Winter wonderland at Heavenly Mountain Resort

The word of the day: Pogonip.

That is what gave the top of South Lake Tahoe's Heavenly Mountain Resort the look of winter and fresh snow on Saturday morning.

According to the National Weather Service in Reno, a cloud deck around 8,000-9,000 feet was in place most of the night and the supercooled liquid droplets froze on the branches becoming a thick coating of frost.

Here is the definition of "pogonip" from Wikipedia:
Ice fog is a type of fog consisting of fine ice crystals suspended in the air. It can happen only in cold areas of the world since water can remain liquid down to -40 °C (-40 °F). It should be distinguished from diamond dust, a precipitation of sparse ice crystals falling from a clear sky.

In the western United States, ice fog is commonly known as pogonip. It occurs very rarely during cold winter spells, usually in deep mountain valleys. Ice fog can be quite common in interior and northern Alaska, since the temperature frequently drops below -40 °C (-40 °F) in the winter months. Pogonip only forms under specific conditions, the humidity has to be near 100% as the air temperature drops to well below 0 °C (32 °F), allowing ice crystals to form in the air. The ice crystals will then settle onto surfaces.

The name pogonip is an English adaptation of the Shoshone word meaning "cloud" (payinappih). The English-speaking settlers who encountered this unpleasant and sometimes scary phenomenon when they went out West in the 1800s needed a word for it and they borrowed it from local populations.

Supposedly, western Native Americans called it "frozen death" because it took so many lives from upper respiratory infections.

In The Old Farmer's Almanac, in the calendar for December, the phrase "Beware the Pogonip" regularly appears. In Smoke Bellew Jack London described Pogonip which happened to the main characters, killing one of them.