By Cecile Usdin
1. Snow is tricky. It can only exist upon another particle, pollen or dust usually. It can never be alone. It is codependent, like me. We need something or someone else.
2. Snow is actually translucent. The white color comes from the light bending on the imperfections of each crystal. We can only see it because of its imperfections. Without these imperfections snow would blend in with everything else.
3. Fresh snow absorbs sound. It makes everything quieter, hushed and calm. Once the snow is old, once it's melted and refrozen it makes sound clearer and travels farther. The refrozen snow is tired and loses its ability to still the world.
4. Snow is cold.
5. Snow warms you up. It’s a great insulator, think of igloos, and animals that burrow in the snow. The inside of an igloo can be up to 100 degrees warmer than the outside. The trapped air in snow is what encases body heat. Snow is one big prison, trapping air, light and heat. Sometimes I am my own prison.
6. 93% of avalanches are triggered by the victim or someone in the victim’s party. Things are rarely random, they always have a cause. I am usually the cause.
7. It can never be too cold for snow, and in the right conditions it can snow in 50 degree weather, but snow is also picky, it needs the exact right humidity and precipitation to happen.
8. It can take snow up to one and a half hours to reach the ground. For reference a raindrop takes just over two minutes to reach the ground. Snow takes its time. Hesitant or patient but definitely careful and slow.
9. Snow comes in many different forms, sticky, powdery, icy, slushy, crunchy.
10. When there is a snow storm a whiteout can happen. You can’t see anything, just snow. You feel blind in life, lost, stuck, and hopeless.