Munson Creek Ice

Just foolin’ around at Munson creek on a cold winter day.

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Stream ice

Each winter “ice art” forms along the edges of forest streams as these did along Munson Creek on January 1.

The icicles of Buffalo Bill Canyon

Although this may look something like a series of fountains, it is really a display of naturally formed ice on the side of a cliff about three hundred feet above the bottom of a small canyon. They are formed by water from small seeps through the rock, aided to some extent by snow-melt, which drip and trickle down, freezing over months of cold nights into icicles. I would estimate that the taller ones are six to ten feet tall.

Ice garden

Today I visited the area of beaver activity about which I posted a few days ago to see how the severe cold that has settled in has changed the ice. What I found was a complete surprise!

The water in the vicinity of the beaver’s activities has frozen into ice so thick that I was able to jump on it: that I expected. What I didn’t expect was what has appeared on the surface.

This photo shows where the little stream enters the river. Notice the lumpy appearance of the ice in the foreground. There is 2 to 5 feet of water beneath that ice.

This photo provides a little closer look at those lumps which at first glance look a little like big spiders, at second glance, like white ferns growing there.

The rest of the photos are close-ups of individual lumps, which are two to four inches across and at most a half inch in height. When I touched several very gently with my fingertip, they disintegrated completely into “ice dust”, resembling fine snowflakes. I could feel no resistance to my touch and there was no organic material inside them, just very, very fine ice crystals.

Water & ice

When the world was young and I was a child of perhaps seven or eight, someone gave me a small simple camera and a roll of film. “That crazy kid used all of it taking pictures of an icy stream!” Well, after all those years, not all that much has changed.