A Picture Of Resilience: Bizarre Folded Snow
I was walking my dog through the park before work about 10 years ago and saw some amazing resilience. There was no human involved – it was snow!
In the late spring in Colorado, we can get heavy, moisture filled snow. And, on the day of my dog walk through the park, we had gotten gifted by such snow. I was in a hurry to get to work at the university because I was teaching a class and had a trip to Denver later that day (to a nurse-midwifery conference.)
What I saw sitting on the end of the slide seemed surreal. I wasn’t sure if it was a weird phenomena or if I just missed it for the past several decades since I was born. I grabbed my cell phone and got a couple photos – but I had a class to teach so no time to go home an grab a real camera.
When I got to work, I showed some people who thought it looked cool. I decided to send it to a meteorologist from our region who I followed on social media. He thought it was weird enough to post it to his Twitter (now X) account. He titled it “SnowSlide” OMG – by mid-morning, my phone blew-up with people asking for permission to use the photo.
Physics At Work
Before I go on with the viral photo story, let’s look at the snow’s resilience. I was told that the phenomena that I saw was actually a small avalanche. It was an old metal slide and the snow broke away and slid down the slide. Gravity explains part of it – but the snow had a resilience. Physics caused it to fold over on itself rather than just land in a pile at the end of the slide. Here is a definition of material resilience from Penn State University:
“We can define resilience of the material to be the amount of energy the material can absorb and still return to its original state. If we are talking about stressing the material and having it return to its original state, we are talking about the material remaining in the elastic region of the stress-strain curve.”
My First and Only Viral Photo
The photo ended up on websites for every major TV network in Denver. It made a lot of other sites, too. It made Buzzfeed and other such places. Friends would message me when they saw it. It got plagiarized and I had to tell the Facebook cops. Even years later, it made it to Japanese TV.
My favorite is that it made it to the back cover of a book called Complete Pleats that was published in the UK. I got a free copy. It’s about origami! That’s all I ever made off of my viral photo, BTW.
The Dog Ate It: It Must Be Real
A lot of people on social media thought it was fake. So the next year when the heavy snow came in mid-April, I got my dog, Maizzy, and headed to the park. There it was, again – not as perfect as the year before, but it was there. I let my dog eat it to show the world that it wasn’t some kind of fabric. Unlike my student’s homework, I have proof that the dog really ate it!
And, now, the photo lives on as my homepage centerpiece. It is a photo that is resilience itself. Now, that’s resilience!
Ten Years Later . . .
Plus, there are still a few websites with the photo. Here are a few – hopefully, the links hold up. You can also google “Cathy Hartt snowslide” and see what comes up.
You may have seen it around. It may not have been credited, but my dog knows.
Just don’t forget that it is copyrighted! Please ask for permission before using the image.
The photo was taken at Buckley Park in Montrose, CO and the slide was recently replaced with modern plastic playground equipement.
Please share your experiences with witnessing material resilience in nature.
Resilience - The Very Stuff Of Life 
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