalled against the solid sheet ice but mounting up like a tidal wave that a thaw or pressure build-up could propel forward in a roiling mass.

Continuing upstream along the west bank, we found where the masses of frazil had stalled in their journey at this bend of the river.

Continuing northward, we came to the far end of the jam, where currents of open water were slipping underneath the ice, inexorably lifting it up and nudging it forward. Deposited along the banks here are both kinds of the ice that makes up the jam: chunks of solid blue ice that forms in frozen still water, and the frothy white frazil, resembling snow, that forms when droplets of splashing fast water freeze in the air, forming the nuclei around which masses of ice quickly coagulate.

Continuing on the river road, we arrived at Snake Rock, one of the sites where in summer we gain access to the river banks where rare wildflowers grow. I certainly would not want to try to walk down toward the river today! This stuff could collapse beneath your weight, even though it is several feet thick.

At Snake Rock, the frazil deposits had mounted so high they started across the road, until plows pushed them back.

The jumbles and heaps of frazil were impressive!

The little trees are pushed right over by the force of the frazil ice.

Oh my, but that ice is mountainous!

Here's another stretch of what are called the Ice Meadows, a site protected by the Nature Conservancy because of the abundance of rare plants that grow here. Only the hardiest native plants that have evolved to tolerate these harsh conditions can survive here, where the weight of these ice masses prevents any trees from growing up to shade the area.

One more shot of heaped-up frazil ice.

Well, ALL nature wasn't buried beneath the snow and ice. Thousands and thousands of Winter Stoneflies swarmed the snowbanks along the road. Since this is an insect that can survive only in unpolluted waters, we should always be glad to find them. And I was.

Where is Spring?

Despite a week of rain and above-freezing temperatures, Winter continues its stranglehold on Spring.

Weary of trudging through thigh-deep snow too porous to support me on snowshoes, I went to the Betar Byway in South Glens Falls today. Here the path along the Hudson is not only paved, it's plowed.

The bluebirds along the Betar don't really signal the arrival of Spring, since flocks of them have been feeding in the berrybushes here all Winter.

Aha! Now this is more like it! Here's the first flower of Spring: Skunk Cabbage. Not only has it opened its spathes to reveal the flowering spadices within, it has also begun to unfurl its big green leaves.

I also saw Turkey Vultures sailing high overhead. Like the Skunk Cabbage, these birds are true harbingers of Spring, although they are seldom honored as such in poetry or song. But I was glad to see them.

Ice Chasers

OK, I just had to go north today to check out that Hudson River ice. I'd heard that the flooding at North Creek had reached record levels: 12.19 feet, which is 2.19 feet above flood stage, surpassing the record of 12.14 feet set in 1948. As of noon, the ice jam causing the flood was still holding, so I jumped in my car and headed to Warrensburg, where I caught the road that follows the river north from there. A few miles north of Warrensburg, the Hudson was clogged with masses of ice that had risen well above the height of an island out in the middle of the river. This is a section of the river called the Ice Meadows, where heaps of ice typically reach heights of 10 feet or more.

A few miles north of there, at The Glen, the river was now wide open and flowing freely.

While I was observing the river from the bridge at The Glen, several cars pulled over and a group of fellow ice chasers got out. Some of the folks lived upstream at Riparius, where a big ice jam had just broken loose, so they hurried down to The Glen to watch the ice floes arrive.

After about 15 minutes, the first floes arrived, carried by rushing currents of cold black water. They would soon add to that jumble of ice I saw heaped up at the Ice Meadows.

Before long, the river was nearly covered over by roiling floes. Standing on the bridge, we could hear and feel them crashing into the piers of the bridge. Luckily, they kept on coursing downstream, and didn't jam up again under the bridge.

One of the men among the ice watchers told us he'd just received word that the jam at North Creek had let go, so we'd better get over to Riparius if we wanted to see those masses of ice charging down the river. So, of course, that's where I went next. It took me 20 minutes or so to get there. When I arrived, the river was running freely, with no floating ice that I could see.

I made myself comfortable on the bridge and watched the river for more than half an hour. It was all very peaceful and meditative, but no ice floes arrived and it started to get dark and spit rain. Time to go home. I guess that fellow got misinformation, or else the ice jam from North Creek had dammed up again between there and here. And now it was too late to drive further north to North Creek to see what was happening there.

I suppose some folks might find it curious that folks like me would chase all over the north country to catch the river doing its rivery things. It kind of puzzles me, too. There's a kind of excitement I get from big weather and dramatic waters. Not the terrible weathers and waters like those that just happened in Japan (God help those poor people!), just those extraordinary events that make us stop and pay attention but don't really hurt anybody. And maybe it's just cabin fever. I gotta do SOMEthing to get me through until spring!