I have decided that my new favorite pastime while hiking is to throw rocks at ice.  The rivers and lakes are trying to freeze over so ice is forming in some places.  Sometimes it’s thin enough to break through and splash the water below it.  Sometimes the rock just skids across the surface.  Rarely does the rock go where I want it to.  It often takes a few tries.  I had seen a video about people that like to skate on thin new ice.  If the ice has covered the whole lake, but is still thin, it acts like a drum and makes other worldly sounds.  We went for a hike to Columbine Lake and found it frozen.  I didn’t realize we had come upon it at just the perfect timing in its freezing process to be able to experience these sounds.  But, since throwing rocks at ice is what I do, I found a rock and threw it.  It skidded across the ice and pinging sounds radiated out from where the rock landed.  I was instantly reminded of a video I had seen about this and became very pleased with this good fortune.  We should have been going back so we wouldn’t get back to the car in darkness, but it was so much fun that we stayed for 20 minutes or so throwing rocks and icicles at the ice and delighting in the various sounds that the frozen lake gave back to us.

Post blog note:  Throwing rocks at ice is only a fall activity (it might be a spring activity, but no research has been done on this yet).  Once the snow starts falling and the temperatures don’t freeze and thaw, the rocks become frozen to the ground or buried under feet of snow so you can no longer get rocks to throw at ice.

Here is the video where I first heard these sounds of thin ice:  https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=v3O9vNi-dkA

And here are my pictures and videos: