Cold Wintry Wonderment Lingers Long Past the Bomb Cyclone's Big Melt: Volume IV | Eastern North Carolina Now

This pictorial remembrance of the coldest week in 3 decades here Downeast comes to an end, but not without some memorable images that will not pass this way again for a long while.

    After four full days of frozen Mac'swood "cabin-fever", I struggled out to take an iced numbing look at my old muse - the Pamlico River Trestle and the frozen Pamlico River. As mentioned in the previous entries in this series, it had been brutally cold; freezing every drop of moisture that was not heated by humankind.
Of course, I had my own frozen water: Above. And birds - this woodpecker - that needed feeding: Below.    photos by Stan Deatherage    Click images to expand.
    After making some images from around my Mac'swood grounds, I headed down to the Trestle Muse.
I began at the frozen Jack's Creek pond parallel to the mostly frozen Pamlico River, with only a thin strip of railway separating the two; these images bracketed to gain the range of visual mood: Above and below.    photos by Stan Deatherage    Click images to expand.
    With Jack's Creek frozen ponding of water at my back, I head down the frozen tracks' cold steel and ice to the Pamlico River Trestle.
Northeastern North Carolina is not used to frozen shoreline, and this wonderment of wintry weather is more akin to an alien landscape: Above and below.    photos by Stan Deatherage    Click images to expand.
    The glintering of the sun's rays upon the eastern face of the trestle's timbers is a common site when the sun is low, but with the long laying snow taking on a wintry light, it is quite lovely.
The glintering dying light upon the timbers and the cold steel of the rails: Above and below.    photos by Stan Deatherage    Click images to expand.
    I have walked upon the railroad tracks many times before with plenty of snow; however, this time, with far less snow and colder, I was most careful to negotiate the overwhelming coating of ice upon its tracks.
The icy frozen tracks of the Pamlico River Trestle; very slippery with a good breeze, even treacherous for the ducks that seek anywhere not frozen: Above and below.    photos by Stan Deatherage    Click images to expand.