Lake Erie's ice dunes
Every winter, Pennsylvania’s Presque Isle State Park is transformed by ice dunes into “a sci-fi moonscape,” said Robin Soslow in The Washington Post. A seven-mile spit of land that juts into southern Lake Erie, the park is among the relatively few places outside the Arctic where cold waves and spray conspire to build frozen dunes. Stepping onto the unstable ice is prohibited, but my camera gave me an excuse to tiptoe close to some dunes that reached 15 feet in height. The texture of the dunes varied dramatically. Some were smooth, some “abraded by wind-thrust grit”; their colors ranged “from ghostly white to variegated honey, ale, and ash.” As our group strolled the coast, led by a naturalist, “sunbeams lanced the gray skies, creating monochrome rainbows” overhead. Presque Isle is home to Pennsylvania’s only beaches, and I hear they’re quite nice during the summer. But “for sheer serenity,” I’d take gazing at the ice dunes.
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