What happens when you take the general creepy scariness of quicksand and freeze it to add the threat of hypothermia in with drowning? Frazil Ice. The video below shows more about it, but basically it’s a giant natural Slurpee that you can fall into, which forms in Yosemite National Park in the spring. Sort of fascinating in its own right, but mostly I think the giant 1,430 foot tall natural snow cone machine at 4:20 is awesome, especially with the rainbow at 5:16. The time lapse at 6:20 really makes the point of how volatile the stuff is too.
(Via Boing Boing)
There’s 8 other videos so far on Yosemite’s youtube channel. I watched a couple of the others, and though not quite as weird and fascinating, they all definitely qualify as gorgeous and at least somewhat informative. Unfortunately, I haven’t been able to find channels for any of the rest of the national parks. If you look around on the National Park Service website, there’s some more videos out there, but they’re a little hard to find and really spread out from what I can tell.
In other news, did you know there’s a National Recreation Area in California called Whiskeytown? There is.
That settles it, I need to go visit more of the National Parks.