Wednesday, March 12, 2014

Eugenia Falls in Winter

Eugenia Falls is in the village of Eugenia near the head of the Beaver Valley, and is named after Empress Eugenie, wife of Napoleon Bonaparte III, and has some really interesting history associated with it.  But on this occasion I wanted a winter picture, so off I went - when I got there the falls was totally frozen, and this was only a few days ago!

It's a beautiful waterfall, falling over the upper dolostone layer of the Niagara Escarpment.  This was the site of the Eugenia Gold Rush in 1852, but after only a few weeks they realized it was pyrite, or fool's gold.  Still, it put Eugenia on the map!

The falls was also the site of a hydro-electric power project, and a long tunnel was excavated to the left of the waterfall.  That project came to nought, though you can still see the tunnel entrance, made of stone.  Instead, a dam was built upstream in 1914, creating Lake Eugenia, and diverting the main flow two miles north to a power plant, still in use.  The flow remaining over the falls is a small trickle compared to the original river.

It's actually hard to get a good picture of the falls other than from the one viewpoint, 200 yards down the trail from the falls where all these pictures were taken.  But by zooming in, you can see the blue colour in the ice, and the top of the huge pile of spray ice at the bottom of the falls, as well as the ice stalagmites on the left hand side.

This is a picture in the summer, just for comparison.

The letter this week at 'Alphabe-Thursday' is Q.  I don't have a Q here, but I do have an Empress, which is pretty close to a queen, and the whole region is part of the 'Queen's Bush', a name used in the middle of the 1800's when this area was opened to white settlement, and still used locally, as in the 'Queen's Bush Quilting Guild'.  I hope that's close enough.  So I'm linking to:

http://jennymatlock.blogspot.ca/

15 comments:

  1. That's another waterfall I haven't been up to. It's beautiful!

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  2. Wow, that's a lot of ice and snow! It's gorgeous!

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  3. Very beautiful and close to home for me!

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  4. Lovely! The ice adds extra drama to this fantastic sight.

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  5. Beautiful wintry fall photos and great post for Q ~ xxx

    artmusedog and carol

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  6. Beautiful scenery - winter and summer.

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  7. Wow the frozen falls is beautiful!!!

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  8. Just a very beautiful "frozen" falls. Love these photos.

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  9. Frozen falls! How beautiful! My sis came down here to escape the cold Manitoba winter - and ended up experiencing one of our coldest Ozark winters in years! Some of our smaller falls froze and left cascading ice down the bluffs.

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  10. gorgeous falls, both frozen and running!

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  11. Hi There, We are home from George's fabulous birthday trip. I will blog about it tomorrow. It was truly a trip we will be talking about for a VERY long time!!!!

    We saw waterfalls similar to this one this week --but much smaller... However, I have never seen so much ICE in my entire life....

    For waterfalls lovers like hubby and me, we would love to see this waterfall someday..... Gorgeous.

    Hugs,
    Betsy

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  12. It's close enough and those were beautiful pictures.

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  13. Thanks for sharing this beautiful waterfall with us. I really enjoyed your icy winter pictures, but the summer picture is wonderful as well.

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