The land here is flat and the streets laid out on a grid.  The Chicago metropolitan area may be the biggest, flattest grid on Earth.          

        As soon as I started walking to Lake Michigan yesterday, I could see atypical spray shooting into the air five blocks away, as though waves were smashing into a cliff.

        When I got down to our South Beach, it being the southern most beach in Evanston--the next beach is in Chicago--I found that the narrow strip of sand no longer sloped gradually to the water’s edge, but ended in a six to seven foot high quarter mile long ridge of ice.  This has not happened before during our winters here, and must be due to prolonged temperatures just below freezing; warm enough so that the lake water remained liquid, but the spray froze on the colder land. 

        I climbed to the top for a better view.

        On the other side were small ice floats and thousands of ‘bergy bits’.  Our own mini-Antarctica beyond Mount Evanston.

        Getting down was more difficult than getting up.