Three days of Atlanta snow

Jan 14, 2025

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On Friday, January 10th, Atlanta experienced a rare snowstorm. Sunday, January 12th brought warm afternoon sun, and the brief wintry landscape began to dissolve into memory and mud. But for a few days, we lived in a world of icy silver and sparkling white.

A black-and-white closeup of snow, showing icy crystal shapes in the foreground and fading to soft focus with sparkles in the background — Close-up of snow on the porch railing

The sun still slept below the horizon. The back garden waited, enshrouded in shadow, but white interrupted the pre-dawn darkness. Fast, fat snowflakes fell through the chill, gray air — falling stars from the not-quite-morning sky. Their blurry movement wove a shifting veil between me and the trees. It obscured the black branches that stretched and spiraled like lines of ink across the paper-white sky. It dampened the red on the wings of the blackbirds, my only companions in the garden.

A black and white photo that is mostly dark, with big white snowflakes falling across the image. In the near distance is a platform bird feeder with snow on it and two red-winged blackbirds pecking at the snow (or seeds under the snow) — Snow falling, plus red-winged blackbirds at the snow-covered platform feeder

The day brightened; the snow became freezing rain, yet this did not disturb the snow blanketing the ground. It remained, dense and slushy. As I walked on it, firm walls took shape around my shoes; my steps built structures that stood, straight and strong, long after I had departed.

In my garden, I had looked for color but found a world of grayscale and sepia — an absence of the cardinals, titmice, and bluebirds that typically frequent the feeders. I found instead obsidian blackbirds, the sooty gray and snowy white of dark-eyed juncos, and the pale plumage of sparrows, streaked with stripes the many browns of a winter meadow.

A dark-eyed junco in the garden. This individual has some brown mixed in with the sooty gray and snowy white. Most of the juncos I have seen are less colorful — dark gray with a white breast and belly.

A close-up of a white-bellied sparrow with a bright white throat patch and streaky brown back and wings. The sparrow is standing on snow. The sparrow typically has bright yellow lores (a small patch by the eye), but in this photo, the yellow is not very bright - perhaps muted by the overcast day's hidden sunlight. — A white-throated sparrow in the snowy back garden

In the late afternoon, I left the garden. I walked down the hill to the headwaters of Camp Creek, which flows at the edge of undeveloped city-owned land in my neighborhood.1

Shadow-dark water, gray like the dark-eyed junco, flowed around dark stones half-hidden by bright snow. Snow covered the trash that collects around the creek; the red I saw this day was not from Solo cups smashed into the grass, but from a brief glimpse of a cardinal among the twisted, piled vines of dead kudzu. A curtain of golden-brown beech leaves hung in the pale mist above the creek. Leaves of Chinese privet and English ivy interrupted the pale landscape with the dark evergreen of their leaves.

A photo of a dead tree stretching diagonally across the frame against a solid pale gray sky. A red-headed woodpecker sits in the middle of the tree, black and white body and vivid red head against the almost white, pale gray sky. — A red-headed woodpecker on a snag near the headwaters of Camp Creek

Rusty blackbird near the headwaters of Camp Creek, January 10th

I left the creek and wound my way among neighborhood streets, a meandering long way home. The “tsst!” of sparrows whispered from trees along my route, but I saw few birds — a towhee in a tangle of dormant hydrangea and a secretive brown thrasher, seen only as a flash of beech-leaf golden brown, before dissolving into the snarled sticks of a leafless hedge.

An Eastern towhee - a bird with a black head, back, wing, tail, and bib; white belly; and red along the sides of his body - in the middle of the frame, which is otherwise taken up by bare, light brown hydrangea branches coated in silvery ice — The aforementioned Eastern towhee in a tangle of dormant hydrangea

Back on my porch, I watched the snow catch the light of the fading day; snow had formed a small, soft curve over the dish of the bird bath — a miniature hill, shining with captured sunlight, a small glow in the gloom of a mostly sunless day. As the sun sank, the air grew cold, and I thought, Tomorrow will be ice.

Close-up of an icy shrub with mostly dark purple leaves, though some have faded to yellow or red. Icicles hang from the thin branches, and a patch of snow rests on some limbs just above the center of the frame. — Ice and icicles on the purple-leafed loropetalum in the front garden

Saturday arrived, the day of ice. Lichens wrapped around thick tree limbs, fitted garments of crocheted lace flowers in shades of pale turquoise, cyan, and yellow-green. Ice formed a luminescent layer of glass over the lichen lace; ice coated every leaf, branch, and twig. Ice formed shimmering beads where water droplets had frozen — bringing sparkly light to the overcast day. In the afternoon, quick, strong breezes huffed through the trees, causing the icy branches to crackle; when birds landed on the branches, they sagged, bounced, and creaked.

The birds that seemed to be hiding on snowy Friday emerged on icy Saturday. I spent hours popping in and out of the house, onto the back porch, to observe and photograph my backyard birds.

A male Eastern bluebird, a mostly blue bird with peachy orange-red showing around his neck, on a skinny, ice-coated tree branch. The background is white snow. — Eastern bluebirds brought ultramarine brillance to the gray and white snowscape

A bright red male cardinal standing on white snow, with brown twigs and leaves scattered around on the snow as well. — I was determined to get a photo of a male cardinal in the snow. We have few opportunities to do this in Atlanta. Finally, on Saturday afternoon, he arrived!

The yellow-rumped warbler is, like the landscape, mostly gray, black, and white, but he brings a little bit of color with the yellow patches on his chest (and his rump, though that is not shown here.)

A tufted titmouse on an icy branch. The titmouse is a slate blue-gray bird with a large black eye and a little peaked head-crest. Typically the white belly has some pale peach as well. This tufted titmouse has wet feathers gathered in little peaks, giving the belly an effect of intermingled white, peach, and blue. — This tufted titmouse looks a little scruffy, like someone who fell in the bird bath and hasn’t quite dried out yet. But the scruffiness of the feathers shows blue belly feathers I've never noted before.

A bright yellow pine warbler in the middle of a photo that is otherwise just white, icy snow. The bird is facing forward. — Pine warbler in the snow. Cute, cute, cute!

Sunday brought warm afternoon temperatures; the thaw began. But Sunday morning was still frozen, and I ran outside with my macro lens to try to capture the snow and ice before it disappeared. The icicles seemed to have lengthened overnight — rows of sharp, sparkling spikes suspended from each tree branch like teeth.

A close-up of an icicle against a gray background. The photo shows the shapes inside the icicle, which are spiky lines radiating from a central circle, like starbursts, fireworks, or some flowers. — Close-up of an icicle, with starburst crystal shapes inside of it.

The solid, pale clouds of the past two days had dissolved. Fluffy clouds floated in a blue sky, the metallic blue of winter, with the color and shine of a blue jay’s wing. Against this was a dazzling array of diamond daggers, sparkling all the more in the sun that was slowly destroying them. In the hours I wandered, photographing my garden, I saw the icicles dissolve from crystal claws to blunt sticks and by mid-afternoon, to water on the ground.

Against a beige background, a pinkish-brown and green branch with salmon pink flower buds, coated in ice. A small icicle drips from the flower at the branch's tip. — A blueberry branch coated in ice, with a small icicle hanging from a flower bud.

In the evening, I watched the sun through the window, setting into a soft bed of orange clouds that rested on the horizon. Across the sky stretched layers of thin clouds, a curving, scalloped pattern of mauve. I marveled at the light still visible at 6:00pm, a sky of blue, a shining pale orange, and white, the canvas across which the trees’ black branches sketched thick, overlapping lines.

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I previously wrote about this place in the following essay: