Off season
The Gorge in January, When the Spray Comes Back Down as Ice
Frozen mist coats every railing, branch and lamp post along the rim until the whole gorge looks upholstered. Four days in the coldest and emptiest week of the year.
Off season
The ice shove, and what February does to a shoreline
Wind pushes a frozen lake ashore in plates the size of doors, then leaves them stacked along the beach until April. Six days of watching it happen.
Read the report
- Five reports
- Two sections
- Written and photographed by Marek Idzik
- Buffalo, New York
Off season
Why the cold half of the year gets all of it
Warm months make a landscape legible to everybody at once. The same shoreline in February is doing something specific and short lived, most of it produced by weather that people arrange their lives to avoid, and almost nobody is standing in front of it.
That is the entire editorial position of this journal, and the ice shove report is where it started. Six days on a frozen lake shore produced roughly forty minutes of the thing I had gone for. The rest of the week was spent on a beach in the wind watching nothing happen, which turned out to be worth photographing too.
Read the ice shove reportThe index
Everything filed so far
Five reports. Three are places worked in the coldest weeks they get, and two are method notes, written after enough repetitions that I stopped guessing.
Off season
Five Days in the Snow Belt, Where the Measurement Is in Feet
A plateau east of the lake collects more snow than anywhere else in the eastern United States. Banks over the roof line, a road cut like a corridor, and a silence that is genuinely unusual.
Cold craft
Dressing for Standing Still, Which Is a Different Problem
Every clothing system sold for winter assumes you are moving. Waiting three hours beside a frozen lake breaks all of them in the same order, and the order is predictable.
Cold craft
Batteries, Condensation, and the Three Winter Failures
Cold does not usually break a camera. It drains it, fogs it, and makes it impossible to operate, and each of those has a plain fix that costs almost nothing.
Frames
A contact sheet from last winter
Six frames from the last cold season, printed small and numbered the way they came off the card. None of them belongs to a report.
The Cold Front
The Cold Front
A short note goes out when a report is finished, which comes to something between six and eight a year. It holds the opening section, two frames that were left out, and nothing further.
One note per report, never more. Each one carries a working way to leave, and how long an address is held is set out in the Privacy Policy.
Before you post
Questions that keep coming back
Can anything be booked here
Nothing. This is a journal with no shop attached, no basket, no price on any page, and no route by which a payment could reach the publisher. Reports get written and photographs get made; anything a reader wants to do afterwards is organised somewhere else entirely, with no involvement from this address and no income from it. There is also no tie to an airline, a hotel group or a reservation service, and nowhere named in a report has an arrangement with the journal.
Why only cold weather
Because the cold half of the year does things to a landscape that the warm half does not, and because those things are short lived, weather dependent and largely unphotographed. An ice shove exists for about an hour. Rime on a gorge rim needs a specific cold snap. Deep snow on a plateau settles and greys within days. Working only in that window keeps the subject narrow enough to say something useful about, and it has the side effect of putting me in places when nobody else is there.
Is any of this sponsored
None of it. No affiliate arrangements, no commission, no sponsored reports, no free nights, no gifted equipment, and no advertising on the site as published. Delyavia Imprint LLC pays for the work out of its own funds. If that ever changes it will be stated on the About page and printed above the first paragraph of any report it touches, and advertising would be labelled as advertising from the day it appeared.
How often does a report appear
Six to eight times a year, all of them between November and March in terms of the fieldwork, and published whenever the writing and the frames are done. Reports normally sit for a month or two after the trip. Cold weather makes an experience feel more significant than it was, and a report written the week after tends to overstate everything. What survives until spring is closer to the truth.
The desk
Who keeps this
Marek Idzik. I write the reports and make the photographs, and there is nobody else involved in either.
Buffalo is home and it is also the reason this journal exists in the shape it does. Somewhere with a hundred inches of snow in an average winter, an inland sea that freezes, and a gorge that ices over every January is an unusually convenient base for a publication about the cold. Most of what appears here is within three hours of the desk.
Delyavia is a made up word. It abbreviates nothing, it means nothing in any language, and it came off a list of short spellable options nobody else had taken. Delyavia Imprint LLC is the publisher, registered in New York, and its whole function is to keep the filing of a one person operation in order.
The full account