We had some freezing rain yesterday[1], so today (March 6, 2022) I decided to go out on my snowshoes[2] and see how the various trees were taking it. I think this first bush is a honeysuckle, and it seems to be tolerating it fairly well even though it is uniformly coated with about a quarter of an inch of ice.

The alders were similar, not really drooping very much in spite of the ice encasing their branches and catkin/cone buds

The red dogwood branches were leaning over quite a bit, but then the dogwood gets pretty much mashed down by the snow every year anyway.

The birch, on the other hand, was kind of droopy. The branches usually stick up a lot straighter than this.

It was the pines that were taking it hard. Their branches were sagging down pretty significantly, making the trees look sad and tired.

The reason the pines were taking it so hard was because they have long needles that accumulated a lot of ice, much more than the deciduous trees did.

The spruce handled it better, only sagging a little bit.

This was because the spruce needles are a lot shorter than pine needles, so they didn’t have anywhere near the area to accumulate ice and snow.

This is a good example of the tradeoffs between being a deciduous tree versus an evergreen tree. On the one hand, the evergreens are all ready to start photosynthesizing the moment it gets warm enough, but they suffer a lot from damage due to the snow and ice load that accumulates on their branches. The deciduous trees have to re-grow their leaves in a hurry in the spring and can miss several weeks of photosynthesizing time as a result, but on the other hand the branches are much less inclined to be damaged by snow and ice. So the deciduous trees often grow a bit slower than the evergreens, but the are also a lot less damaged by the winter when spring finally rolls around.

When the sun comes out, the ice glistens nicely, like in this shot I got the day after the rain when we got a brief bit of break in the clouds just before sunset. The picture actually doesn’t do it justice, to the naked eye it looked like the trees were covered with golden fire.

It also sometimes was pretty spectacular when the sun broke through from time to time during the day. If one stood at the right angle, the ice would act like a prism and make it look like the trees were covered with multicolored lights. Unfortunately, this turned out to be something you had to be there to see. In photographs, the multicolored effect was lost almost completely.

---

[1] It was pretty slippery yesterday. Here’s a video of Sandy slowly sliding down the sloped road that runs past our house. When Sam appears at the end, she was planting her stick in the ice to keep from following Sandy down the hill.

[2] There is pretty much no way we are going out in the woods behind the house without either snowshoes or cross-country skis. Here is an example of just how deep the snow is. This first picture is my 6-foot long walking stick leaning against a tree:

And here’s the same tree, with the walking stick pushed down into the snow until it hit solid ground:

So the snow is just about 3 feet deep. This isn’t due to drifting, that’s how deep the snow is everywhere right now. Without snowshoes I would be wading through snow up to my hips, and would be lucky to get fifty yards before collapsing from exhaustion. But with snowshoes, I only sink in a couple of inches, which more than makes up for the weight and awkwardness of the snowshoes.

These are Michigan-pattern Iverson snowshoes that I bought way back around 1984 or 1985 from the local hardware store. I’ve had to glue up cracked frames several times, replaced the bindings once, and partially replaced the original neoprene lacing with varnished nylon, but overall they’ve given pretty good service. I can probably get a few more decades out of them.

Wood-frame laced snowshoes are generally considered obsolete these days, to the point that Iverson’s appear to have decided to go all-in on appealing to die-hard traditionalists. They don’t appear to offer neoprene or nylon lacing anymore, and instead have gone back to varnished rawhide.

Modern Snowshoes tend to be aluminum-framed with a polymer-sheet “deck” instead of lacing. They also tend to be smaller, because most people these days go snowshoeing on relatively shallow and firm snow, or in groups, and so are walking on mostly dense snow and packed trails. You don’t need much snowshoe to keep from sinking in partially packed snow, and so a less unwieldy snowshoe is nice. But, I like the ones I have because I am almost always either out by myself, or breaking the trail for the kids. And, our snow is, as noted above, very deep and quite fluffy. These big traditional snowshoes have a lot of flotation, and so keep me up on top of the snow better than smaller modern snowshoes would. Also, the “tails” help keep the snowshoes tracking in a straight line, making me less likely to trip over them. The “Michigan” pattern was originally developed specifically for walking through deep snow while maneuvering around trees in the woods, and so they suit my needs very well.

I do highly recommend a walking stick of some sort when out with snowshoes in deep snow. It’s not only good for probing the snow in front of you, they also give support for standing back up when you inevitably trip over something and fall over. The stick is also really good for climbing hills, I can stick it into the snow and hang onto it to keep from sliding back down. When I’m feeling pretentious I refer to my stick as an “alpenstock”, but really it’s just a 6-foot hardwood mop handle that I put a metal tip on so it would dig into the ice.