Winter won’t vanish overnight

Monday, February 4 was 58 sunny degrees atop Blue Hill from 2 to 3 PM after about ten days of subfreezing weather. After lunch the warmth drew me out of the house. I thought I would photo some ice.

Here’s some blue afternoon puddles and cattails on the Blue Hills Reservoir on Chickatawbut Road in Quincy at the head of the Pine Tree Brook watershed. Oftentimes puddles atop ice will be rain but not today–I believe they’re meltwater. The ice itself looked thick enough to walk on.

These are gray birch saplings at the edge of a vernal pool along the Skyline Trail just upslope to the south . Here the pool’s floor is dry but roofed by ice. I’m guessing that the water that was underneath the ice ran off or soaked into the ground before it could freeze.

Here the ice is thicker and cracked into jigsaw pieces. It’s in shade and softening a little but it held my weight.

Here are several brittle layers stacked in the sun next to a lichen-covered rock.

I’m not even going to try to explain what happened here:

The ice would be clearer if it weren’t speckled with tiny bubbles:

Here’s some green stuff–a wiry tufted grass–left over from last fall. But February is traditionally our snowiest month. We may yet get enough to close school a day or two.

Tom Palmer
Willett Pond Manager
February 2019