Simple Minds gives me the musical reference for this post title.  I was out on the Heart River last Friday for a while after verifying that the ice disc I photographed earlier was still frozen solid.  I had a photography pal with me, and we decided to work the river for a little bit.

I found a couple of pretty neat ice chunks protruding from the river, and the lighting conditions were changing every few minutes or so. The coolest thing about the ice was the lines where it had melted and frozen. The photo above kinda shows some thick “veins” running down the slab.

In the shade, and with a little off-camera flash, you can see a couple of sets of striation lines in this ice.  Some run vertically, probably from melting, and others run horizontally, most likely as the slab froze thicker and thicker. But something else about this feature caught my eye.

My boys think this looks like some sort of sci-fi sword. Maybe it looks like a shark fin to some. I was just glad to find some sort of neat looking protrusion that wasn’t discolored by river sand. I decided to play some angles and experiment with off-camera flash while the lighting did various things.

Looks like a sculpture, doesn’t it?  Maybe a golf trophy or something.

The brilliant blue sky turned to gray and even a little purple at times (we dudes don’t know terms like “lavender” or “periwinkle”.  With that, the reflectivity of the ice changed (along with the color of the slab).

Here you can see the lines of the slab. It looks like a chandelier – a five hundred pound one, at that.  I tried time and time again to do them justice, but I simply could not.

I feel like I won a Longest Drive contest or something!

And then the blue skies came back.  We sauntered up river a little ways to start pointing the cameras at some gnarly trees or something, and it’s a good thing we did. The standing water atop the ice was encroaching upon our position, meaning that things were starting to melt.  I’m not one to take a lot of chances on river ice. Even though the slab we were on was incredibly thick, I wasn’t about to let my guard down.

Soon there won’t be any river ice to photograph. I have to say I’ll miss it a little now that I’m getting more camera time again, but then again…not so much.  It’ll be back before we know it.