Earlier this month, The Valley Reporter was out and about early one Sunday morning taking pics of ice jamming up in Waitsfield by the Covered Bridge and in Moretown by Spillway Road and Bridge Road.
Those March 8 pics were shared on Facebook and other social media and began to generate a lot of views and comments and shares. Other local photographers, including John Williams, Warren and Andy Yager, Fayston began sharing pics as well.
The ice jam in Waitsfield led to flooding in the Bridge Street Marketplace parking lot and the river re-routed itself – running through the parking lot and back into the river. It did the same thing in Moretown, rerouted itself to a channel to the east of the river and re-entered the river beyond the Bridge Road bridge.
The Valley Reporter tabulated some of the responses to the pictures and videos and here’s how that looked:
- The Valley Reporter original video of ice-jammed upstream of Covered Bridge 190,160 views
- The Valley Reporter video a huge slab of ice starting to move 423,988 views
- Andy Yager drone video of Waitsfield Covered Bridge 61,588 views
- Andy Yager drone video of Bridge Road 35,247 views
- John Williams picture of a couple seated at a bistro table by the river with coffee 21,656 views
And while that was fun, the comments from people on all of the posts throughout the day and later into the week were great with people offering historical perspectives, predictable solutions (dredge the river and or use dynamite to blow up the ice dam), and there were a few comments that deserved a response.
There were several people who wanted to know the time, date and location of the images and videos. Times and dates of posting are visible on social media but locations were not always given. Some posts said Waitsfield or Bridge Street or Moretown etc. This led readers and commenters to ask where on the planet Waitsfield is, where the Mad River is etc. One person said that there could be dozens of Waitsfield’s in the United States which led to a Google search that revealed there were not dozens of towns with that name. In fact, Waitsfield, Vermont, chartered in 1792 is the single incorporated town with that name in the country.
The Mad River, however, is not so unique. There are six distinct Mad Rivers in the US.
Here are the primary Mad Rivers in the US:
- California: A 100-mile-long river in Trinity and Humboldt counties.
- Connecticut: Located in New Haven County.
- Maine/New Hampshire: A 1.4-mile-long mountain brook on the Maine-New Hampshire border, acting as a tributary to the Cold River.
- New Hampshire: A tributary of the Pemigewasset River in Grafton County.
- Ohio: A 60-mile-long river in southwestern Ohio.
- Vermont: A tributary of the Winooski River that flows through the Mad River Valley.
- Washington: A tributary of the Entiat River.
To read more comments and see all the pics, visit https://www.facebook.com/TheValleyReporter/ and scroll down to March 8. It was a fun read!
