Up to the Ice Castles

All summer and fall, access to the mountainsides overlooking the Hudson along Spier Falls Road has been forbidden, due to work installing new powerlines up there.  But finally, the work seems to have halted for the winter, so I felt free to ignore the No Trespassing signs and barrier gates and head on up, without fear that I would be firmly escorted off-site (as I was once, last fall).

Well, as could be expected, the work site was appalling to behold, with the earth bulldozed bare and heaps of tangled brush and tree trunks shoved over the edge of the newly constructed road that terraces across the sloping rock face of the mountain.  Ah well, let a decade or so go by, and new greenery will start to heal over the scarred site.  Maybe too, we'll have a nice new trail for skiing and hiking that will offer great views of the river below.  My destination today, though, was higher up the forested mountainside, to a site that I call the Ice Castles.  I soon found the stream that would lead me up to where huge boulders had long ago tumbled down from cliffs above.

That same little stream cascades over those boulders in beautiful waterfalls, waterfalls that today were frozen into bridal veils of filigree ice.

The higher up the mountain I climbed, the more monumental the waterfalls became, creating tier upon tier of fantastic shapes, like fairytale castles.   I climbed as high as I dared, until the footing became too icy for me to safely proceed.

I found a bare rock and just sat for a while, enjoying the music of water singing and thrumming and splashing beneath the ice.

Where quiet pools had formed by the side of the stream, the water had frozen into other, equally interesting, shapes.

How happy I am to have access to these wonder-filled mountain slopes again!  I hope by next spring the powerline workers will have moved on and we can reclaim our trails to more beautiful sites like this.