Before you scoff at my ignorance, remember that I grew up in the Phoenix area where the only things that freeze are either caffeinated, or play weekly at Sun Devil Stadium. I had always thought that freezing rain was what most people called ice. Or that rain, having been frozen previous to its descent to the surface of the Earth, was known by most as snow. However, there is a rain that freezes, which is not to be confused with freezing fog, which we also have here. I think the best way to describe freezing fog is to think of what might happen in a certain area of the body if one were wearing sweat pants while jogging through north Alaska.
Also, having been from Phoenix, I am no stranger to dramatic landscapes. I took this picture not two weeks ago, just outside of Mesa. It may be familiar to many of you.
But I digress. We had some freezing rain this week, and, much to my delight, the rain left a scene that I found most original and pleasing. Most of the trees here have already lost their leaves. The areas around the creeks and rivers are now filled with the skeletal forms of these trees in hibernation. The rain fell all day and froze to everything in town. Icicles dripped from from every sign, branch, and stationary object. And nowhere did the rain stay frozen like in the dead and leafless trees.
The trees were much like the palo verde in Arizona, exhumed from the desert and resurrected in a crystalline haze, for each branch carried a load of dozens of tiny, shining ice-leaves that grew with the falling rain. The area around this wash, previously washed through in gray, now blended into the cloudy sky and the thin fog that froze in the wash so that the scant remaining halfdead grass seemed the world's only color, like the pallor of gold corroded. It was something I never expected to see in my dreams, a great and simple treat for a desert guy like myself. Perhaps this was commonplace to the locals, if so, all the worse for them.
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