Cold as ice

I am in Thunder Bay visiting family for the holidays.  It is -28C raw temperature here - with the wind chill and humidex and such it would be far chillier than that.  We decided to take a walk along the river today to watch the ice and see what shape it had taken; every year is different.  You really have to wrap up properly under these sorts of conditions and though I managed to keep the rest of me warm the tip of my nose was not pleased about hiking through the woods on such a cold day.

We found an area where the river had a little bay of sorts and the water in the bay was shallow and frozen over.  We walked out onto the ice and managed to get quite near the edge where the fast moving open water began and while perhaps it should have been a nerve wracking experience it didn't work out that way.  My dad has lived rural for nearly his whole life and he knows what is safe and what is not, though admittedly my mom has too and their assessments of risk do not always quite agree.  At any rate he assured us that the ice under us was quite thick enough to be safe so we stood on the ice just 2 meters from the edge of the water gazing at the ice formations all along the river.

At the river's edge, standing on the ice, we found a couple particularly interesting formations - giant slabs of ice that were halfway on the shelf that held us and halfway in the water.  They were 2 by 3 meters and a good 20 cm thick, with one end dipping into the river and the other tilted up in the air, with the whole slab carefully balanced on the edge of the ice.

Of course we couldn't leave those slabs of ice alone!  We tried pushing them into the river and levering them up but neither really worked - instead we ended up accidentally snapping them in half and watching the half that was up in the air come crashing down and break into hundreds of pieces.  I had to grab those pieces and hurl them into the river, using them to try to smash other chunks of ice free to get them to float downstream.  I smashed many chunks of ice to smithereens and freed up some enormous pieces to float down the river.

It was glorious.

I don't know why smashing huge chunks of ice to bits is so satisfying, or why I feel compelled to get the ice moving downriver.  Sometimes I need to dam rivers and sometimes I need to watch them flow and carry all the things away.  Usually the river isn't quite so dangerous as it was today though.

Walking in a winter wonderland indeed.