First Frost

In the Creston valley, winter weather arrived about a month ago; first dilly-dallying and foreshadowed with the icing-sugar dust of snow high on the Skimmerhorns looming over, then promptly and firmly with overnight freezes and heaps of snow piling down in an hour. The snow and cold come and go now at their own leisure.

Our first hard frost came in early October. With it came a biting chill in the shade of the mountains and tiny crystals lining the edges of plants and grass. In that blue light of morning, the world took on a silvery sheen melted away by my footprints where I stood. Some of the frost had already begun to dissolve into bright droplets.

The beauty of the first frost is bittersweet. It brings the initial teeth of winter, if only for a moment, felt in the crackly frozen puddles and leftover nip in the air. I shivered in that mountainy shade with my breath fogging out before me. Winter is an enchanting season, but it can be a difficult one to adjust to. We’ve lost our rituals of storing up food and fat and fuel, of burrowing in our dens a little deeper. The snow is just a nuisance now (unless you’re lucky enough to be too young to wield a shovel). The frost arriving was a bit jarring like a quick pinch – albeit a picturesque pinch, if there ever was such a thing. Winter is coming! You can’t avoid it.

Here is what I discovered in the frosted world at my feet. Take a look for yourself and be sure to set some time aside to study the patterns and delicate crystals, formed by tiny cold hands coaxing water into art.

As a bonus, here are some photos of needle ice. This strange kind of ice forms when earth is above freezing but the air isn’t; groundwater is lifted to the surface of the soil and freezes in a needle-like structure. I find it fascinating. In the photos below it resembles a castle, or a forest, or frozen plants.