Niagara Falls in Winter: Frozen Spray, Ice Mounds and the 1848 Freeze

During the bitter cold of February 2015, Niagara Falls put on its winter show. Spray froze onto every railing, tree and rock, and the water pounding into the gorge built mountains of ice at the foot of the falls. Reuters photographer Lindsay DeDario was there to record it.

The scene looked like a frozen waterfall, but the Niagara River never stopped. Even in the coldest weather, well over a million litres of water a second keep going over the brink. What freezes is everything around it.

How Niagara Falls freezes in winter

Niagara ices up in most winters without ever freezing solid. Two processes do the work:

• Frozen mist: the falls throw up a constant cloud of spray. In sub-zero air the droplets freeze almost as soon as they land, coating rocks, trees, lamp posts and viewing platforms layer by layer.
• Ice build-up below the falls: ice carried down the river and spray freezing at the base pile up into huge mounds. In some historic winters ice sheets in the gorge reached 12 to 30 metres thick, though nothing on that scale has formed since 1954.

Upstream, a 2,700-metre ice boom installed by the New York Power Authority and Ontario Power Generation holds back floating ice so that it does not jam the river and the hydroelectric intakes.

When Niagara Falls really stopped: 1848 and 1912

Only once on record has the water actually stopped. On 29 March 1848 an ice jam upstream choked the river, and for as long as 40 hours little more than a trickle went over the falls. Mills and waterwheels along the river fell silent.

The other famous winter is 1912. The American Falls froze completely that year, while the Horseshoe and Bridal Veil falls kept flowing. A thick ice bridge formed across the gorge on 15 January and became a popular place to walk, until it broke up on 4 February with people still on it. Three died in what became known as the Ice Bridge Tragedy.

Partial freezes made headlines again in 2014, 2017 and 2019, and the February 2015 cold produced the scenes in these photographs.

Niagara Falls facts and figures

Niagara is three waterfalls on the border between Ontario and New York State, 27 km from Buffalo and 69 km from Toronto:

• Horseshoe Falls (the Canadian Falls): an average drop of 57 metres and a crest about 670 metres wide, above a plunge pool some 35 metres deep.
• American Falls: a crest of about 260 metres; the free fall is 21 to 34 metres onto the rock talus at its base.
• Bridal Veil Falls: the smallest of the three, separated from the American Falls by Luna Island and from the Horseshoe by Goat Island.

Under the 1950 Niagara Treaty, at least 2,832 cubic metres of water a second must flow over the falls in daylight during the tourist season, and 1,416 cubic metres a second at other times. The rest is diverted to power stations. The falls have cut back about 11 km since the ice sheets retreated roughly 12,500 years ago.

Visiting Niagara Falls in winter

Winter is the quietest season at Niagara and, after a cold spell, one of the most photogenic. The boat tours (Maid of the Mist on the US side, Hornblower on the Canadian side) pause in the cold months, but the main viewpoints stay open: Table Rock beside the Horseshoe Falls in Ontario, and Prospect Point and Goat Island in Niagara Falls State Park, New York.

The frozen mist that makes the railings so beautiful also glazes paths and steps, so wear boots with good grip and keep to the cleared walkways. The best ice forms after several days well below freezing, and a sunny morning brings out rainbows in the spray.

Related reading

• Will Gadd’s Niagara Falls Ice-Climbing Film
• Michael Muraz’s Illuminated Niagara Falls in Winter
• Minnehaha Falls in Winter: A Changing Curtain of Ice
• Twenty-Three Waterfall Scenes: Winter Ice and a Mineral Lookalike
• Six Waterfalls and Thor’s Well: Seven Places Shaped by Moving Water
• Nantucket’s slushy waves

Sources