Snow over the retaining wall, and light pillar

2022 February 27

After the big flood on Father’s Day of 2018, the road downhill from our house was pretty much wiped out. It took three years to rebuild it, and the rebuilding included a very substantial retaining wall made of concrete blocks. The snow has been accumulating on the wall in interesting patterns. We had unusual weather[1] yesterday (Feb. 26, 2022), so I went down to get some pictures.

For a sense of scale, the individual concrete blocks are 2 feet tall, and the snow overhang was far enough that I could easily stand completely under it.

A bit further down the hill, the wall gets really tall and there is also meltwater going over the top of it, making substantial icicle structures.

When the wind blew, the snow would pour over the edge as a frozen waterfall

At least, until the gust of wind fully developed and it blew into a short blizzard

And then the wind would die down again and it looked just like before.

So anyway, welcome to the Keweenaw. And it looks like it will be some time before I can start getting insect pictures outdoors again.

And here’s another interesting snow-related phenomena that I photographed before sunrise on January 7, 2022: Light pillars!

The orange light is an unshielded sodium-vapor streetlight that allows a lot of light to go upward. The “pillar” effect comes from ice crystals (not big enough to be considered snowflakes) that are slowly tumbling as they fall towards the ground. Because of the way they tumble, the crystals that reflect light to your eye are only the ones that are between you and the light, the ones off to the side reflect the light in other directions. This makes it look like the light is forming a vertical pillar pointing into the sky. The ice crystals are only the right shape when they are forming below about 14 degrees F, so you only see these on pretty frigid nights. I unfortunately didn’t have a tripod along, and at the low light levels my camera shutter speed was fairly slow, so the picture was a bit blurry. It looked more impressive in real life.

/https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Light_pillar

Light pillars are a sign of two things: (1) it is pretty cold out, and (2) your streetlights are wasting a lot of energy illuminating the sky rather than the ground. Years ago, I used to see forests of light pillars over town. But, for the last decade or so, the streetlights have been getting replaced by LED lights. These are not only more energy-efficient, they also can be made to send light in a particular direction rather than radiating it all around. So, now most of our streetlights direct the bulk of their light to the ground where it can do some good, and don’t make light pillars anymore. They also don’t cause as much light pollution of the night sky, and it has gotten easier to see the stars at night because of this.


[1] The unusual thing wasn’t the amount of snow. That’s pretty normal for this time of year. No, the unusual thing was that the sky was clear and the sun was shining.

One Response
  1. March 13, 2022

    Beautiful!

Comments are closed.