Icy New Year With Warm Family

My Mom and I took Cedar up to my aunt's house near Bellingham and it was just a gorgeous clear cold New Year's Eve.  The view of various snow-clad jagged peaks on the way up was breathtaking!

The next morning started out with mimosas and ginger pear scones, which was fantastic, and then my Mom, aunt and I took the dogs for a walk past one cousin's house and up to the other's.  It was freezing and nature had done some amazing things with ice!
I had never seen how water forms ice in the earth and then juts up like quartz crystals.  It crunched under our feet with almost every step.  I tried to get a picture of one that looked like a little crystal castle, but Adventure Dog ran back to see what I was looking at and smashed it flat.

The little stream we crossed over a couple times on little wooden bridges had ice along the edges and also had formed very strange ice in some spots.  One spot it was all blobby splashes.

In another place, the drops and splashes formed like tear-shaped balloons.  It was phenomenal. 

We saw a pileated wood pecker.  This gregarious redhead was far away and seemed please to announce her arrival with both calls and loud knocking since she was nearly safely out of reach of my zoom (hence the blurriness of this photo- sorry!)

Cedar had a good time playing with my aunt's West Highland white terrier and also my cousin's lab mix.  I'm not sure he was overly thrilled about the cold ice.  Doesn't he look a little sad in this picture?

After visiting and eating and drinking and warming ourselves by the fire and eating and drinking and visiting and drinking... it was time to say goodbye and head home.  I was happy that some of the flocks of swans were still in the fields where we had passed them on the way north.  Happy New Year everyone!