Freezing Rain; Beauty & Destruction

This freak winter storm, that has kept our temperatures around 20* for several days and dumped 14-17 inches of snow right here in the valley , ends with a bang, as we get an inch of freezing rain to top it off. If you've never seen this weather phenomenon it's hard to describe and yes, even difficult for these pictures to adequately convey. The rain hits everything as rain then instantly freezes. 

Well,it's exquisitely beautiful and amazingly destructive. Some of the large fir limbs that could hold so much snow just couldn't take an inch of ice on top of that and have broken and are just dangling. Our old willow trees {of which we have about a dozen} are just weak limned and couldn't hold up their arms under such weight either.

On this foray out into the yard today to survey the damage and the beauty, we tried to stay out from under our trees that kept shrugging off sudden avalanches of snow and spears of ice as the temperature slowly made its way above freezing.

{I have my own Russian Cossack.} You can tell he knows how much work this is going to be to clean up!