Evanston: lake gull over Mt. Evanston
Evanston: lake gull over Mt. Evanston
The land here is flat and the streets laid out on a grid. The Chicago metropolitan area may be the biggest, flattest grid on Earth.
As soon as I started walking to Lake Michigan yesterday, I could see atypical spray shooting into the air five blocks away, as though waves were smashing into a cliff.
When I got down to our South Beach, it being the southern most beach in Evanston--the next beach is in Chicago--I found that the narrow strip of sand no longer sloped gradually to the water’s edge, but ended in a six to seven foot high quarter mile long ridge of ice. This has not happened before during our winters here, and must be due to prolonged temperatures just below freezing; warm enough so that the lake water remained liquid, but the spray froze on the colder land.
I climbed to the top for a better view.
On the other side were small ice floats and thousands of ‘bergy bits’. Our own mini-Antarctica beyond Mount Evanston.
Getting down was more difficult than getting up.
Wednesday, February 17, 2010