The Frozen Edition

This would be a great time to insert a video of our skeleton crew belting out a robust version of Let it Go. Lucky for you loyal readers, the crew has been under the weather and that singing voice  now resembles an elderly camel's snore, after a long walk across the desert. So keep your earplugs in the drawer - we promise never to auto-run karaoke videos on this blog!

Both evergreen and non-evergreen plants have the remarkable ability to withstand winter's lower temperatures. I won't go into the details here, but suffice to say in late fall plants begin to alter their solutes (mostly sucrose) and proteins to prevent the liquids within their cells from freezing. They can also alter their cell membrane lipids to better tolerate the cold. As we know from observation, in some winters damaged plants or extreme cold can bring on crystallization, thus killing the plant. But overall, the "antifreeze" strategy has evolved to be successful.

Meanwhile, we did manage to get out and about during that first week of January when our region got a shot of frozen precipitation to bring in the new year. We don't get it every year and it's rarely more than a few inches, for which I am truly thankful. But for us blogger-photographers, it's a nice twist at the least or a man vs. nature challenge at the most.

It is an El Niño year here again, so we expected above average precipitation, and that we got in December and January, but it was all liquid. But in early January conditions were right for some frozen stuff: we got an inch or two of snow late on Jan. 2nd. The next day was mostly below freezing and then on the early morning of Jan. 4th we got a dandy mix of snow, sleet, and freezing rain as warmer air arrived from the west. We did not venture far on this day as the roads were quite slick. But the late morning brought some clearing while the ice was still around, making for some good photo ops.

A few days later on January 8 temps were well above freezing here, but still very cold out in the Columbia Gorge, which makes a nice recipe for frozen waterfalls. So the skeleton crew packed up our cameras and survival gear and rolled out. Thankfully we didn't need the survival gear since the Espresso cart was open at Multnomah Falls, but we did load up a memory card with icy images.

The "Frozen" slideshow below should load up in less than 30 seconds. Let us know if you have any trouble viewing it.

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