Now this was some fun paddling! I felt like I was playing the old video game "Asteroids" as I wove in and out of ice chunks in the Columbia River, The source of all the ice was the Wenatchee River, just upstream, which had been frozen solid at the mouth for several weeks. Then all of a sudden, whamo, it's 40 degrees for several days in a row and the ice started to quickly break up.
I drive or bicycle commute over the Columbia River to work every day, so I noticed the ice sheets starting to come down a few days ago. I almost waited a day too long to go paddle amoungst the icebergs. On the day these photos were taken, I was able to navigate up one side of the Wenatchee River, but about 1/2 of the river was still chock-a-block full of ice, up to 3 feet thick. The next day I rode my bike over a footbridge on the Wenatchee in the same place I had paddled, and the river was empty of ice altogether. It's really amazing how quickly warm temperatures can affect an ice sheet that is so seemingly permanent. It's like I just witnessed my own mini global warming experiment. Kind of makes you think about it a bit more.
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