Tanana Ice Shard Forest 2025-04-25 (publ. 2025-04-28)

Location: Tanana River dike trails

Date: 2025-04-25

The first half of my lunch break walk, up until about 12:30pm, was partly clouded and a little chilly, but then most of the sky cleared up, and the sun beat down warm and bright. Perhaps the most interesting feature was a "shard forest" I discovered along the bank of the Tanana River. Along a large swath of the bank, and maybe 10 or so feet out from it, the ice had partially melted. Remaining from the melt was many, many shards or spikes of ice, each about three to six inches long, that stuck up either from the water, or from a thin layer of snow on the water. The shards were criss-crossing each other, and in places they interconnected in flake-like or tree-like patterns. The shards were generally bent over such that the whole thing formed a mat or forest about three or four inches above the water. I realized my timing was fortunate, because the heat from the sun was causing the mat to rapidly disintegrate, so that every two or three seconds I could hear and see a clump of them collapse with a crashing noise.

Another picturesque observation, along the trail, was a paper birch tree growing about five feet away from a balsam popular (cottonwood) tree, with the birch on the left and the balsam popular on the right. Both were similar in size, having grown to about 20 ft tall. Of course, there are a lot of these trees growing together around here, but there was something striking about the contrast between the thin branches of the birch, and its colorful, paper bark, set alongside the bold, knobby branches of the balsam popular, with its white and grey bark.

I observed an alder tree also. The old bark was light grey, but the recent branch and twig growth was a red-brown.