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A Strange Orchard at Cornell: Discovering Rona Pondick’s Untitled Tree Sculpture

On a March afternoon at Cornell University, I encounter Rona Pondick’s surreal sculpture Untitled Tree, where scattered aluminum “fruit” reveal unsettling human teeth beneath bare branches.

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An encounter with Rona Pondick’s Untitled Tree (1997)

One March afternoon on the lawn near the Herbert F. Johnson Museum of Art at Cornell, you might notice a small, leafless tree rising from a circle of red gravel. At first it seems merely dormant, another tree waiting for the long Ithaca winter to loosen its grip. But as you approach, the scene grows quietly unsettling. Around the trunk lie dozens of smooth gray forms—small, rounded objects like stones or fruit that have fallen from the branches.

Then you see the teeth.

The objects scattered beneath the tree are cast aluminum forms bearing unmistakably human molars. They appear to have dropped from the tree like strange metallic apples, a harvest that belongs less to botany than to anatomy. This disquieting grove is Untitled Tree (1997) by the American sculptor Rona Pondick.

The Artist of Hybrids

Pondick, born in Brooklyn in 1952 and trained at Queens College and the Yale School of Art, has spent decades exploring the language of the body in sculpture—often literally. Her work frequently uses casts of body parts, particularly teeth or her own head, creating forms that merge human anatomy with animals, plants, or everyday objects.

The result is a sculptural vocabulary that feels simultaneously ancient and uncanny. Critics often describe her work as “hybrid”—a blending of the human body with other forms, echoing mythic creatures such as sphinxes or centaurs while remaining distinctly contemporary.

Teeth have been a recurring motif in Pondick’s art since the 1980s, when she began casting them and embedding them in unexpected contexts. These fragments of the body carry a peculiar emotional charge: they evoke childhood, appetite, vulnerability, and mortality all at once.

A Sculpture That Feels Like a Dream

Created in 1997, Untitled Tree belongs to a group of works where Pondick began experimenting with trees as sculptural forms. She has explained that she sometimes uses actual branches or trunks as starting points for casting in metal, translating natural textures into aluminum or steel.

The Cornell sculpture is monumental yet restrained:

  • a cast-aluminum tree,
  • surrounded by dozens of small aluminum objects,
  • each about the size of a stone but bearing human teeth.

Seen from a distance, the scene reads like a quiet landscape intervention. Up close, however, it feels like a fragment from a surreal dream—a tree that has shed something disturbingly human.

The Poetry of the Fallen Teeth

Standing before it on that March afternoon, one might think of the sculpture as a botanical riddle.

Trees drop fruit.
They drop leaves.
In autumn they drop seeds.

But this tree has dropped teeth.

The idea is both playful and faintly macabre. The small aluminum forms resemble seeds, yet their teeth suggest the human mouth—the place of speech, hunger, laughter, and loss. The sculpture seems to whisper that the natural world and the human body are not separate realms but entwined systems of growth and decay.

In the red gravel circle beneath the tree, the objects appear almost archaeological, as though a curious species once grew here and shed fragments of itself into the soil.

Cornell’s Quiet Surrealist Grove

Placed on the lawn near the Johnson Museum’s striking I. M. Pei building, the sculpture forms a gentle conversation between art, architecture, and landscape. In winter the bare branches echo the skeletal trees around it. In summer the aluminum trunk gleams among living foliage.

And the scattered teeth remain—silent, patient, and oddly humorous.

They remind us that nature, like art, can be unsettling and beautiful at the same time.

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The Science and Poetry of Melting Ice: Cayuga Lake During a Winter Thaw

Under a blue February sky, Cayuga Lake keeps its icy grip, revealing how light, time, and physics conspire to make winter’s farewell a slow, luminous negotiation.

MichaelStephenWills8 Comments

These photographs, made along the frozen margin of Cayuga Lake at Cass Park in mid-February 2026, carry a quiet paradox. The sky is a lucid blue, the light has that late-winter clarity that hints at spring, and yet the lake remains locked under a pale, glassy skin. A few geese stitch the air. A bench waits. Red and white beacons stand where water should be moving. The moment is fixed: late afternoon light in February, Finger Lakes winter—but the deeper story is written in physics, not pixels: why does lake ice linger so stubbornly during a thaw?

The short answer is that water is a hoarder of heat and ice is a keeper of promises. The long answer is the reason these scenes feel suspended between seasons.

Start with the cost of melting itself. Ice does not simply warm into water; it must first be converted, and that conversion demands a large, fixed payment of energy known as the latent heat of fusion. To melt just one kilogram of ice takes about 334,000 joules—and that energy raises the temperature not at all. It is spent entirely on changing solid to liquid.

Scale that up to a lake surface and the numbers become sobering. Even a modest sheet of ice—say ten centimeters thick—contains roughly ninety kilograms of ice per square meter. Melting that much requires on the order of thirty million joules per square meter. To put this in a human context, in 1 kcal there are 4,184 joules. Melting a square meter of ice requres 7,170 kilocalories (kcals) or 3.6 days for a person expending 2,000 kcals per day. Spread across square kilometers of lake, the energy bill climbs into the tens of terajoules. That is the hidden arithmetic behind the familiar disappointment of a February thaw: a few warm days feel dramatic to us, but to a lake they are only a small down payment.

This leads to the second, more subtle constraint: melting ice keeps itself cold. As long as ice is present, the surface of the lake is pinned near 0 °C (32 °F). Incoming heat does not make the surface warmer; it simply converts more ice into water at the same temperature. The thin layer of meltwater that forms on top is also near freezing, so the entire interface remains locked at winter’s threshold. There is no “warming momentum” here—no quick rise in temperature to accelerate the process. The system quietly consumes energy without changing its outward thermal expression.

That is why the lake in these images can look bright and almost springlike while remaining physically winterbound. Sunlight is being spent on erasure, not on warming.

A third rule of water deepens the delay. Freshwater is densest not at freezing, but at about 4 °C (39 °F). In early spring conditions, the coldest water—near 0 °C—floats. The slightly warmer, denser water below tends to stay below. This creates a stable stratification: a cold, near-freezing surface layer sitting like a lid on the lake.

The consequence is crucial. The lake cannot easily mix warmer subsurface water upward to attack the ice from below. The thaw must work mainly from the top and the edges—where sunlight, mild air, rain, and shoreline heat can do their work—rather than through a coordinated, whole-lake turnover. In practical terms, the ice is dismantled by margins and seams, not by a sudden, uniform collapse.

Add to this the reflective nature of ice and snow. The pale surface in these photographs is not merely beautiful; it is also defensive. Bright ice and snow reflect a significant fraction of incoming sunlight back into the sky. Dark, open water would absorb that energy eagerly and warm quickly. As long as the lake remains light-toned, it is actively rejecting some of the very energy that could hasten its release.

Thickness and structure matter too. Winter does not lay down a single, simple sheet. It builds layers: clear black ice, milky refrozen crusts, snow-ice composites, trapped bubbles—each a page in winter’s ledger. A brief thaw may soften the surface, open a lead near shore, or trace fine cracks across the sheet, but the bulk remains. In the closer views—the lighthouse and the red beacon standing in frozen sheen—you can see subtle tonal shifts and faint stress lines, the calligraphy of slow change. These are signs of negotiation, not surrender.

Scale, finally, is destiny. Cayuga is long and deep; it behaves more like a small inland sea than a pond. Small waters can change their minds quickly. Large waters are conservative. They remember. The heat they lost in autumn must be repaid, carefully and in full, before winter loosens its hold. This is why harbors and shallows darken first, why the margins in these scenes show hints of movement while the center keeps its pale composure.

Put together, these rules explain the peculiar patience of February ice. The thaw is not a switch but an accounting. Enormous quantities of energy must be delivered just to accomplish the phase change. While that work is underway, the surface temperature barely moves. The cold meltwater stays on top, limiting mixing. The bright surface reflects sunlight. The lake, in effect, resists haste through the ordinary, unromantic laws of physics.

There is an austere beauty in this. Ice is a temporary architecture built by the loss of heat, and its demolition requires an equally disciplined repayment. The quiet in these images is the quiet of bookkeeping—joules being transferred, layers being undone, thresholds being approached but not yet crossed. When the change finally comes, it often feels sudden: a windy day that breaks the sheet into plates, a warm rain that darkens the surface, a week when the margins retreat visibly. But that drama is only the visible last act of a long, invisible exchange.

So the lake lingers. Not out of stubbornness, but out of fidelity to the rules that govern it. Under a sky that already looks like April, Cayuga is still paying winter’s invoice. The ice remains until the account is settled—and when it finally goes, the benches will no longer face a mirror of light, but a moving field of dark water, ready once again to begin the long work of storing heat for another year.

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Juvenile Cooper’s Hawk at a Winter Feeder: A Backyard Predator in the Finger Lakes

On a frigid winter morning, a young Cooper’s Hawk claimed a backyard feeder roof, revealing how predators, snow, and survival intersect in an ordinary Finger Lakes yard.

MichaelStephenWills16 Comments

These four images and YouTube video document a winter visit by a juvenile Cooper’s Hawk (Accipiter cooperii) to our backyard feeder, captured on February 7, 2026, during a snowstorm in mid-morning light in sub-zero temperatures. The metadata places the sequence between 10:35 and 10:37 a.m., recorded on an iPhone 14 Pro Max with a 9 mm f/2.8 lens at low ISO (32) and fast shutter speeds—conditions that make sense for a bright, snowy day when reflected light is abundant and a moving subject demands short exposures. The bird itself, however, tells a longer story than the camera settings can.

Cooper’s Hawks are medium-sized accipiters, built for pursuit in cluttered spaces. Short, rounded wings and a long, banded tail allow them to thread through trees and shrubs with startling agility. In the Finger Lakes region in winter, they increasingly overlap with human habitats because bird feeders concentrate prey. The metal feeder roof in these images is mounded with snow, and the hawk has chosen it as a temporary perch—an elevated, stable platform that offers both a view of potential prey and a place to rest after a chase or to wait out a flurry of weather.

The bird’s plumage marks it as a juvenile, likely hatched the previous summer. Instead of the blue-gray back and fine rufous barring of an adult, this hawk wears brown upperparts patterned with pale, teardrop-shaped spots and a buffy, vertically streaked breast. In the first image, where the bird faces forward through a lattice of branches, those bold brown streaks on a whitish background are especially clear. The eye is yellow rather than the deep red of a mature adult—another reliable sign of youth. Over the next year or two, those eyes will darken and the plumage will transition to the cleaner, more uniform adult pattern.

In this first image, the hawk faces forward, squarely watching the yard.

The long tail, visible in the rear views, shows broad, dark bands and a pale tip. That tail is not just decorative; it is the rudder that lets the hawk brake, pivot, and surge forward in tight quarters. The posture here—upright, alert, feathers slightly fluffed against the cold—suggests a bird conserving heat while remaining ready to launch. In winter, energy balance is critical. Each failed chase costs calories, and each successful one must pay back the effort many times over.

In this second image, the hawk looks over its shoulder, scanning.

Cooper’s Hawks specialize in birds roughly the size of starlings, doves, and jays, though they will also take small mammals. Feeders unintentionally simplify the hunt by bringing many potential targets to a predictable spot. The hawk’s presence does not mean the feeder is “bad” for the ecosystem; rather, it shows the food web functioning in real time. Predators follow prey, and prey follow resources. In snowy conditions, when natural seed and cover are harder to find, that concentration effect is even stronger.

Click me for my Cooper’s Hawk photograph on Getty Istock.

The sequence of images reads like a brief behavioral study. In the first, it faces forward, squarely watching the yard. In the second and fourth, the hawk looks over its shoulder, scanning. In the third, it turns again, keeping its head in near-constant motion—classic raptor vigilance. Accipiters often hunt by surprise, bursting from cover rather than soaring and stooping like falcons or buteos.

In this third image the hawk turns, keeping its head in near-constant motion—classic raptor vigilance.

Winter also shapes the hawk’s relationship with humans. Juveniles, in particular, are more willing to explore unfamiliar structures and take calculated risks. A feeder roof is not a natural perch, but it offers height, stability, and a clear line of sight. Over time, many individuals learn the rhythms of a yard—when sparrows or doves are most active, where cover is thickest, where escape routes lie. Some succeed and stay; others move on.

In this fourth image, the hawk looks over its shoulder, scanning.

From a broader natural history perspective, this bird represents a conservation success story. Cooper’s Hawks suffered declines in the mid-20th century due to pesticide use, but populations rebounded after bans on DDT and related chemicals. Today they are again common across much of North America, including upstate New York, occupying forests, edges, and increasingly suburban landscapes.

Watch Cooper’s Hawk behaviors in this video.

The file metadata anchors this encounter in a precise moment—February light, a cold morning, a quiet pause between hunts. The images, however, capture something timeless: a young predator learning its craft, reading the winter landscape, and testing the boundaries between wild and human-made spaces. For the backyard observer, it is a reminder that even in the most familiar settings, the ancient choreography of predator and prey continues, written in feathers, snow, and a long, banded tail poised for flight.

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Memories of Valentine’s Day: Family Beginnings and a Lifetime of Shared Journeys

A Valentine’s Day reflection spanning childhood, family, and partnership—where a homemade cake, a living room, and an ocean voyage reveal love’s enduring thread.

MichaelStephenWills16 Comments

Our culture insists that Valentine’s Day is about hearts and chocolates, about gestures that can be wrapped, written, or eaten. My memories tell a longer and more intricate story. Valentine’s Day is thread that runs through decades—binding childhood, family, and shared journeys into a single, evolving narrative.

An early Valentine’s Day memory of mine is anchored in a living room at 107 Deepdale Parkway in Albertson, New York. It is 1959. The room is familiar and ordinary, yet in memory it glows with a particular warmth. My sister Theresa is two, Christine is four, and I am five. We are gathered together, small figures in a modest suburban home, unaware that this fleeting domestic moment will outlast nearly everything else in the room. What I remember most is not an event, but a feeling: the sense of being held within something stable and loving, a family rhythm that proved enduring.

Theresa (2), Michael (5), Christine (4) in the livingroom of 107 Deepdale Parkway, Albertson, New York on Valentines Day 1959

As the years passed, Valentine’s Day shifted its shape, as it does for everyone. Childhood gave way to adolescence, and later to adulthood, when the holiday began to carry expectations and interpretations shaped by romance and partnership. Yet even then, my earliest associations lingered beneath the surface. Valentine’s Day was was beyond an exchange between two people; it was about continuity, about the quiet reassurance that one was part of a larger story.

A part of our celebration this Valentine’s Day cake—chocolate, homemade, and unapologetically generous.  Baked by my wife, Pamela, whose acts of care often expressed themselves through the kitchen. The cake was not elaborate by modern standards, but it does not need to be. Its value lay in what it represented: time taken, effort given, and love made tangible. Long after the plates are washed, the memory of that cake remains inseparable from the idea of Valentine’s Day itself. Love, I learned early, could be simple, nourishing, and shared.

Chocolate Valentines Day cake by Pamela Wills

That understanding deepened over time, especially through my life with Pam. One Valentine’s Day memory stands apart not for its extravagance, but for its improbability. Pam and I found ourselves aboard the Oceania ship “Regatta”, sailing the Pacific Ocean off the coast of Chile. The vastness of the water, the steady rhythm of the ship, and the sense of being suspended between sky and sea created a striking contrast to the small living room of my childhood. Yet the emotional register was remarkably similar. Once again, Valentine’s Day was marked not by spectacle, but by presence.

The following day we reached Puerto Montt, a port city framed by water and volcanoes. The journey itself became a metaphor for the way love matures. Where childhood love had been rooted in home and routine, this later expression unfolded through shared experience and mutual trust. Standing on the deck together, watching the coastline emerge, I was struck by how Valentine’s Day had come to encompasses where we had been and where we were going.

Pam and I aboard the Oceania Regatta sailing the Pacific Ocean off Chile. The following day we reached Puerto Montt.

In that sense, Valentine’s Day functions much like memory itself. It selects certain moments and holds them fast, allowing others to fade. A cake, three young children in a living room, two partners standing together on the open sea. These are not scenes one could have predicted would endure, yet they do, because they are threaded with care, attention, and shared time.

Now, looking back across the span of years, I understand Valentine’s Day as a recurring prompt that asks us to remember where love first took root, how it was tended, and how it has carried us forward. The details change, but the essence remains remarkably constant.

In the end, Valentine’s Day does not demand grand gestures or perfect words. It asks only that we recognize the quiet continuity of love as it moves through our lives—sometimes in a childhood living room, sometimes on the open ocean, always leaving its mark in ways we only fully understand in retrospect.

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Stones That Traveled: Glacial Erratics, Deep Time, and the Stories They Leave Behind

Glacial erratics are immigrant stones—carried south by ice, dropped without explanation, and left behind to challenge our sense of permanence, place, and deep time.

MichaelStephenWills22 Comments

There are rocks that merely sit where gravity has placed them, and then there are rocks that arrive with stories already embedded—foreign syllables carried south on ice, dropped without explanation, and left for us to puzzle over. Glacial erratics belong to the second category. They are migrants with no passports, refugees of deep time, whose presence quietly contradicts the landscape that hosts them.

Long before anyone reached for a hand lens or an ice-flow diagram, people answered such contradictions with imagination. In Ireland, a boulder perched just so on a mountain side is not a geologic problem but a resting place. Leprechauns, we are told, favor such stones—high enough to observe human intrusion, solid enough to outlast it. Skepticism, as folklore reminds us, is not always a stable position. Kevin Woods—better known as McCoillte—found that out the hard way when doubt collided with experience on the slopes of Slieve Foye. What followed was not merely a conversion story, but an act of modern mythmaking: folklore translated into bureaucracy, imagination petitioning regulation, and “The Last Leprechauns” entering the unlikely language of conservation. Stone, story, and belief hardened together into something oddly durable.

Rocks such as this are a favorite perch for leprechauns to rest and contemplate the works of man who have invaded their world. Inhabitants of Carlingford who wander Slieve Foye have come upon them often enough, their stories and certitude in the existence of the Little People are resistant to manifold doubters with their reasons and arguments. Kevin Woods, aka McCoillte, was a doubter until worked on a stone wall on property he owned on Ghan Road, Carlingford. His belief did not arise on the discovery of the leather purse, covered with ages of dust and lime, nor with the gold coins inside. McCoillte pocketed the coins for luck. As luck would have it, McCoillte loved to walk on Slieve Foye. It was on one such walk he and his dog encountered Little People who paralyzed them to escape. His unexplained absence led to troubles with the wife. This experience brought McCoillte around to enough of a belief that he, with lots of help, succeeded in petitioning the E.U. European Habitats directive to recognize leprechauns a protected species. A reserve was establish on Slieve Foye to protect the “Last Leprechauns” and you can google this phrase to learn more about McCoillte’s stories.

Back in the Finger Lakes, we tend to use a different grammar when confronted by an out-of-place rock. We name it, classify it, and trace its lineage northward. Erratics scattered across Tompkins County are geological sentences that begin somewhere else entirely. The bedrock beneath Ithaca—Devonian shale and sandstone—cannot account for crystalline intruders left behind like forgotten punctuation marks. These stones speak of ice sheets thick enough to erase valleys and decisive enough to transport mountains in fragments.

Some of those fragments have been domesticated. Cornell, for example, has never been shy about rearranging its stones. An unremarked erratic along the Allen Trail may once have been shrugged off as inconvenient rubble, while another—dragged from the Sixmile Creek valley—was carved into a seat and made eloquent. The Tarr memorial boulder, resting near McGraw Hall, transforms erratic stone into deliberate monument. It invites rest, contemplation, and perhaps gratitude for those who taught us how to read landscapes written by glaciers.

We find boulders of crystalline rock, commonly derived from Adirondack sources, left behind on the surface of ablation moraine, in the Finger Lakes Region. Cornell finds some and move them, maybe the case for this unremarked erratic found along the Allen Trail of FR Newman Arboretum. Another enormous erratic, brought in from the Sixmile Creek valley, was carved into a seat as a memorial to Professor R.S. Tarr who deciphered much of the glacial history of the Finger Lakes Region. Find it at the southwest corner of McCraw Hall on the Cornell University Campus. Reference: “The Finger Lakes Region: Its Origin and Nature,” O.D. von Engeln, Cornell University Press, 1961 page 106

Glacial Erratic, Fillmore Glen

Elsewhere, erratics remain defiantly themselves. In winter, one along Fall Creek alternates between anonymity and revelation, depending on whether snow smooths its surface or retreats to expose lichen constellations. Bridges pass overhead, traffic flows, semesters turn over, yet the rock remains unimpressed. It has already endured pressure sufficient to rearrange its crystals; a passing academic calendar is not likely to trouble it.

Glacial erratic with and without a snow covver and spotted by lichen along Fall Creek in a winter afternoon as seen from Cornell Botanic Gardens. That is the bridge over Fall Creek on Forest Home Drive. Cornell University, Ithaca, Tompkins County, New York State

Closeup of the same boulder

This boulder, a glacial erratic, was found near Fall Creek and the Cornell Botanic Gardens Horticulture Building. Cornell University, Ithaca, Tompkins County, New York State

This rock, a glacial erratic, was found near Fall Creek and the Cornell Botanic Gardens Horticulture Building. Cornell University, Ithaca, Tompkins County, New York State

Then there are the stones that confront us most directly—those we stumble upon in fields, pulled from soil by plow or frost, demanding explanation. A white, iron-stained marble boulder in a Tompkins County field is not subtle about its foreignness. It does not belong to the local vocabulary of shale and sandstone. Its pale surface, crystalline texture, and mineral scars point insistently north, toward the Grenville terrane of the Adirondack Lowlands. The Balmat–Edwards–Gouverneur marble belt offers the most persuasive origin story: metamorphosed carbonate rock carried south by Laurentide ice, released when climate and physics finally lost patience with one another.

I found this white marble erratic in a Tompkins County field. The highest-probability source is Grenville marble from the NW Adirondack Lowlands / St. Lawrence County (Gouverneur/Balmat–Edwards marble belt), delivered by southward-flowing Laurentide ice. I say the most probable source is metamorphosed carbonate (marble) from the Grenville terrane to the north—especially the northwest Adirondack Lowlands / St. Lawrence County marble belt (the “Gouverneur Marble” and related Grenville marbles), transported south by the last Laurentide ice sheet. Why that’s the best bet: Ice-flow geometry favors a northern source. In the Finger Lakes, glacial ice advanced with a flow direction that was very close to due south, guided by the north–south bedrock valleys. Tompkins County erratics are “exotic” imports. Local bedrock around Ithaca/Tompkins is Devonian shale/sandstone, but the region contains many nonlocal (“exotic”) glacial erratics carried in from much farther north (including southern Canada and beyond). Marble isn’t local to the Ithaca area, but it is abundant in the NW Adirondack Lowlands. The Balmat–Edwards/Gouverneur area in St. Lawrence County is a classic Grenville Lowlands district with marble belts (the same province that yields cream/white building marble around Gouverneur).

What makes this particular erratic compelling is not just its provenance, but the improbability of its journey. Ice moved with purpose here, flowing south along bedrock valleys like Fall Creek and Cayuga troughs, turning the Finger Lakes region into a conveyor belt for distant geology. When the ice melted, it left behind evidence that refuses to blend in. Erratics are geological truth-tellers. They announce that this place was once unrecognizable, that what seems permanent is merely provisional.

Perhaps that is why folklore clings so naturally to stone. Whether leprechauns or Laurentide ice are credited, erratics insist on a larger frame of reference. They ask us to imagine landscapes in motion and beliefs under revision. A boulder can be a seat, a marker, a perch, or a puzzle—but never merely background. It waits, quietly confident, for us to catch up to its story.

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Lucifer Falls in Winter: Traversing Ice Chutes Along Ithaca’s South Rim Trail

A careful winter walk along the South Rim reveals Lucifer Falls transformed—ice chutes, frozen veils, and flowing water beneath stone, inviting patience, attention, and quiet awe.

MichaelStephenWills15 Comments

January pares the gorge to essentials. Color withdraws, sound sharpens, and the land reveals its underlying grammar—stone, water, cold, and time. Reaching Lucifer Falls by the South Rim Trail on a winter morning feels less like an initiation, a careful passage through ice-chutes and shadowed ledges where the creek rehearses its ancient work in a new key.

Wintertime scene along the South Rim Trail of Robert H. Treman State park. The trail is solid ice. Ithaca, Tompkins County New York State

The trail begins quietly, a soft crunch underfoot where snow thins to leaf litter. Hemlocks hold their breath. The gorge opens in increments, not all at once, and the creek’s voice arrives in fragments—first a whisper, then a steady insistence. Winter edits the landscape with a clean hand. The clutter of summer understory is gone; what remains is structure: stratified shale stacked like a book left open to a single, patient chapter. Every footfall demands attention. Ice slicks the stone where seeps cross the path, and the trail teaches a winter gait—short steps, weight centered, the quiet confidence of traction earned rather than assumed.

As the rim narrows, the air cools perceptibly. The gorge walls rise higher, their layered faces stippled with frost and snow. Icicles form a punctuation along ledges, commas and exclamation points caught mid-sentence. In places, the trail descends into ice chutes—steep, polished corridors where meltwater has glazed the rock. Here, the body listens more closely. Boots test, then commit. Hands brush the cold bark of a leaning tree, a borrowed handrail. There is pleasure in this concentration, the way winter insists on presence. You cannot hurry. You cannot drift.

Below, the creek widens into a quiet pool, its surface a muted mirror. Thin plates of ice drift and collide, sounding a faint porcelain clink. The sound carries upward, amplified by the gorge’s acoustics, a delicate counterpoint to the deeper hush of falling water. The trail curves, and suddenly the falls announce themselves—not in full view, but as a white presence beyond the bend, a brightness lodged between walls of stone.

The trails this day were solid ice. I arrived via the South Rim Trail, the only way to access this site. Robert H. Treman State Park, Ithaca, Tompkins County, New York State

Approaching from the South Rim offers a measured reveal. First the upper cascades appear, water fanning across rock that has become a winter canvas. Ice has claimed the margins, building ribs and curtains that thicken day by day. The falls do not stop in January; they change. Water threads through ice, slips behind it, emerges again in translucent veils. Gravity persists, but its expression is altered—slower, more deliberate, sculptural.

At the base, Lucifer Falls stands transformed. The familiar plunge has become a tiered architecture of frozen flow, a stepped amphitheater where icicles hang like organ pipes and snow pillows settle into hollows. The water still moves, a silver ribbon finding its way down the left flank, while the right side has grown into a cathedral of ice. The gorge walls close in, amplifying the sound—a low, resonant murmur that feels as much felt as heard.

The cold sharpens every sense. Breath fogs, then clears. Fingers tingle through gloves as the camera comes out, metal biting through insulation. Framing becomes an act of translation: how to honor motion when much of it has paused; how to suggest the hidden currents beneath the frozen skin. A short video will later catch what stillness cannot—the soft shiver of water behind ice, the way the falls breathe even in winter—but for now, the eye lingers on texture and line. Shale layers echo the ice’s striations. Time repeats itself in different materials.

Standing there, it’s impossible not to feel the weight of deep history. These rocks remember glaciers and warmer seas; this creek has been at work since before memory had a word. January merely adds a chapter. Snow feathers the ledges. A stray sunbeam slips into the gorge, briefly igniting the ice, and then is gone. The falls return to their monochrome palette, as dignified as an old photograph.

The return along the rim is lighter, the path now familiar, confidence earned. The ice chutes yield more easily on the way back, as if acknowledging the careful passage. Above the gorge, the forest resumes its quiet, and the trail leads out into the open day. What lingers is the sense of having witnessed something intimate and exacting—a winter conversation between stone and water, conducted without haste, inviting those willing to slow down and listen.

January asks little and gives much. Reaching Lucifer Falls by the South Rim is a reminder that beauty is not diminished by cold; it is clarified.

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Where Fall Creek Turns: An Esker’s Quiet Authority in Malloryville Preserve, New York

An ancient esker redirects Fall Creek at Malloryville Preserve, revealing how Ice Age meltwater shaped the land and still quietly governs water and wandering feet.

MichaelStephenWills16 Comments

The esker rises like a glacier’s spine, a long-backed remnant left behind where an ice mountain learned how to leave quietly. It is not loud geology—no cliffs shouting their age, no cataracts announcing force—but a patient, sinuous fact. A frozen river’s footprint, pressed into the land and then abandoned, it lies there still, grading itself gently on both sides, as if unwilling to offend gravity or time.

At first glance, it could pass for a human thing: a railroad berm, a raised roadbed, an engineer’s solution. Yet this ice-scribe ridge was shaped without blueprints, drafted by meltwater racing beneath a retreating glacier, carrying gravel like a hoard of stories. The stones settled where the ice allowed them, stacked by pressure and patience, forming a ridge long enough—nine-tenths of a mile—to tell a stream where it must turn.

Fall Creek meanders through the esker fields of the Malloryville Preserve. Here is the view from an abandoned railroad bridge. The preserve is near Freeville in the Finger Lakes Region of New York State.

Fall Creek arrives with purpose, confident in its descent, until it meets the esker and must reconsider. Here the water performs bows, an abrupt acknowledgment of authority. The creek becomes a liquid negotiator, redirected by the ridge’s quiet insistence. This is the esker’s work: not domination, but persuasion. Land teaching water a new sentence.

This video provides a better feeling for the esker. To do this from WordPress Reader, you need to first click the title of this post to open a new page.

Standing at the foot of the esker, the slope to the right reveals itself slowly. It does not announce, I am important. Instead, it waits to be noticed. A swamp settles nearby, the water-mirror lowland, collecting what seeps and lingers. Together, ridge and wetland form a conversation: height and hollow, drain and gather, spine and lung.

Before there was signage, before placards translated glacial grammar into public language, the land already knew itself. Knowledge preceded explanation. My son and I pitched a tent atop a kame at our front door — another ice-left hill, a deposit of ancient momentum. That night, the ground beneath us was older than memory and younger than myth. Camping there was not recreation so much as apprenticeship.

A kame is a meltwater’s knuckle, rounded and abrupt, shaped by collapse rather than flow. To sleep upon it is to rest on uncertainty made solid. The tent fabric whispered in the breeze, a thin membrane between human breath and glacial aftermath. Fireflies stitched brief constellations above the grass, while the earth held fast, remembering ice that no longer needed remembering.

Walking along Fall Creek later, watching it turn west where the kame insists upon geometry, one begins to sense the land’s authorship. This is not random scenery. It is edited terrain. Each ridge, each bend, each saturated hollow is a sentence left behind by ice that once covered everything and then, mercifully, withdrew.

The esker itself is a time-ladder, inviting slow ascent. Step by step, gravel shifts underfoot—rounded stones, carried far from their origins, now loyal to this place. Each stone is a traveler without a passport, naturalized by pressure and pause. Together they hold their line, resisting erosion not by hardness alone, but by collective agreement.

From above, the ridge reveals its length, its deliberate curve. It does not hurry. It does not apologize. It simply is, a memory ridge, reminding the present that absence can be as powerful as presence. The glacier is gone, yet its handwriting remains legible.

Overflow from a Kettle Pond threads through a meadow before feeding Fall Creek. The O.D.von Engeln Preserve at Malloryville.

In the nearby swamp, water pools in dark reflection. Frogs tune their throats. Sedges write vertical poetry. This is the after-ice sanctuary, where meltwater’s descendants linger and life reclaims the margins. The esker drains; the swamp receives. Between them flows a balance older than names.

To walk here is to practice a different kind of attention. The land does not reward speed. It rewards listening. The ridge asks you to follow its curve, to feel how it shapes movement, how it choreographs water, wildlife, and wandering humans alike. It is a path-without-intention, yet it guides all who encounter it.

Long after the tent is folded, after the creek continues its bent course, after the placards fade and are replaced, the esker will remain. It will continue directing water, lifting footsteps, and teaching geometry to anyone willing to notice.

Eskers and kames are the glacier’s farewell letter, written in gravel, signed by time, and left open for reading.

Click Me for the first post of this series.

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Atkinson Hall and the Quiet Confidence of Good Design

A new Cornell building settles into its hillside, glass and weathered metal catching sky and trees—less a declaration than an invitation to pause, wander, and think together.

MichaelStephenWills10 Comments

Learning the Shape of a New Building

I first noticed the building from above.

Not in person—on my screen, late at night, when I should have been revising a draft and instead opened Google Earth the way some people open a window. There it was, just off Tower Road, close to Stocking Hall, pale and newly settled into the slope. From that height it looked careful rather than confident, as if it had arrived recently and was still deciding how much of itself to show.

Atkinson Hall, Google Earth from August 2023, 350 Tower Rd, Ithaca, NY 14850

I remember thinking: good placement on a former triangular parking lot. Enough distance from the older buildings to breathe, close enough to feel included. The hill does most of the work. You can see that even from an overhead height.

The next morning I walked there.

Atkinson Hall as viewed from the open field south of the Nevin Welcome Center of Cornell Botanic Gardens

Across the open field the building didn’t announce itself. Trees intervened—pines, bare hardwoods—so that it came into view in pieces: a curve of metal, a long line of glass, brick holding the ground. It felt less like approaching a destination than like gradually realizing you were already there. I liked that. Buildings that reveal themselves all at once tend to exhaust me.

The slope matters. You feel it in your legs as you walk, and the building seems to acknowledge it, stretching rather than standing tall. It does not pretend the land is flat. It follows the descent toward the creek, toward the older geological story underneath all of us.

Up close, the materials settle my attention.

North Side of Atkinson Hall, 350 Tower Rd, Ithaca, NY 14850

Brick at the base—solid, Cornell-familiar, not trying to reinvent anything. Above it, bands of weathered metal curve gently, already carrying the muted browns of fallen leaves, old stone, and stream-worn shale—colors long familiar to the slopes and ravines that shape this campus. They look as though they have agreed to age, which feels like an underrated design choice. The glass holds the sky without insisting on transparency. Some days it reflects trees so clearly that the building nearly disappears into them.

Compare the facade brickwork of Warren Hall, one of the earliest buildings on the Cornell University campus, completed 1868. This is the southwest corner with facade signage, Cornell University, Ithaca, New York

I stop near the windows longer than I intend to. The view steadies me. The hillside, the trees, the quiet persistence of winter light. My notebook stays closed for a few minutes. No one seems to mind.

View near Atkinson, Nevin Welcome Center, Cornell Botanical Gardens, 124 Comstock Knoll Dr, Ithaca, NY 14850

Inside, the building does not behave like a department.

That is the first thing I notice once I begin using it regularly. No single discipline claims the space. Offices and meeting rooms feel provisional, lightly held. Conversations drift. Someone from engineering crosses paths with someone from policy. A food systems researcher borrows a chair from a planner. No one looks lost.

It helps to remember who gathers here. The building hosts people from many parts of the university, each arriving with partial expertise, incomplete questions.

Cornell College / UnitAreas of Engagement
College of Agriculture and Life Sciences (CALS)Food systems, agroecology, climate resilience
College of EngineeringEnergy systems, materials, infrastructure
College of Arts and SciencesEarth systems, ecology, human dimensions
SC Johnson College of BusinessSustainable enterprise, supply chains
College of Architecture, Art, and Planning (AAP)Urban resilience, adaptive design
Cornell Law SchoolEnvironmental law and governance
Public & Global AffairsClimate policy, diplomacy

I keep this list taped inside my notebook. It reminds me that no one here is meant to arrive fully formed. The building expects us to be unfinished.

Cobblestones with fallen oak leaves along Feeny Way, Cornell University, Ithaca, New York

There is a quiet confidence in how the place is run. Systems hum discreetly. Heat holds steady even when the weather rips. Somewhere nearby, unseen, a generator waits, a reassurance. Work continues. Conversations do not end mid-sentence. I think about this more than I expected to. Stability has become a form of generosity.

On certain afternoons I walk the exterior again before heading home.

The curves soften what could have been institutional. Corners ease into one another. Nothing feels sharp. The building does not posture or instruct. It listens. It seems content to let weather, foot traffic, and time finish the job.

I have overheard visitors describe it as “restrained.” I think that is right. It does not wear sustainability as an emblem. It does not ask to be admired. It offers something quieter: space to think without being hurried, to talk without being territorial.

From some angles it nearly disappears into the hillside. From others it asserts itself just enough to be useful. That balance feels intentional, and also rare.

When I sit near the glass and look out, I sometimes imagine the building learning us in return—our habits, our pauses, the way we linger in doorways when a conversation matters. It seems designed for that kind of noticing.

If I were forced to describe it the way a realtor might, I would say it is well built in all the ways that matter. The structure is sound. The site is excellent. The materials will age well. But what I would mean is something less technical.

It is a building willing to wait.

Seen from above, it is still new.
Seen from the field, it is already settled.
Seen from inside, it feels patient.

That patience makes room—for uncertainty, for collaboration, for the long work that does not resolve quickly. I think that is why I keep returning, even on days when I do not strictly need to be there.

The building does not ask what I am producing.
It asks only that I stay awhile.

And for now, that is enough.

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Winter Walking at Taughannock Falls: Finding Connection and Quiet Along the Gorge Rim Trails

Winter distills Taughannock Gorge to stone, water, and silence, where careful footsteps along icy rim trails reveal deep connections between landscape, memory, and quiet joy.

MichaelStephenWills35 Comments

Winter pares the world down to its essential lines, and nowhere is that more apparent than on the rim trails of Taughannock Falls State Park. On a Wednesday afternoon walk, a three-mile pilgrimage, the gorge revealed itself as a living corridor of connections—between water and stone, past and present, effort and joy. The season sharpened every sensation: the crunch and slip of ice underfoot, the hush of leafless woods, the long exhale of the falls echoing unseen below.

From the overlook, the gorge opens like a vast stone book, its pages written in shale and time. Taughannock Falls drops away in the distance, not so much seen as felt—its presence announced by scale and gravity. Even before stepping onto the trail, the walk establishes its rhythm: pause, look, breathe. Winter insists on this slower tempo. Ice dictates caution, and caution invites attention.

Heading along the Rim Trail my progress became deliberate. The path, glazed in places with solid ice, turned each step into a negotiation. Yet this was no impediment to pleasure. Slowness allowed for noticing the quiet labor of the park maintenance crew, whose careful clearing and repairs spoke of spring already anticipated. Their work stitched the present moment to the coming season, a reminder that parks, like stories, are maintained through this unseen devotion.

The gorge itself is a system of thresholds. A bridge crossing the creek marks the transition from North to South Rim, but it also frames one of the most dramatic views in the park. Standing above the chasm, one senses connection: water flowing beneath, trails diverging and rejoining, human passage layered lightly atop geological endurance. The gorge is a conversation between forces, ongoing and unresolved.

Gorge Road, early November
Gorge Road, early November
From the South Rim Trail. Taughannock Falls, New York State Park, Ulysees, Tompkins County, Finger Lakes Region.
Click any photograph for a larger image

Ice eventually nudged my walk onto Gorge Road, which parallels the South Rim Trail like a quieter narrative strand. Here, the landscape shifts from wild drama to human memory. A curve in the road reveals a farmhouse, modest and fragile beside its outsized barn. In winter, the absence of leaves makes the scene stark and honest. The farmstead buildings do not ask for nostalgia; they simply stand, bearing witness to lives tethered to this steep land. The structures emerge gradually as I walk downhill, as if the land itself were choosing when to reveal them.

Overview of this small cemetery overlooking Cayuga Lake

A short detour leads to a small cemetery perched on a shelf above Cayuga Lake, near the Taughannock Farms Inn. In winter, cemeteries feel less like places of mourning and more like rooms of quiet conversation. Headstones rise from frozen ground, their inscriptions softened by time and distance. From this vantage point, lake and sky merge in pale bands, and the lives commemorated here feel gently folded into the larger story of the landscape. The dead, too, are part of the park’s web of connections.

Another detour brings the lower falls into view—a more intimate expression of the same water that plunges dramatically upstream. Here the sound is closer, the movement more conversational. It is easy to imagine this water traveling, moment by moment, linking ravine to lake, winter to spring, memory to presence.

One of many Rim Trail overlooks. That is the Gorge Trail, below.

Rejoining the rim trail for the final climb north, the gorge offers repeated overlooks where the Gorge Trail can be seen threading below. These moments collapse distance: walker and walker, above and below, bound by the same route at different elevations. Over the course of roughly three miles and almost 600 feet of cumulative elevation change, effort becomes its own reward. Two hours pass not as measured time but as a sustained attentiveness, a gift winter offers to those willing to meet it on its terms.

Walking these trails in winter is about entering a conversation with the land—listening to ice, stone, water, and history speak in a quieter register. The joy lies in connection: trail to trail, gorge to road, past to present, and walker to place. In winter, Taughannock invites, gently and honestly, those who are willing to walk slowly enough to see.

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Glacial Kettle Bog Wonders: Photographing Pitcher Plants at the O.D. Engeln Preserve in Freeville

Step onto Freeville’s O.D. Engeln Preserve boardwalk and meet purple pitcher plants in a glacial kettle bog—carnivorous beauty, hidden blooms, and macro-photo magic.

MichaelStephenWills3 Comments

Seen from 1000 feet above in Google Earth, the O.D. (Von) Engeln Preserve at Malloryville Road lays itself out in two glacial “kettles,” pond and bog; a simple diagram drawn by ice and time, then complicated by everything that has happened since. In my photograph, taken from the bog observation platform on a July morning, the sky is rinsed blue, clouds billow, conifers stitch along the rim around open space. Step closer, or lower your lens, and the openness resolves into a crowded, intimate architecture of sedges and moss, twigs and standing water, sunlight and shadow.

I came here for a plant that does not announce itself the way wildflowers often do. The purple pitcher plant, Sarracenia purpurea, is a quiet scandal: a green vessel in a place where green should be satisfied simply to survive. I arrived equipped for attentiveness—an iPhone for the broad scene, and a Canon DSLR with the F2.8 100 mm macro lens for the stars of this bog. The macro lens is an instrument of humility. It forces you to admit that the important drama is often no bigger than your palm.

In earlier years, the pitchers could be found right where a visitor naturally looks—within the central cut-out of the observation deck, close enough to lean over and study. But the bog is not a museum display; it is a living negotiation. This season, highbush blueberries pressing in from the margin had crowded the pitchers out, pushing the flowering plants into the grasses eight to ten feet away. The shift is small in human terms, the kind of distance you cross without thinking. In bog terms, it is displacement—an erasure of a familiar scene, a reminder that rarity is not only about numbers but also about space.

The pitchers themselves—those “turtle socks,” as they’ve been nicknamed—sit at ground level in a rosette, their mouths open to weather. Sunlight floods the cups and turns them into something both domestic and uncanny: a set of green, veined slippers left out to air, or a cluster of small amphorae awaiting an offering. In the bog’s thin soil, nourishment is hard-won. The pitcher plant answers that poverty with invention. Instead of arguing with the chemistry of peat, it borrows from the animal world—luring and taking what the air can spare. The cup is a trap, yes, but also a reservoir: rainwater gathered and held, a miniature wetland that mirrors the preserve’s larger one.

There is a tension here that never quite resolves: the plant’s beauty, and the plant’s appetite. We admire the cup’s red veining, the glossy rim, the way the opening flares like a lip; then we remember what the lip is for. We admire the flower’s elegant sheltering forms; then we realize the shelter is also a funnel, a choreography. This is not cruelty—no more than winter is cruelty. It is adaptation made visible, a lesson in how form follows need, and how need can produce something unexpectedly lovely.

And yet the real marvel—the reason I came that day—rises above the traps on a strong stalk, lifted clear of the dangerous mouths below. The flower is not purple in the obvious way its common name promises. It is subtler and stranger: a suspended structure with the poise of a lantern and the protective logic of armor. It struck me as a flower unlike any I have experienced, resembling an insect carapace, with the reproductive element underneath a hood. That hooded design feels less like ornament than strategy—an architecture that guides a pollinator’s route, controlling entrances and exits the way the pitcher controls the fall of an insect.

Even the flower’s back side refuses to perform for the camera. From the posterior angle, “there are only bracts”—plain supporting structures, the botanical equivalent of scaffolding left in place once the facade is finished. The bog, too, shows its scaffolding everywhere: dead stems, old wood, peat-dark water, last year’s leaves. A preserve is never only what is blooming. It is what persists.

I found myself thinking about the details I wanted but could not quite capture that day: the downward facing hairs inside the pitcher—those one-way bristles that make retreat difficult once a victim has slipped in. I or my lens was not up to this challange. The shortcoming was minor, but instructive. The bog offers glimpses, not guarantees. It invites return visits, different light, different seasons, a different kind of patience.

Standing on the platform I felt the preserve’s central truth: these are landscapes shaped by constraint—by ice, by water, by nutrient scarcity, by the slow encroachment of shrubs—and yet they keep producing improbable forms. The purple pitcher plant is one of those forms: a green cup that drinks rain, a flower that wears a hood, a turtle sock that turns hunger into design. In a place where the ground itself seems to refuse abundance, the plant answers with a different kind of richness—an elegance that is also a solution.

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