Discovering ice

“Many years later, as he faced the firing squad, Colonel Aureliano Buendía was to remember that distant afternoon when his father took him to discover ice.”

First sentence of One Hundred Years of Solitude, by Gabriel Garcia Marquez

We went on a walk yesterday. The weather had improved a bit, it wasn’t so cold and windy. I like walking on a Sunday in a special place, and I like having a coffee and snack afterwards. So Acadia and Bar Harbor it was. I picked out a carriage road loop that wasn’t too long. My body was not entirely happy on the first half of the walk, but by the end, I felt marvelously better. Warm and comfortable and enjoying the air.

At the top of the loop, the landscape changed. There was a lot more ice along the sides of the trail. The first sign of ice was this frozen waterfall, viewed from a small stone bridge. I like the way that white tree curves around the top of it.

As the trail moved into the downhill phase of the walk, we could see mound after icy mound on our left coming out of the hills. Amazing that all that water just flowed out of the landscape and froze.

I was very impressed with faint colors in the ice. Here is some blue. My camera rendered it fainter than it actually was, but even in the photo it looks blue.

And a greenish yellow one, with a little tree growing nearby.

We found an ice cave that Sam could get into. I kept thinking about a book that I started but couldn’t finish: The Ice Palace, by Tarjei Vesaas (Norwegian). It became too frightening for me when the girl entered the ice palace. Maybe I’ll try the book again sometime. I have a couple of books on my shelf that became too frightening to finish.

Here’s a map of our route. We stuck to the carriage trails, where the three bridges are shown. Some intrepid hikers had ventured on the trails to the peaks, but we were not looking for that kind of challenge. We were happy to walk on the well-groomed carriage trails. And I feel unexpectedly blessed by the beauty of the ice formations.