Herkimer & Perkins: Building Backyard Boats in Buffalo, NY

Winter Dreams Archive:

10 April 04

Boomtown on ice

10 April 04: The Reverend and I, hoping to finally say good-bye to winter and its imitators, when down to Niawanda Park in Tonawanda, on the Niagara River.

The crews had removed the ice boom from Lake Erie just above the Peace Bridge the other day. The ice was defining the channel in the river.

It was pretty, and only a little bit cold, unlike last year, when the wind and general chill made the ice-out a tinkling delight for the ear as well as the eye.

Read the original tone-setting post to this log
Archive of Winter Dreams log entries

For reasons that I don't understand, the ice breaks up in predictable shapes, often oval.
Ice and its shadow.
Water inside the ice reflects the colors of the sky.
The milky stuff is the underwater portion of this chunk of ice.
The ice flows at a few miles per hour, defining the channel nicely. At Niawanda Park, the ice was in about half of the river. We went on down to Goat Island, just above the falls, but only saw one chunk of ice, and that was well above the falls.