Location Taken: Niagara Falls, New York
Time Taken: December 2009
Niagara Falls during winter looks a bit different than what you see in the photos in that fancy book of waterfalls your Grandmother keeps on the coffee table.
Now, the falls themselves are pretty much the same, a little bit of cold isn’t going to keep that much water from flowing over the escarpment. But the surrounding area, that’s different.
For one thing, there’s only a bare handful of people rattling around this tourist trap of a town. It’s really odd to see all the fancy buildings and restaurants (ok, once-fancy buildings, the town is well past its golden age and all the buildings are dated and getting a little run-down) closed down and inoperative. It feels a little post-apocalyptic, even, like you’re looking at the ruins of a more innocent time.
Still, even in the heart of winter, there’s a few hardy souls visiting the waterfalls.
And they are fantastic falls. Though I’m so used to seeing photos taken from the Canadian side (it’s much more dramatic at that angle) that the whole setup on the American side seems, well, backwards. Like I snuck in the back door and am seeing all the fishing wire holding up the flying boat in a play or something.
And then there’s the snow. There was about an inch of it all around, with footprints showing where people had taken shortcuts off the main paths covering the gentle slope of the viewing park. It colored the world white. Well, at least the parts of it that weren’t brown leafless trees. I’m sure they’re beautiful when they’re not ragged sticks-on-top-of-larger-sticks, but yeah, deciduous trees just don’t show their best face in winter.
And last but certainly not least, there is the ice. It’s not on the river, mind you, that’s moving too fast for ice to form. But that waterfall knocks up a lot of fine spray, and not all of it lands back in the river. The rest of it creates a fine coat of wetness on the surrounding rocks and trees – well, at least it would during the summer. In winter, that thin layer of water freezes solid quite quickly. And then another cloud of vapor settles on top of it, and the ice layer grows. Grass gains a white coating, or if it gets enough, turns into those odd shapes you see at the bottom of the photo. That’s from about an inch of ice covering, and it’s long since merged together.
But still, the falling water still falls.
