Bending bending bending
                The fir branches are bending
                They are waiting for more snow




The famous Japanese poet Basho wrote a poem like the above, except it was about bamboo bending under the snow load.

I was reminded of Basho's poem yesterday, as we just had our first snowfall of the season. Here in Redmond, about 2 inches, just enough to bend some of the fir branches.

And not only the branches were bending.

I took the opportunity to check out the pond. It had an ice covering before the snow, but with the snow and warming trend, the ice had thinned, and gotten pressed down under the snow load. The glaze over the pond was bending. Where a hole appeared in the ice, water got pushed up and out, flowing in dark channels over the icy glaze, forming a spider-like or branch-like pattern in the now slushy snow. I climbed up a tree on the shore and took a few shots.
The dark branches are longer towards the center of the pond, making the patterns point away from the shore. This is because the water flows more readily downhill, and the center of the pond is slightly downhill. The ice has anchored itself to the shore, but the snow load pushes down, depressing the center of the pond a little more than the edge.


More discussion of this is in my previous post of Jan. 15, 2012: http://www.storyofsnow.com/blog1.php/2012/01/19/slush-fingering-and-other-pond-patterns#more139

But our poor tree branches might have to wait awhile for more snow though -- the snow is already melted away and the trend is for more warm, wet weather. The pond is clear of ice and slush.

-- JN (02/10/2014)