N 42°57’7.65″ W 77°35’29.76″ Google Earth location
I think everyone in the northern hemisphere is feeling the heat these days, so we needed a cold one, thus this jumps ahead in the lineup. And I’m a day early for the scheduled abstract, but we’ll cope.
This is Honeoye Falls on Honeoye Creek in the town of (wait for it) Honeoye Falls, NY, back when I had relatives living there – this was in 1993. I had moved down to NC three years earlier, but returned for the holiday season, the only time that I ventured back to NY during the winter – I had left the state, in part, because of the winters. My arrival coincided with a decent cold snap, and the small falls that provided the name had frozen, not exactly over, but thick enough that it made an interesting sight, and the only time (so far) that I’ve seen a frozen waterfall or cascade. Most of the ones I know, first of all, are in mid-latitudes and so don’t see long or serious cold snaps very often, but they’re also not within easy access, usually requiring a hike on mountain trails or a long drive through the mountains, and these are not things to tackle when the weather is icy; in most cases, access would be denied by the Parks Department anyway. These little falls, however, were within easy reach, and this was taken from a railing overlooking the creek.
I was staying not too far from Cayuga Lake where I grew up, and I recall that I visited that lake on the first day there, finding it clear except for some light ice around the edges. Returning a few days later (after my side trip to Honeoye Falls and thus this photo,) I found the lake frozen over solid, something that I’d rarely witnessed, and so thick that a large rock hurled onto the surface only produced a star pattern, like a cracked windshield, in the ice. Impressive, and it spoke to the drastic temperature drop. According to my brother, who still lives in the general area, now the winters have become so warm that people are selling off their snowmobiles, having too little snow accumulation to use them.
And now, a little confession. Sometime afterward, the negatives for this photo went missing, and all I had were the original 4×6 prints. Wanting to keep them (this was long before I was building my photo stock,) I ended up placing the prints on a flat surface in the sunlight and reshooting them, so this is a scan of that negative, and actually looked like this:
As you can see, I wasn’t quite dead-on perpendicular and the color register was off, though possibly from the scan of that negative or perhaps even from the original print, but both had to be corrected for this post. It was more an exercise than anything, because I’m not that motivated to retain this in stock anymore, but hey, we needed an icy photo, didn’t we? Okay then.