Pretty as a Picture Out There

It's my hope and habit to try to find something of beauty or interest every time I go out, no matter how dreary the weather.  Today I didn't even have to try.  I just looked out my window.

SNOW!!!

 Wonderful snow!  Tree-twig-sticky snow!  The kind of snow we sing about when we sing "Winter Wonderland!"  And it stayed in the trees and covered the shrubs all day long.

Other duties kept me out of the woods today, but a quick walk around the block yielded many wonders close to home.  In my own backyard, the Flowering Dogwood buds were bonneted with snow as high as Marge Simpson's hairdo.

The common weeds were transformed into things of beauty, like these gracefully arching stems of spent Motherwort.

I cheated a little and used my camera's flash to light up these Sycamore fruits, dangling like Christmas balls in little fur caps.

Climbing the Waterfall's Course

It was actually quite a pleasant day today, with a bright blue sunlit sky in the morning, and the temperature still above freezing.  Clouds had moved in by the time I got outdoors in the afternoon, but the woods was still lovely and welcoming as I climbed the course of a waterfall in the mountains that rise above the banks of the Hudson across from the Spier Falls Dam.

I kept on climbing, up and up,  following the streambed beyond the powerline road that traverses the mountainside here, up to where many tiny rills spill over boulders, creating fantastic ice palaces in the winter.
 

With all the above-freezing days we've been having, much of the ice had melted, but enough remained to transform the barren boulders into structures of cascading beauty.

Beauty lay all around, although sometimes I had to peer closely to appreciate it.   This patch of Haircap Moss with its colorful spore stalks certainly deserved a closer look.

As did the undersides of this fungus.  From the top, it was just a boring plain white, but a flip of the stick it was growing on revealed this beautiful honeycombed surface.

I was also enchanted by constellations of little asters, their petals long spent but their clusters of starry bracts revealing the very rightness of their genus's name, derived from the Latin word for star.  (Yes, I know their genus is Symphyotrichum, not Aster, now.  But I still call them asters.)

Winter Along the Kayaderosseras Creek

Nope.  Not a good day outdoors.  Fortyish, raining . . . .  Why would I leave the comforts of a cat-cushioned couch to go slipping and slogging along the banks of an ice-choked Kayaderosseras Creek today?  Well, it was just because that creek was ice choked that I saw the photos in the paper this morning and just had to head over to Ballston Spa to take a look for myself.

Yes indeed, that creek was surely choked with ice.  Jammed with ice, so the water was rising and shoving huge chunks into people's backyards, crushing the shrubs and scraping the paint off sheds, while the creek kept coursing along, right over the banks and down into creekside cellars. As I stood on a bridge that was groaning a bit underfoot, it was quite an impressive, kind of scary, sight.

But just a mile or less downstream, all was serene along the Burl Trail at Gray's Crossing.   It was here, last year, that the steep banks were beveled to allow high water to spread out over a floodplain, but today the water was well below flood stage, despite days of rain and snowmelting temperatures.  I guess that ice jam upstream was holding the water back.

There was still lots of water falling from the sky, creating pretty crystalline drops on every twig and bud and catkin and cone and fluffy tuft of grass.  

 

After this bank was cleared and reshaped, the state Department of Transportation planted the area with dozens of native trees.  Some of them thrived, but others did not.  The presence of all these ruffly fungi on the trunk of one young tree would indicate that the wood was dead and rotting.

 I didn't recognize this fungus at first, since I've only ever seen Split-gill Fungus (Schizophyllum commune) when it's all dry and shriveled.   A remarkable thing about this fungus is that it can dry up and shrivel again and again, but all it needs to come back to life is a little rainfall.  No shortage of that, of late.

Here's a close-up view of the split gills that give this fungus its name.   This is a particularly fascinating fungus with a very interesting sex life you can learn all about, if you like, by clicking here.

Along the water's edge was a tall weedy plant I do not recognize.  I wouldn't have paid it any mind, such a scraggly thing it is, but its transparent seed pods were catching the light and thus catching my eye, so I had to stop and give it a closer look.

I have never seen seed pods like this, transparent as cellophane.   Most likely, this plant is some kind of noxious weed brought in with all the new plantings, but who knows?  It was certainly thriving along these banks, so I should be able to find it and identify it next summer when it comes into bloom.  In the meantime, would any of my botanist friends like to hazard a guess what it is?

Update:  I heard from Steve Young, chief botanist with the New York Natural Heritage Program, that this is  a Mustard Family plant.  As he explained it, the sides of the seed pods have fallen off, leaving only the translucent partition that divided the fruit, called a silique.  Without leaves, though, we can't identify the plant as to species.

Soggy Winter

Several days (and even nights) of above-freezing weather have made a soggy mess of the woods, and hard-packed ice on the trails makes the walking quite treacherous.  But Nature still calls me out of doors, so I pulled on my Yaktraks and headed out for a hike around Mud Pond today.  I had heard that Moreau Lake State Park  staffers had placed a road-killed deer on the ice, so I hoped I might catch some ravens or eagles enjoying a carrion feast.

But not a creature was stirring around the poor sodden carcase lying lonely out there on the watery ice, nor could I find any trace of the wildlife that lives in these woods, except for numerous litter-strewn holes that squirrels had dug to retrieve their hidden food caches.   Oh wait, there were numerous deer tracks, too, the deer being the only woodland residents heavy enough to break through the crusted snow and leave any sign of their passing.

The birds were quite silent, too, with not a caw nor a twitter nor a peep to be heard above the sound of the rushing brook.  With all the rainwater and snowmelt filling its course, the creek made it all the way to the pond today.  Much of the year, this little creek disappears underground long before it enters the pond, but today it kept dancing happily all the way to the shore..

Despite the drear weather, I did find a few spots of color  in a stand of Bitternut Hickory, a tree that's known for the bright chrome-yellow of its buds.

I was truly surprised to find a couple of Witch Hazel flowers still bravely in bloom.

I took the river road home from Mud Pond, stopping to admire this view of my favorite little island in the middle of the Hudson.  Two days ago, the river was still iced over from shore to shore, but today the water ran open and dark, reflecting the beauty of the forested mountains that line the banks.

January Rain

No fair!  The better I feel, the nastier grows the weather.  Here I am, all over my cold and eager to get outdoors, and it's pouring rain.  Two days ago it was zero, today it's pushing 50.  Very strange!

Well, I did get out today, if just for a few minutes here and there, trying not to get my camera soaked.  I thought the fog rising over the snow might make for some interesting atmospherics, and I was right.

Here are horse pastures along Fitch Road above Saratoga Lake.

This is the Hudson River, still frozen over, from the boat launch site below Spier Falls Dam.

With the sodden snow, drifting fog, and pouring rain,  the landscape lacked much color.  These dripping Red Osier Dogwood twigs certainly stood out against the unrelenting gray.

Watching the Frazil Form

Well, if I had to get sick, this was a good week to do so, with weather so awful I wouldn't have gone outdoors anyway.  First, we had rain to turn all our lovely snow to slush.  Then arctic cold slammed down to way below zero, turning that slush into slippery slashing blades underfoot.  Then the wind came howling to drive that cold down deep in your bones, no matter how you bundled against it.  Yes, a good week to curl on the couch with a Kleenex box, mugs of hot tea at hand, and laps full of furry cats.

Today, both the cold in my head and the cold outdoors eased up enough to tempt me out under a clear blue sky.  But just for a drive.  The frigid air still caused me to cough with every breath.  It was only in the single digits above zero when I headed up north, curious to see if the frazil ice was forming on the Hudson River north of Warrensburg.  It was certainly cold enough to do so.

Before I reached the bridge that carries Rte. 28 across the Hudson at The Glen, I could see that the river was well jammed  up with this particular kind of chunky white ice that forms in areas of turbulent water.  As we head up north toward the Adirondack Mountains, the Hudson falls ever more steeply, with consequent turbulence.

Although it may look very much like snow, frazil ice doesn't fall from the sky, but forms when splashing water throws droplets up into the sub-freezing air, the droplets immediately turning to ice before falling back into the water.  These frozen droplets cling together, building up into slushy mats that eventually clog the river from shore to shore, as they are doing in this photo.  Eventually, the frazil clogs the river all the way down to the bottom, damming the flow and causing the frazil to rise up high on the banks, sometimes to heights as tall as 15 feet or more.

When I reached the bridge at The Glen, I could see that the river was still flowing freely here, with slushy mats of frazil rushing rapidly downstream.

I followed the river road downstream in my car, and had gone hardly more than half a mile before I could see that the frazil had stalled and was mounting up, pushing into the woods along the shore.

More than five miles further downstream, at the Thurman bridge, the river was still covered with frazil from shore to shore, although I could see where wide channels of open water had formed as the current pushed through.   But even these channels were covered with still ice today, after more than two days of temperatures well below zero.  This is the view looking upstream, and the view downstream looked much the same.

It's always an adventure to see what the ice on the Hudson will do.  Last year the frazil piled up to unprecedented  heights, engulfing the riverside road and shoving trees over in the forest.  It took several weeks for roadcrews to cut a lane through the heaps that covered the road.  Here's a photo I took last winter, on a patch of newly cleared road.

Let's hope the frazil is not quite so adventuresome this winter!

Say It Isn't So!

What's this I hear on the weather report?  RAIN?!  40 DEGREES?!  Just when we got the most beautiful snow, along with frigid air to keep it soft and fluffy.  And now it will all be sodden.  I was going to stay home today and start reading some of the wonderful books I got for Christmas, but when I heard that bad news, I hurried up to Moreau Lake to enjoy this splendid winter landscape before it gets ruined.  And I sure wasn't the only one walking out on the frozen lake.  The park was truly mobbed today, with skiers, snowshoers, dogwalkers, and ice fishers celebrating this beautiful day in this spectacular setting.

After strapping on my snowshoes, I headed around and across the lake, rejoicing in how the frozen surface gave me such ready shortcuts to my favorite sites.  Of course, I had to stop at the shoreline site where I found that rare Whorled Mountain Mint this fall, and I was delighted to see its withered seedheads standing tall above the snow.

I also stopped to chat with several fishermen, admiring their catches or commiserating with their lack of luck.  Ice fishers tend to be a really friendly sort of folk, usually glad to break their solitary vigil with some genial chatter.  I was having  a really jolly time chatting with these fellows (Jeff, Craig, and Rob), when Craig asked me if I lived in Saratoga and was I the mom of two of my boys.  Well, small world!  These guys know my guys and all about their music and other stuff.  In fact, Craig lives right around the corner from me and had seen me coming and going all summer with my Hornbeck strapped to me car. Even further, his girlfriend Kirsten is a publicist for my son Peter's band, The Figgs.  Amazing!

Speaking of my kids, why not put their photos here on my blog?  I sure am proud of this sweet bunch of boys, shown here at their sister Jane's house this Christmas.  Philip is on the left, then Stephen in the middle, and Peter on the right.
 

And here's their sweet sister, my darling daughter Jane, who hosted our entire family, along with all of her own and her husband's family, for a fabulous Christmas feast.

I am one lucky mom!

Revisiting the Winter River

On Friday, I waited and waited until the weak winter sun could coax the temperature to 4 above zero before suiting up to return to the snowy riverbank I first photographed for this blog five years ago.  And  look!  Except for maybe the trees being a little taller, nothing at all has changed!  How lucky I am to live in a region where landscapes as lovely as this are protected forever.  Or at least, for as long as I'm likely to live.  And how lucky I am, too, that I still have the health and strength and forbearance for cold that allow me to tromp about in the winter woods and enjoy its beauties.

The animals who live in this forest were still huddled snug in their dens, so I did not see a single track in the snow to indicate they'd been out and about.  The river,  though, had left plenty of evidence of its rising and falling, freezing and thawing,  by the sinuous lines that were etched on the ice near the shore.

Always, always, there's always something of beauty just waiting to be discovered along these shores.  The Highbush Blueberry buds were glowing a Christmassy red beneath a mantle of snow.
 

But the Winterberries sure took the prize for the richest red.