No precipitation needed

 

I was happy enough to have gotten frostweed ice pictures in Great Hills Park on December 18th and again just five days later. On the morning of the 25th the idea suddenly came to me that I should go hunting for icicles, even though we’d had neither rain nor snow nor sleet. So back I went to my neighborhood park, where I found that my intuition had known what it was talking about.

 

 

The sustained freeze of more than a day, followed by a couple of rounds of light thawing and more freezing, had festooned the cliffs along a section of the park’s main creek with icicles. The water that made them must have seeped through the rocky face of the cliffs, there to get frozen in the unusual cold.

 

  

In the top picture, the branches are from a dead Ashe juniper tree, Juniperus ashei. Notice the fungi on the leaning trunk. The chiaroscuro close-up in the middle is me being artsy. The bottom photograph shows an area where the cliff is approximately vertical; as a result, many of the icicles that formed there were only semi-detached from the rock surface.

 

© 2022 Steven Schwartzman