"The trail swung down upon a wide stony flat where the wind had carved a thousand grotesque figures."

Yesterday night I was driving through the Austrian countryside. It was very foggy, the wind was blowing fiercely from the East, and the temperature was dropping rapidly below freezing. This led to a phenomenon called "Eisbruch" in German : a thick ice layer is building on the branches of trees, sometimes almost two inches thick, causing some of them to fall. A lot of roads were blocked and trains stranded. Were the easterly wind could roam freely, it often formed bizarre shapes such as the one above.
