A thousand icicles

On Friday I went back to the Carron Valley Reservoir again with a friend, this time on skis. As we wanted an easy day, we kept to the track that runs along just above the reservoir for much of the way, but with a few small hills to add a bit of interest to the skiing.

Sheltered corners of the reservoir were completely frozen, but there was enough movement in the water further out to break the ice and the middle of the reservoir was entirely free of ice. In the picture below, taken where the ice was breaking up, you can just see the open water beyond the ice.

After a couple of miles we decided to stop for lunch beside the reservoir. It was only then that we noticed what wind and water had done to the trees along the shoreline. The base of each one was completely covered in icicles of every possible description.

In the picture above, the pile of snow along the shoreline is in fact washed-up pieces of ice from the surface of the reservoir, covered in a thin layer of snow.

Some of the icicles were hardly thicker than pencils and pointing upwards instead of down. Others were curiously bent (some of these having formed around thin twigs which hardly show in the pictures). All the pictures below are the right way up.

Even each blade of grass was completely encased with ice.

On a different note, today, Easter Day, we stayed at home to watch the service broadcast from Paisley Abbey on BBC Scotland this morning. What a treat! ...and I'm not just saying that because I do the website for the director of music there. If you can access iplayer, it's available for the next week at www.bbc.co.uk/programmes/b01rp2sq and I strongly recommend it.

More ice

Last Wednesday was a cold bright day. The night before, we had passed a frozen waterfall high up on the Campsie Fells on our way home from an unsuccessful attempt to try and view Comet Pan-STARRS, so we decided to head out in that direction.

We were not disappointed, though the waterfall was in the shade, which is probably why the icicles had remained.

On our way home, later in the day, we were lucky to catch the few minutes when they were sunlit.

Our destination, however, was the Carron Valley Reservoir, where we went for a walk.

Here we found some amazing ice formations, including these ice stalagmites.

Several streams were encrusted with ice crystals. I thought these looked like the skeleton of a reptile.

Cracked ice on a puddle

At the edge of the reservoir, where the ice was moving and clinking in the wind, it appeared as if ice pans were beginning to form.

Curious short icicles in a stream

After the snow 2

Now that we are suddenly having warm, sunny days that seem like summer, it is hard to remember that only 10 days ago I was cross-country skiing on the hills just half an hour's drive from our house.

When I wrote the previous entry entitled "After the snow," I didn't imagine that we would have so much more cold weather with plenty more snow although we mostly had to travel short distances to get to it. I spent so many days cross-country skiing that other things, such as keeping up this blog, got left behind.

Towards the end of February I visited Loch Lomond twice. Large parts of it were frozen, and this picture was taken on 21st February at Balmaha on the east shore.

Two days later, after a day's hill walking, we stopped off at Loch Lomond Shores at the south end of the loch. Here, too, the loch was largely frozen, though there was little snow on Ben Lomond in the background.

The Fintry Loup is a large waterfall in the River Endrick, and I visited it when it was still partly frozen. The amount of water coming down was considerably less than usual, not only because of the ice, but also because we had so little rainfall.

On 24th February more snow fell, and two days later we went skiing at the Queen's View by the road to Drymen. Unfortunately, further up the hill the snow was not only very deep but a hard crust had formed on it which we continually broke through, making skiing very difficult and tiring.

Better conditions followed and we had several magnificent days of skiing in the Carron Valley Forest. The hill in the distance is Meikle Bin.

The Carron Valley Reservoir, like almost every other area of water, was completely frozen.

In some places it was hard to tell where the land ended and the water began.

Although it appears that the ice is melting in the picture below, it was only surface water, and when we visited again a few days later the surface was once again solid ice.

The continuing cold weather produced many more ice spikes in our garden, especially after I discovered that using de-ionised water greatly increased the likelihood of spikes developing. This double spike appeared on 31st January.

Another strange phenomenon, which I began to see with increasing frequency on lochs and reservoirs which had been frozen for some time, was large stars forming in the surface of the ice.

There is an article about this in the Physical Review, published by the American Physical Society.

While the cold weather lasted, we continued to be visited by large flocks of redpolls. The largest count I made was 84 on 5th February. The numbers dropped off as the weather became milder, though a pair of redpolls was still present last week.

Now, by contrast, we have warm, sunny weather. There are new flower species coming out every day, and they are catching up fast.