Niagara Falls In The Winter

Can Niagara Falls freeze over as recent news reports have indicated?  If it gets cold enough, possibly, but this would have to be colder than cold, really.  One of the things that makes Niagara Falls so impressive is just how much water flows over her rim.  Think about it, the entire drainage of the Great Lakes is forced through this one outlet (The Chicago and Welland Canals are not permanently open) in a dramatic scene that is one of the last visual reminders we have of what life was like when the Laurentide Ice Sheet was in final stages this far south.  This is a lot of water to slow down enough to turn into a solid.  That said, there will be lots of ice in a decent winter for the very same reason.  Lake Erie has to put all that frozen water somewhere.  In periods of prolonged cold, like the winter of 1911, the river can be so jammed and frozen across that the flow gets severely restricted.  Piles of ice at the bottom of the falls and smaller flows over the rim will indeed form the illusion that the place is frozen over. 

So what does it look like otherwise, in a more typical winter?  Beautiful. 

That there bridge would be the Rainbow, with the buildings in the background being in Niagara Falls, NY.

Large chunks sometimes survive the fall and gather with other masses of ice which get trapped in the gorge to form icebergs.

Still quite a bit of flow on the American Falls, with the gorge walls being coated nicely in ice enough to look like the falls are frozen.  This is water frozen into place on the rock face, rather than the falls themselves.

The Niagara Gorge itself is pretty impressive this time of year, let alone at any other time.

Looking back into Ontario (from Ontario actually) we see a less than frozen Horseshoe Falls.  Considering the amount of water that flows over this thing, it would be next to doomsday if it were truly frozen.  That huge volume of mist sure does freeze on the way through the air though, coating everything nearby with a decent amount of rime. 

 Winter is actually a pretty decent time to come explore the falls and surrounding area if you want to beat the crowds.  For bird lovers, the almost guaranteed open waters and fishy smells (a lot of fish get sucked into this discharge) wafting into the air by the powerful mists attracts the world's largest known gathering of nearly 20 Gull species every winter.  The water and smells are just as powerful on human gatherers too, with the senses being delighted by the magic of liquid water in an otherwise frozen time of the year.  The place almost always smells like fish, but not in a bad way, more like in a refreshing next-to-the-ocean sort of way, which is great because this is not even saltwater. 

These pictures were all taken in February of 2013.