“I got all my boyhood in vanilla winter waves around the kitchen stove.”
~ Jack Kerouac
~1922 ~ 1969
Winter’s icy beauty infuses Wehr’s Dam with a frozen splendor that makes the waters of the Jordan Creek look like vanilla ice on a late January day.
The dam, built in 1904, is next to Wehr’s Covered Bridge, which dates back to 1841, at Covered Bridge Park, Orefield, Pennsylvania.
“Music comes from an icicle as it melts, to live again as spring water.”
~ Henry Williamson
~ 1895-1977
~ English army officer, naturalist, farmer & ruralist writer
Cascading waters are frozen in harmony with early winter beauty on a late December afternoon when I captured this rich tone monochrome shot as temperatures rose to near 50 degrees along the Delaware & Lehigh National Heritage Corridor (D&L Trail).
I captured this shot this after setting out from the Cementon Trailhead of the D&L Trail in Cementon, Pennsylvania, part of the Asher F. Boyer Eagle Trail section of the D&L.
Running from Wilkes-Barre to Bristol, the D&L Trail passes through the Lehigh and Delaware Rivers and their canals in Pennsylvania.
“How many lessons of faith and beauty should we lose, if there were no winter in our year!”
~ Thomas Wentworth Higginson
~ 1823-1911
~from “April Days”
~ 1861
A vehicle crosses the icy waters at the Ford of the Jordan Creek, one of my very favorite places to be and to photograph, at Trexler Nature Preserve, Schnecksville, Pennsylvania.
I shot this frosty scene as the light of the looming sunset waltzes on the icy waters soon after the historic January Blizzard of 2016. In a winter shorn of snow until the blizzard, the storm plonked 31 inches of snow on nearby Allentown in a 24 hour period.
For more than 50 years visitors have enjoyed driving through the Jordan Creek. Kids and kids at heart cite “Crossing the Water” as one of their fondest memories.
