Diary of a Rock Balancer ::
Stone Balance Art created* and photographed by Michael Grab — 16*/17/18/19 December 2016 — Colorado, USA ::
I’ve been working on updating my website more recently… So I almost missed this opportunity to play with ice, until i checked the weather… and discovered a forecasted snow storm. So i went out before the storm and built this simple counterbalance arrangement with ice in mind. I must say the timing was perfect.. i zeroed the balance on the 16th just before the freeze took hold of everything… after that it was these three days of relaxed, frozen, documentation…
17 December 2016
This is the day i developed the large icicle simply by splashing water on it every minute or so until desired length. I especially love the curves produced by snow falling evenly over the structure.
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18 December 2016
The most beautiful part of today was the extreme freeze overnight, and the symptomatic hoarfrost growing all over the place, including on yesterday’s icicle. Also found an interesting ice formation underwater… which i later decided to add to my frankenstein creation. I discovered it actually creates a substantial lensing effect with the sun, similar to a magnifying glass. Since it was so cold, the snow remained fluffy powder, which i was easily able to remove, when time came to focus on ice formation. :)
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19 December 2016
Today my goal was to lengthen the second largest icicle before the temperature broke back above zero. Then, once my ice lens melted off the top arm, i decided to mess with it and begin the deconstruction. The ice was still surprisingly strong, even after breaking above zero.
Despite the large tension of the top weight while balancing, I was able to rip the top straight off and the rest of the structure remained frozen in space.
Then i just began throwing rocks around to break as much ice as possible :)) kinda like a kid splashing in puddles.
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