Goodbye, winter gods
Your last chance to stand before a gigantic frozen waterfall
For centuries, human beings have attributed the ferocity of winter to deities. Slavic Pagans dreamed up Morana, a goddess who epitomized the death and rebirth of the winter cycle. In Ancient Greece, a consortium of winter spirits known as the Anemoi were said to cast snowstorms and freezing winds at the huddling masses. But New England—a land colonized by pious nut jobs in the 17th Century—is strangely devoid of winter deities. Other than vague allusions to Old Man Winter, who might as well be that dude who walks your street in boots and a bathrobe during mid-January with a pipe dangling from his lips (every neighborhood has one,) we have no winter gods.
But we do have a more terrestrial substitute—frozen waterfalls.
By New Year’s Day, most of New England’s spattering and thunderous cascades have solidified into bumpy beds of ice. Or rivulets of ice draped around granite humps. The most spectacular frozen waterfalls, however, are the ones with enough water volume to freeze into a gargantuan block. When you’re standing at the base of these frozen falls, not only do you feel like you’re in the presence of a giant, but if you perk up your ears and listen carefully, you’ll hear the rush of water beneath the frozen exterior of this ice behemoth—as though you’re listening to Godzilla breathing softly as he sleeps.
We’re now entering the latter half of an unusually temperate March, which means our watery winter gods are about to wake up and thaw in spectacular, rip-roaring fashion. Consider these next few weeks your last chance to see New England’s most powerful cascades in all their frozen glory, before the base of your average waterfall becomes a churning porridge of snowmelt, uprooted trees, and loosened rocks that you wouldn’t dare wade into. In the interest of getting you out the door ASAP and on your way to a frozen cascade, I’ve decide to make this newsletter issue multi-regional, calling out some of the most arresting frozen waterfalls in New England. But before we segue to the full list, I’d like to take a couple minutes to spotlight a crown jewel cascade, which some of you might have experienced during New England’s balmier hiking seasons…