Cabin Journal: Cycles of Ice and Life

Last November I started my search for one of the more ephemeral forms of nature: ice. Even though the autumn had been warm, ice was already forming on the St. Vrain River. I found it first on the pond below Copeland Falls, where it resembled a thick layer of slush, with a greenish tinge (right).

All winter long I walked along the creek, which gleams in this dark forest of pines, as the cycle of melting and freezing produced ice sculptures and formations that changed from week to week. When I returned to the falls in December, the pond was clear and frozen, and the falls themselves were a spectacle of frozen icicles and rounded ice clusters.

There’s something reassuring about this cycle. The whole world might be in chaos, but the river keeps flowing, insistently finding its way lower, moving downward. As the water continuously freezes and forms a new dam or impediment, the river finds a new channel, skirting the main one, going to the side or deep underneath. I can hear its beat, its thrumming under the ice: sometimes hollow sounding, sometimes like glass bells.

In the first few months of winter (which starts here in November), there was a lot of back and forth on the river: melting and then freezing and then melting, so every week there were new formations, something new to delight. There’s no end to the ingenuity of the creek. Between different weather conditions, gradients in the creek, boulders and rocks that block the way and divert the waters, the variety of ice formations is limitless.

In fact, I found hundreds of terms for how ice forms in lakes, rivers and the ocean. In addition to border ice, which is formed along the shore, there’s candled ice, which looks like thin vertical crystals shaped like candles; and frazil, which are fine, small, needle-like structures or thin, flat, circular plates of ice suspended in water.

I couldn’t find the name for one of my favorites: the rounded ice goblets formed as the ice first melts in the sunlight and starts to drip into the creek and then freezes—all the while these crystal orbs getting bigger and more complex.

Before climate change, many towns celebrated winter with ice sculpture contests. But no human sculptor could create the intricate pattern of lines in the pond or the ice that forms along the edges of the creek. Water is the best sculptor because it’s malleable and able to yield to changing conditions—from sunlight to darkness, from cold to warmth.

About a month ago, the creek went silent after more than two feet of snow smothered the whole landscape. I was happy we finally got a good snowfall in an otherwise dry winter, but I missed seeing the creek. Then last week, I was surprised to see clear dark pools among the piles of snow as thawing temperatures opened the creek again, with the river making hopeful, gurgling noises, as if life was stirring again. No matter what happens—a year of isolation and too many unnecessary deaths, destructive wildfires last fall, and horrific shootings across the country, including here in Boulder—the cycle of life keeps going.