Pogonip...Yes it really is a word.

For the last week our place has been frozen over. Frozen pond, frozen hoses, plants buried under patches of frozen snow, frozen water buckets in the horse stalls. This time of year that's pretty par for the course, except for the frozen snow. We rarely have snow last more than a day or two, but this year it was heavy, and lingered for weeks. However, pogonip was a whole new deal. Apparently it is a Shoshone word meaning "cloud." It is caused by fine ice crystals suspended in the air, and occurs rarely during cold winter spells. Old settlers referred to it as The White Death because they thought the crystals got into your lungs and could kill you. We have had frost at our place every year, but nothing like this. It was beautiful and weird, coating everything in lethal looking ice-spikes. It made our hot-wire pasture enclosures look like barbed wire. Here are some of the photos I took around our place, showing the effects of pogonip.