One of the most amazing things I have seen.
A couple of years ago I made a trip to Coeur d’Alene, Idaho. Six hours from Fort Worth to Salt Lake City, a little fuel, then four hours to Coeur d’Alene, adjacent to Spokane. Before that ten-hour flight day, Idaho was just a flat spot over to the side of my map. Not anymore. The memory is of gliding through mountain passes that looked almost like Switzerland, which we had just visited, if you were in valleys way below the peaks of the Alps One of life’s pleasures is to have a good imagination.
The trip also includes one of the most amazing things I have ever seen. The highway I was following split around a mountain. I decided to cruise climb over the mountain and drop back down over the road on the other side. Piece of cake.
Ahead over the mountain there was a thin sheet of rain. It reminded me of a wispy shower curtain. The virga was probably a mile across and maybe fifty feet thick. It started a little above me with a dark well-defined pencil line along the top, drifted straight down, and stirred away before reaching the ground.
Thinking back, the thin rubber seal across the front of the canopy lip must have shrunken a little in the cold.
Anyway, when I poofed through the thin rain curtain, a short blast of moisture whiffed past the canopy seal. The words ‘squeezed” and “accelerated” and “super-cooled “ probably belong in here somewhere. A delicate two-foot, necklace-like filament of ice crystalized just inside the canopy, a couple of inches out across the instrument panel. The tiny chain of crystals drifted toward me. It was just a couple of seconds, but time and the crystals seemed to stand still. I reached out . . . The crystal necklace sparkled there another couple of heart beats and flitted away.
Bill James