Large Ice Chunk Recording

In February 2010 I drove up the hill behind my house once again and recorded more ice breaking. Keep in mind this “back hill” peak is actually 4000 feet above Sandpoint, Idaho. This time I found a very large water containment pond that had frozen solid when it was extremely cold back in January. The standing water under the ice had drained away and the top 10 inches or so of ice had collapsed in on itself. It was hollow under the ice and around the edges the ice was still hanging on to the rock like a ledge. This made for some rare ice recording and I was ready! I was able to break away chunks of ice at least 8 inches thick and throw them around. I got some really good sounds of heavy pieces of ice sliding, scraping, dropping and hitting.


I used a Sound Devices 702 recorder with a Sanken CSS-5 microphone and a Sony PCM-D1 both at 24bit 96kHz.