Dillone

The Icicle on the Mountain

Last spring, I went on a school trip to parts of Germany and Switzerland. I loved every second of it, and when our trip was coming to an end, one of our last stops was at Mount Pilatus (one of the mountains of the Swiss Alps). The weather was perfect; there was just enough snow for playing around and climbing but not too much that you couldn't go anywhere. The temperature was cold enough to keep the snow from melting, but it was still warm enough that we didn't need gloves. There was a huge snowdrift at one side of the platform, so naturally, some of my friends and I used it to climb over the platform and up to another level with a maintenance door and a shoveled out snow cave. While two of my friends were busy making the snow into snowballs for a siege on our comrades below, I spotted this lone icicle, which had held out against the warm weather but, slowly, was also melting. I was enchanted by the solitary beauty and resilience that that singular icicle projected, and I thought it would make a great picture. So I quickly snapped a few until and my friends called me back to help them make more snowballs. We went to the top of the mountain and then went back to the lift to take us down, and I thought nothing more of the picture I had taken.