Dawn Over Ice

We got our snow last week, but a very strange snowfall it was. I had watched a Science Channel special that week about the ice storms in Canada, and just had to make the connection. The snow started as a grainy dry slush, we got an inch or two of that. I have no other discriptor, this stuff was like nothing I ever saw. My sister described it as like tiny glass beads. If you stepped on it, your foot would begin to slide, like on slush, but then it would freeze into place as the grains aligned under the pressure of your foot. Pick it up, and it's heavy and dry. Weird.

Then the freezing rain started to fall. The temp was in the single digits, and warm wet air was coming in from off the ocean and rising OVER the super cold air. So, the rain fell and was super cooled and then froze on contact. Overnight the temps fell below zero, and the wind took over.

The next morning the world was covered in a three inch coating of bulletproof ice, dry to the touch and welded to anything it fell on, proof against the most vigorous scraping. The shine you see on the snow in the pic is that ice. You could drive a big car onto that snow and it would not collapse, or even leave a trace, except for the dirt off the tires. Very, very slippery too.