The Year's Most Gorgeous Winter Photos Have Already Arrived

New Hampshire’s Mount Washington, located about 50 miles northwest of Portland, Maine, isn’t a place you’d want to be caught without long underwear. The temperature in the coldest months regularly dips below zero (the lowest recorded was minus-47 in 1934), and foul-weather winds can practically rip a beard off your face (the all-time winner of 231 mph makes most hurricanes look like annoying, household drafts).

While not suitable for shirts-versus-skins football, Mount Washington’s winters and falls are perfect for creating wondrous, CGI-quality landscapes of cloud and ice. Exhibit A is Sunday’s weather, which featured deadly-looking (but in reality delicate) frozen shards and saucer-shaped clouds that appeared ready to suck up some local. The Mount Washington Observatory, a nonprofit science institution that maintains a weather station 6,288 feet up on the summit, caught it all on camera: