Funny! A Winter Mushroom!

This is a few days old picture, taken before the last bout of snow. A car, covered in snow. Snow melts, runs down the bonnet and sometimes you get this:

An ice scupture? An ice mushroom? It will scare the careless mobilist who parks his car here and crashes into it. Although more likely, the snow plow got it first.

Wet snow will turn into ice when cars drive over it, causing un-ruts (whatever is the opposite of  a rut :-) of ice which are hard to remove by a regular snow plow (you need a scraper for that). These unruts, covered by snow were the reason for several crashes while the snow was still coming (I guess there were some pileups too). At least that's what the drivers claimed. And I think I read about a car flipping over a few days later when the weather got colder and the salted main roads started to freeze. Salt does not prevent freezing, it just makes it happen in colder temperature. So one might get that partially frozen, black ice road surface at -20C that we had a few days ago.

Luckily, there is no salt on bikeways so we're spared from artificial slipperyness, although that 15 or 20 centimeters of snow did make riding a bit difficult. :-P