Thursday, March 3

With just about zero advance planning, Ed and I returned to Lake Haiyaha, where we had just visited less than two weeks ago. We arrived at the Bear Lake parking lot with no destination in mind, but with the warm temperature and (seemingly) calm winds, we decided it might actually be pleasant enough at Haiyaha that we wouldn’t freeze our fingers off if we tried to take pictures of the ice.

Our prediction was spot-on. I never took my gloves out of the pack. We spent about an hour at the lake, wandering around inspecting the endlessly fascinating ice, eating our picnic lunches, and occasionally chatting with other visitors to the lake. I even ran the GoPro, thinking the thin veil of high clouds would be both interesting and calming. Sadly, the camera fell on its back after about seven minutes, shooting straight up until the battery was exhausted. No timelapse video again this hike. So it goes.

I am left, then, trying to show what the ice looks like. I probably should just put these in a slide show and be done with it, but instead, I’ll blather on and on about each shot.

Here we see Ed working on getting some photographic evidence. Huddled around these rocks poking through the ice, we could occasionally hear a soft crack. The ice is constantly, slowly, dropping. It’s a mosaic of many pieces, large and not-so-large, and if you listen carefully (and the wind is calm, as it is today), you can hear it settle.

Where the rocks punch through the ice (which drops something like eight or ten or fifteen feet over the course of the winter, due to the lake having a leak) we can see the ice from the side. It’s a pale blue over most of the lake and filled with columns of tiny air bubbles.

Next to one of the larger boulders where the wind swirls madly, the ice is almost perfectly clear and has very few of the little bubbles we see in the light blue ice covering the rest of the lake. It’s sometimes difficult to figure out its shape, as it features no flat surfaces and lenses the light unpredictably. Most interesting here, I think, is where it at first looks like there’s some snow on top of the ice, with gaps in the snow like the holes in swiss cheese. But it’s not really snow, and it’s not on top of the ice, but a layer in the ice. Where the layer below this seeming snow is absent, I ran my finger along the under surface. Where it looks like snow, these are voids with the bottom of the ice, coated by tiny crystals that look like snow. Note the crack in the upper layer, curving from the lower left of the frame through the center.

I was unable to get a decent photo of the ripples on the absolutely clear ice, so I found a rippled area on the blue ice. I can’t help but wonder just how the ice gets to be this way. The water doesn’t flow here, and it certainly doesn’t freeze quickly enough to freeze any water waves. I can only conclude that these ripples are carved by the wind, blasted and polished by snow and small ice crystals.

Here I’m looking straight down into the ice. It’s probably a foot thick here. Again, there’s no snow here. The hole extends deeper than I can reach with my finger. Wherever it looks like snow in the ice it’s actually a void, with small crystals coating the bottom of the ice (or the top of the void, whichever way you want to look at it.)

I’m a big fan of variety. There is a wide variety of beautiful sights to take in in the Park. So my tendency is to want to visit places I haven’t been to before, or to revisit places I haven’t been to for quite some time. But Lake Haiyaha in winter always seems to provide me with something new to take in. Who knows? Maybe I’ll make another trip here before summer.