In this episode, we explore the remarkable diversity of snow and ice, uncovering the hidden science and sensory experiences behind winter weather. From the light crunch of fresh powder underfoot to the glassy threat of black ice, snow isn't just snow—it’s a constantly shifting part of life in the Northwoods. Whether you ski, hike, or just appreciate winter’s beauty, this episode will help you notice the small differences in the snow around you—and maybe even fall in love with winter a little more.

Top Topics:

The Many Faces of Snow:

We start by learning how temperature, moisture, and wind create wildly different types of snow. Whether it's dry and fluffy powder or heavy, wet snow perfect for snowballs, each type affects how we walk, shovel, ski, and play. Discover how temperatures inside the clouds shape the snowflake and why not all snow is great for building snowmen.

Lake Effect and Fern Snow:

Snow isn't just formed in the clouds—bodies of water like the Great Lakes play a big role. Lake effect snow can dramatically increase snowfall totals in localized areas. We also discuss “firn” snow—partially melted and refrozen snow that forms the beginnings of glaciers—and how mountaineers and skiers value it for its firm, supportive texture.

Slippery Situations – Ice and Safety:

From sleet and freezing rain to invisible black ice and dangerous blizzard conditions, not all winter hazards look dramatic. Learn how and why freezing fog and melting snow create treacherous walking and driving conditions, and the best ways to stay safe while still enjoying the season.

Nature’s Winter Artistry:

Hoarfrost, rime frost, and diamond dust aren't just pretty names—they’re among the most beautiful and delicate signs of winter. These phenomena turn ordinary mornings into sparkling fairylands and offer moments of quiet magic for anyone willing to step outside early enough to see them.

Takeaways:

This episode invites listeners to deepen their relationship with winter by observing its nuances. Noticing how snow crunches or drifts, how frost forms on the east side of a tree, or how sleet bounces off a jacket can transform a routine winter day into something fascinating. Winter isn’t just cold and inconvenient—it’s alive with detail, beauty, and opportunity. Whether you're a skier, snowshoer, or sidewalk stroller, understanding snow helps you appreciate what nature is doing right outside your door. The next time it snows, take a moment. Listen. Look. Feel. It might just change the way you see the season.

What are the different kinds of snow and ice? That's what we're going to talk about today. Hi, this is Jill from the Northwoods talking about nature right outside our front door. And if you live as far north as I do, snow is probably right outside your front door. It's not just something that happens once in a while. It's something that happens quite frequently. And where I grew up, which was way up kind of near the Canadian border, all the time. Tons of it. One winter we had it. 310 inches of snow. It was my favoritest winter ever. It's part of our landscape. It's part of how we drive and we walk and we live day to day a good chunk of our year. And once you start to pay attention to the snow, you pretty quickly realize that there's all sorts of different kinds of snow and that they behave differently depending on what temperature it is, the wind, the moisture, and what happens when they hit the ground. And if you ski, hike, snowshoe, live somewhere along a snow You'll notice differences instinctively. You'll notice right away that the snow might feel dry, fluffy, or it might feel wet and heavy, or it can even feel crunchy and crystalline. It feels differently under your boots as you walk. You can hear differences as you walk on it, and those differences kind of matter quite a bit and matter what we do when we're outside. Snow is not just frozen rain. Obviously, you put some water in the freezer, and what do you get? You get ice. But snow's a little bit different. And you have to know that snow is formed a little bit differently. First of all, there is a rain to snow ratio, which means how much snow you get is given from a set amount of moisture. So on a super cold day here up in the Northwoods, we might get 12 inches of snow for one inch of what would have been rain. If it's kind of warmer out, you'll get more like 10 inches of snow for an inch of rain or even less. less if it's even sloppier. So the warmer you get, the less you get. The cold, dry air will mean that you're going to get, like I said, anywhere from 12 to 15 inches of snow with one inch of liquid water. And in warm conditions, it could be anywhere from one to eight inches of snow. So that's where you get a lot, if you live up here, forecasts where it'll say, well, it's going to be between three to five inches. It really depends on how fast the storm system is moving, how fast that cold air from the north is coming, and when those two meet up, where they meet up. And that determines how much snow we're going to get. On Thursday, we just got an inch of rain, and I said to my friend, that would have been a foot of snow right there had it been a little bit colder. Also, that will tell you whether or not you're going to get drifts and blowing snow all over the place, because that's what happens when the snow is dry and fluffy. And when it's wet, it doesn't blow around as much. It also depends on how hard it's going to be disheveled. Obviously, light and fluffy snow is easier to shovel than wet, heavy snow. And the wet, heavy snow can cause people to get injured and end up in the hospital for certain ways because they end up, you know, pulling something or injuring themselves in some ways. And the other part that people don't realize is that the shape of snow is our crystals based on what temperature. they are, especially temperatures inside the clouds where the crystals form. So somewhere around 28 to 32 degrees when it's up there, you get, like I said, this large clumpy wet snow. And around 15 to 25 degrees, you get the classic snowflakes, the one that everyone loves to take pictures of. And they're beautiful little crystalline flakes. But below 10 degrees Fahrenheit, the snow becomes very fine and very dry, almost like sand. And extreme cold snow doesn't always stick together very well. So that's why you don't make snowballs. You don't really make very good snowmen out of them. So a slightly warmer day produces more dramatic snow, more fun snow, and prettier snow. Growing up, you know, in the Northwoods where I did, we had winters, like I said, over 300 inches of snow and snow banks along the street that were taller than I was. The streets themselves became narrow caves. of paths to walk through. I remember one morning I was walking to school and stepping confidently along the snowbank because the sidewalk was under the snowbank. And I hit a soft spot and suddenly I slid right down into the snow. And I realized that this section hadn't packed down in the same way the others do. Snow changes constantly and it changes place to place even when it looks kind of uniform. And when you live in a place with snow, you'll start realizing snow has a little bit of structure to it. There's another kind of snow that's called lake effect snow. And this type of snow is what people hear about a lot, especially around here. We have the Great Lakes. And when you talk about lake effect snow, that is great fodder for that. Lake effect snow happens when cold air moves over a relatively warm body of water. The air picks up that moisture from the lake, becomes unstable, and dumps the snow on the downwind side of it. Namely, namely the east side of it, you'll see it along all the Great Lakes, that if you are on the southern, eastern side of the snow, they can get lake effect snow. So even over here, we might get, you know, maybe eight inches of snow. All of a sudden it crosses over Lake Michigan and then dumps two feet of snow on the other side, right on the other side of it. And that's why places, like I said, Upper Michigan, Duluth, parts of Lower Michigan, Northern Indiana, Western and Central New York, that they can get hammered with snow. While it's just short distance away, they might not see any snow at all. So lake effect snow can create a dramatic difference in just a few miles where one town just gets buried in snow and other places barely see anything. I used to be in the lake effect snow area. This year has been a good reminder that we have seen some really sizable lake effect snows with huge snow totals. So once the snow reaches the ground, it doesn't kind of stay in the same shape. Individual crystals, those little beautiful snowflakes, collapse. They bind together. They refreeze. Maybe they melt a little, refreeze. They compact under their own wake. And it becomes snowpacked over time. And that's where you get something that is called hard-packed snow. That's hard-packed snow. Let me just say it a little bit better. That snow is compressed, refrozen, and is turned into this crusty, Firm, brick-like material. That's where I walked on it. It's great for walking on top of, but it's not great for skiing on. The snow crust is a thin, icy layer that forms along the top of softer snow, and usually, you know, the sun comes out, melts it a little bit, then overnight it refreezes a little bit, and you get an icy layer on it. Kind of fun, like I said, when you're a kid to have that icy layer and play with it. It also twinkles in a very nice way, so it's kind of pretty, too. Then there's drifted snow. And drifted snow is when it blows from one place to another, creating deep piles in one area, maybe on the side of the road. And you might only have like an inch of snow on this side of the road, and you might have huge drifts on the other side because the wind keeps pushing all the snow over there. But suddenly you'll see that the wind deposited. It might be along fences, along the sides of buildings, or just natural bends where the snow just kind of collects in places. And if you don't know, You'll see on these roads where the snow is drifting across the highway, it looks like shark fins. And so we call them, you know, snow sharks. That's essentially it. These little ridges called snow sharks. And they just have like little fins sticking up. But you can tell that's where the wind is really drifting. There's another famous term called corn snow. And this is famous among skiers. It forms on the surface of snow and it melts slightly during the day. Like I said, refreezes overnight. and turns into these little round grains. When the sun warms it again, the surface softens, and it's wonderful skiing conditions. You can ski on it. It's not quite powder snow, which is everyone's favorite snow, and it's not ice, but it's very good skiing weather. I remember a few times I went cross-country skiing. It was funny because I bought cross-country skis. I started getting into shape, and one day on Christmas Day, it was a It was just warm enough to go outside. And I said, you know what? I'm going to take these skis out and I'm going to go. I live like a couple blocks away from a cross-country ski trail. And I thought, I'm just going to try it. I'm just going to see what it's about, see if I liked it. And it was one of the most beautiful Christmas days I've ever had. There was another time I went downhill skiing because I had actually gone downhill skiing a number of times where it was this January day and it was warm. It got up into the 40s. So, you know, the snow was all melty. You almost were a little too warm in your parka. And we were skiing and skiing and skiing. And I had a great time. And then we went in for dinner, came out, the sun went down, and everything refroze. And the first time I decided, after dinner, I'm going to go down the harder hill. I hadn't been on this harder hill. Got up to the top. I went down the harder hill. And the whole thing froze into ice. And I went 9,000 miles an hour down that ski hill and then hit a tree at the very bottom. It was just funny. I'm all like, for a little Get out of the way! And bam! I hit the tree off spine. But, you know, it got ice very quickly. So snow conditions can change rapidly. There is something that is called fern snow. And one thing here is that fern snow, it sounds like a fern, like a fern plant, you know, that's green and springing. Instead, it's F-I-R-N. Fern snow. It's more pronounced, yeah, it's just pronounced a little bit differently. But it is basically snow that survived at least one melt. It's not a glacier yet because we're not quite there yet. But it's much more dense than fresh snow. It tends to form in high mountains and environment area. But this fern snow, I don't know, I'm going to say it differently, is how glaciers grow. They absorb melt water and then refreeze again. And it creates that kind of a stable glacier surface on it. So that's how eventually you become into glaciers instead of just regular snow. Now, downhill skiers and mountaineers value this fern because it's very supportive snow, but it's not icy either. So that's kind of good for the downhill skiers. Then there's something that we like to call in the Northwoods snert. And that means it's snow mixed with dirt. And you see that alongside of roads and parking lots and shopping malls where the snow has been piled up all winter. And then somewhere in May, you'll get this little tiny pile of snow, and it is almost as much dirt as it is snow, and it's kind of brown too. Snert. Not glamorous, but part of winter life here. Snow isn't the only, you know, precipitation that we often get. Sometimes we get something that's called diamond dust. These are tiny little ice crystals that fold in very calm, cold conditions, and sometimes you can even hear them tinkle if you live someplace very quiet. They sparkle in the sunlight, in the moonlight too. And it feels very magical. It's like one of the prettiest things that you'll see at night. I lived in a place that was so quiet that I could actually hear the snow hitting the ground. And it sounded like little xylophone noises. It was just so beautiful. But if you get someplace quiet, you can actually hear that kind of tinkling sound going on. There's sleet, of course, which is ice pellets. And we don't love sleet, but it forms when the snow melts. So think about it this way. We talked about that. All these ice particles are forming in the clouds. It's much colder above the earth than it is at surface level. And then as the snow or ice comes down, it melts in this warmer air closer to the ground. And then suddenly the sleet, you know, is kind of half ice, half water. It bounces, it crunches, and it turns the roads into hazardous areas. Where I grew up, we did not have much of this. It always stayed very snowy. But as you go further south, you get more and more of these mixed types of snow and ice. The first one is called grapple. And grapple forms these super cooled droplets that coat snowflakes and create these small white pellets. They almost look like styrofoam balls. And they just drop out of the sky and this grapple will form. And it's super cool. But it's not exactly sleet snow. It's usually come from high turbulence area. Sometimes we get freezing rain and that happens when the precipitation falls as rain, but the ground is cool, freezes on contact, the cool earth at that place, and it instantaneously coats the trees, the power lines, the sidewalks, the roadways, and it's probably one of the most dangerous winter conditions we have. At that particular point, we may get a lot of power outages. We'll get falling branches because suddenly this branch weighed this amount and now it has this amount of water on it and it cracks. and falls to the ground and the roads become extremely slick and you will see people you don't see a thing it looks um uh what we call black ice where it's very invisible you don't see it at all and then suddenly you're sliding through a red light and you didn't mean to be cars these days are much better than they used to be and driving in ice and snow but we still get uh problems where people slide right through them and i come from a place i've been driving Since I was like 11 years old in winter, I know how to drive very well in winter. But you get a lot of people who don't and then they don't know how to handle it. The other part of it too is that when you get this kind of snow, the sidewalks also look fine and are ice. My friend has a very steep driveway. And there have been a couple times I have gone down on that driveway. One time I hit the back of my head and I saw stars for a little bit. But very dangerous. Like I said, people get hurt. They go to the hospital with broken limbs all the time. Closely related, like I said, is black ice, which is also invisible, and that forms with freezing fog or light melt, and again, you don't see it until you're sliding on the road or on the sidewalks. One of my favorite types of things that we have is called hoarfrost. That's H-O-A-R frost, and hoar is like a white. I think they call it like older people, like in poetry, like the hoary hair, meaning white hair. But it forms these clear, calm nights that we have around here where moisture sort of descends on the surface. Maybe we have like a fog-like situation. Or maybe the air is just very moist, but it never quite got to snow levels. Suddenly it creates these delicate little feather-like crystals on trees, plants, fences, along the sides of buildings, and it's breathtaking. It's beautiful to go out in the morning. It only appears in morning. And you can see this hoarfrost sitting there. I have some, I'll dig up some pictures and put them up here. But you know, hoarfrost is just amazingly beautiful. And once the sun comes out, it melts off the hoarfrost. And so you have to get up pretty early to do it. I remember one time I was driving to one of my birdwatching places on an early Saturday morning, and there's all this hoarfrost. And I looked on the other side of the trees and there was no hoarfrost. But that was because the trees were facing east, where the trees were facing east. The Sun was rising, but still in the west, we still had hoarfrost on the west side of the trees. So you can kind of see it. Direction matters in that particular case. And related to that, we also have something called rimefrost. And that, like I said, forms in foggy, windy conditions. It builds up on the sides of, on the windward sides of things. And so it looks a little chunkier, a little bit more solid. It's beautiful too. Rimefrost is still beautiful, but it's just a little bit different than the sun. than what you get with the hoarfrost. Freezing fog happens when, like I said, you get fog droplets that are super cooled, and as soon as they hit a cooler surface, it just instantly freezes. And so sometimes that freezing fog, like I said, could lead to rime or hoarfrost, but sometimes, like I said, it also can lead to what they call the black ice on roads and sidewalks. And the last thing to talk about when talking about snow are blizzards. And blizzards aren't just heavy snow. It is, It's heavy snow plus strong winds, maybe over 35 miles per hour. And then what happens is the snow blows around and it reduces the visibility to maybe a quarter of a mile. You can't see anything. Blizzards are dangerous because you lose orientation. You can't see the road, landmarks, distance. And they're so cold, so much snow, it's very hard to rescue people in it. So people around here have a lot of warnings when we have lizard-like conditions. I remember once I was driving back from a conference in January and suddenly blizzard-like conditions welled up on this road and you couldn't see the road anymore. We were all driving five miles an hour hoping we were still on the road and not in the cornfield. But it's really quite dangerous to drive in blizzard conditions and so you stay inside. So it's, you know, something that you deal with when you live in the Northwoods. And what's nice about it, I mentioned some of the things, is there's all sorts of different things. things that you can do outside in the snow. There's cross-country skiing. You want that soft, powdery snow, not too wet, not too icy. It's great. Snowshoeing is another great way. Snowshoe helps you keep on top of deep snow and allows you to move through the woods. So if you were a hiker in summertime, snowshoeing is a great hobby for you. It's a good workout as well. And downhill skiing is a big thing around here. And even my friend Em and I, we still go out hiking. You know, we went out to a state park because of the snow. There's a lot of the owls. So we were going out and seeing if we could find some of the owls. And there was a lot of ice on the trails. We were able still to walk on the sides of the trail where there was still leaf material. And so we weren't in dangerous conditions. But you can still actually go out and go hiking too. So there are all sorts of challenging things that you can do out in the snow and still enjoy winter. I was telling my friends out west in California. I say, oh, but you know, you should come here. It's beautiful. And I said, oh, you know, it's first of all, I love winter, but I hate anything that's above 85 degrees Fahrenheit. I am more likely to go out in December than I am to go outside in July. I like the cold and I like the winter. And I think winter is just incredibly beautiful with the snow. And we've had good snow so far this year that I think it's fun. So I guess my challenge to you is, you know, the next time it snows, pay attention. Is it clumpy? Is it Does it squeak? You know, is it drifting? Is it melting? Is it crusting over with that pretty ice layer on it? Maybe even try to catch a few snow pieces on our snowflakes on a dark fabric. You can take a picture of them. If you have a smartphone, a smartphone will do quite well. They're just beautiful. And they're fleeting. You know, you only have them there for a few seconds as you capture them on a dark piece of fabric. But it's one of those amazing things this world has. And I hope you enjoy it. Enjoy it. All right, everyone. Thanks so much. Appreciate you listening, watching. I hope to expand, you know, all of this as we go through small steps so that you can understand and appreciate nature right outside your back door even more. Maybe you don't get snow. Maybe it's a time that you can go on a snowy vacation, rent an Airbnb and someplace that has snow and just kind of enjoy it. But keep in mind, snow driving has a learning curve to it. You don't want to accelerate or decelerate too fast. All right, everyone. Thanks so much. Appreciate you being out there. Have a great day.