Unlike other memorable waterfalls I have visited in the winter — and they always seem most memorable in the winter — Stony Kill Falls lacks a large plunge pool. Instead, its waters drop into a snow-covered ice cone about ten feet across that resembles nothing so much as a white volcano. This “snow volcano” even seemed to be “erupting” as water gushed like lava from its “crater,” where the thick, translucent ice was sea green. The waterfall itself plunged through a massive hollow column of ice that hung from the rock lip directly above the volcano. It’s a spectacle that beggars description and invites wild and outlandish comparisons. Hence, the hanging ice column, invoking Norse mythology, could be a giant crystal chandelier in the hall of the mountain gods, and the huge rows of fused icicles varying in length suggest pipe organs, or when separate, saber-tooth tiger fangs or walrus tusks. Well, you get the idea…
I returned to Stony Kill Falls with Rebecca and our four fellow-adventurers. We set out at a more sensible hour this time, on a bright, blue-sky day, which had brought others to this rather remote spot, too. We walked past a gate into an open field where shale showed through patchy snow and brown dried skeletons of weeds like wild carrot, aster, mullein and evening primrose with its urn-like seed capsules poked up. Across from the fenced compound over a shaft leading down to the Delaware Aqueduct, which conducts water from the Rondout Reservoir to New York City, we paused to pick some wild bergamot seed heads, crushing the brown globes in our fingers to release their spicy, minty scent.
From the first gravel field we descended to a lower one, an old quarry studded with low hills like buttes, whose flat tops showed the ground level here before the shale was excavated. We followed the jeep trail to the other side of the quarry and entered the woods, picking up an unmarked trail that paralleled the Stony Kill in the ravine below. A litter of green hemlock twigs on the snow suggested porcupine activity and a barked maple with large incisor marks confirmed it. Since porcupines don’t stray far from their winter quarters, I felt sure they had dens in the cliff that loomed over the ravine.
