Eagle Creek Ice

I...tried to smash up the freshly formed ice

Eagle Creek Park has always had a special place in my heart. I grew up exploring the woods there with my brother, Nick. We would spend hours upon hours hiking through the trails. In the winter we would go to the park to go sledding and also to look for fresh tracks in the snow. I remember once as a kid I saw a fox run across the frozen lake, and after that I always wanted to go out onto the ice.

This picture was taken on a day that I decided that I wanted to kayak on the reservoir as it was freezing. As I crossed the bridge on my way home, I realized that the lake was rapidly icing over, so I quickly loaded my kayak in the bed of my truck. I drove around the lake and found that it was frozen all the way around. I went down to the water and tried to smash up the freshly formed ice to make a path for the kayak, but it was in vain. Near the shore, the water had already frozen solid throughout as a thick layer of ice.

With my attempt to kayak put at bay, I set off to capture some of the beauty of the freshly iced over lake. This photo is representative of just how quickly the lake froze. New sheets of ice were forming and being pressed against the shore by the wind. This created the beautiful layering effect that is seen in the foreground of the photo.

Beyond the frozen shore, you can see the last holdout of water in the middle of the lake. By this point there was only maybe one hundred acres of the lake that hadn’t been frozen yet. This was quite impressive, as the day before the lake hadn’t even started to freeze, and for the fact that the lake is more than 1,300 acres. The rapid freezing was brought on by the incredibly cold December that we had that year in Indianapolis. A few weeks later, I was running on the frozen lake, because the ice was a few feet thick!