The Ice Palace
Video Tour 3 – January 27 28 & 29, 2013
Welcome to the Third Installment of The Ice Palace Video Tours
If you prefer to follow the tour in chronological order please click on the links below.
Ice Palace Video Tour 1 – January 8 9 10 & 12, 2013
Ice Palace Video Tour 2 – January 16 17 & 18
Or Click on the Video Below and Dive Right In!
The Ice Palace @martincooney.com
The photographs that comprise this, the third Video in The Ice Palace series, were taken towards the very end of a long dry spell here in the Rocky Mountains. Traditionally we receive heavy snow in the run up to Christmas (from Thanks Giving onward) but once the New Year has come and gone there is generally (much to the ski industries’ acute annoyance) a sort of mini drought – very very cold temperatures but precious little in the way of the white stuff.
Consequently what this video shows is the effect on an Ice Palace that is largely the result of my own handiwork with a hosepipe (quite often in the wee hours of the morning) and the dramatic role played by several large snowfalls, or ‘dumps’.
Once the snow did begin to fall it hardly stopped for weeks, and the icy characters you see above were destined to be buried under tons of newly lain snow. But that is for future videos to reveal. This video captures the precise moment when Mother Nature gently edged me aside and began in earnest to sculpt the Ice Palace “Glory Days”, when I would awake practically each morning to have my breath taken away (partly by the absolute bitter cold air) but mainly because I had never quite seen anything like it in my life.
These spiky characters are largely the result of my own efforts with the hose. But…
Mother Nature was about to change all that.
A heavy blanket of freshly lain snow transformed The Ice Palace overnight.
The Ice Palace “Glory Days” were about to unfold.
In the coming weeks The Assembly, as I came to know them, would hold continuous court on the Ice Palace battlements, changing each day – each moment it seemed – as the warmth of the day sun, the sub-zero temperatures of the night, and some of the hugest dumps of the winter, vied to leave the most lasting impression on the now well established rock solid ice structure.
Believe me, the best is yet to come.