At the lowest point on our driveway, there is a spring that seeps. During winters, the seep still flows. And as it does, our little driveway glacier grows. The water spreads out over the driveway and freezes into a large sheet of ice.
Some years it hardly stays below freezing enough days in a row for it to grow much. But in other years, it becomes a significant feature of our land and lasts for several weeks.
Right now, it’s an infant glacier. But with the low temperatures we’ll get over the next few days, it’s going to become a little larger.
This spot is shady, so it takes a long time of above freezing weather to completely melt it all. I don’t think it’ll have time to grow too much on this go-around, as the daytime temperatures will be above freezing after Wednesday for at least a week.
Driveway Glacier Love
While it seems like something that could be a hazard, or undesirable, this one usually doesn’t present many issues. I’ve actually come to love this feature of our land.
One year when all the grandkids were over on a cold winter weekend, they all had a blast ‘ice skating’ around on it. No skates needed, lol.
Fortunately, it’s on a flat-ish part of the driveway, so our vehicles cross it just fine. If it were on the hills, then I’d probably feel differently about it, as it would make going up or down hills pretty dangerous.
Contact & About
email: madison@wildozark.com
phone: (479) 409-3429
I’m a naturalist, herbalist, real estate agent & artist. Sometimes, I also write things. I began using local pigments to paint scenes from nature in the Ozarks in 2018. Medicinal herbs have been a passion of mine since the early 1990’s, and I studied with Amelia Plant to earn my Traditional Herbalism certificate.
Would you love to have a place of your own out here in the rural Ozarks? I’m also a real estate agent with Montgomery Whiteley Realty, under my real name Roxann Riedel. I have a separate website for that at WildOzarkLand.com.
For pretty much everything else that I do online, I go by Madison Woods, a pen name I adopted when I first began writing and then later with my art.
You can see all of my art at the home page: www.WildOzark.com, and my online shop is at shop.WildOzark.com.
I’m available for presentations and workshops, and occasionally I host field trips to identify plants, gather pigment rocks, and make paints here on our property in Madison county, Arkansas.
Sign up for my newsletter if you’d like to know when new workshops/nature experiences are scheduled, new artwork is finished, scheduled events/shows, and just general prose about life at Wild Ozark: WildOzark.com/newsletter