Funny, I never seem to get to the Dells of the Eau Claire in spring or summer.
This time I had company. My neighbor and her granddaughter. Neither had been to the park before and they were both excited to see it and were surprisingly intrepid on the ice. As you can see from the lower right corner, the ice had already built up to a decent thickness in a lot of the slower parts of the river. The brightly colored person in this shot is a stranger, the one higher up on the rocks is the granddaughter. I wish she’d been brightly colored, too, but you take what you can get.
The sky was fairly overcast and we had sprinklings of snow now and then. Overall it was pretty magical.
I meandered down this side of the river for a while and E (I’ll call the granddaughter that) and I got to explore some cool rocks. There are even more dramatic formations in the woods, but I’ll have to figure out a way to photograph them. For now there’s this one that is right on the trail. I couldn’t back up without going in the river.
Eventually we crossed the bridge and got into the rocks and ice on the other bank. I looked for compositions I’ve never been able to get before and this was one –
Here’s a shot from 2018 that I’m using just to show you where I was when I took the shots that come after this one.
The ice was thick between the rocks on the foreground and the ones on the right. So I walked over and got some shots on the lower tier and then at the highest point (upper right). It was very cool.
And a two shot pano –
And a look downriver –
And while I was there I did a few long-exposures. And some black and white conversions.
Maybe I’ll go back during the spring melt. It’s pretty much started already, but a cold snap will add some ice and that could be pretty awesome. Stay tuned!
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