I’ve always found water freezing vertically, rather than in it’s usual horizontal plane, to be oddly appealing. Obviously it has to freeze slowly, a trickle of water turning solid as gravity pushes it towards the earth. Individually these drops don’t mount to much but when there are millions of them you create a natural work of art.
Today’s highlighted photos are of two destinations I visited this past year which demonstrated “ice in the vertical”. The photo above was taken late winter in eastern Manitoba’s Whiteshell Provincial Park, a place I fondly remember from my childhood. My family would often go camping, fishing, and gathering wild blueberries and mushrooms here during the summer. The Seven Sisters hydroelectric dam was the first of it’s kind I’d ever visited as a boy of about 5-6 years, and I remember being both in awe and scared of the size of it, the sheer drop on the spillway (which seems small to me today), the the way the dam rumbled underfoot as water poured over the spillway. But in all my travels, I’d never seen a spillway frozen over before. Fascinating to me!
The photos of the mountain below are of beautiful Cascade Mountain in Banff National Park, just outside of the Banff townsite. This particular frozen waterfall is at least several hundred meters high and is very popular with ice climbers, although none were to be seen on the balmy January day when I snapped these photos.
(Click on thumbnails to enlarge, right arrow to advance)
