Police arrest ‘Elsa' as prime suspect behind winter storm

After a snowstorm froze over the eastern portion of the U.S., South Carolina police released bodycam footage showing the arrest of a well-known ice queen.

The "rare" footage showed Elsa from Disney's Frozen franchise reveling in the freshly fallen snow that blanketed the scenery around her. Then, she spotted the police -- and ran.

"Freeze!"

Despite the poor choice of words, Elsa soon gave up the chase.

"Come on guys, just let it go," she could be heard saying.

No one was "injured or severely frozen," the Pickens Police Department said on its Facebook page. "Her accomplice, the abominable snowman, is still at large. He has unleashed more snow and ice. Help us find him."

The department used the short parody to include a reminder for motorists to be safe on the roads while driving.

A police officer in Pickens County, South Carolina, tells "Elsa" to "Freeze." (Facebook/Pickens Police Department)

The annual Elsa sighting marked only one of several common sights across North America that give winter its fantastical charm.

In California, fog rather than snow took to the stage to show off a new kind of winter wonderland. The National Weather Service's Bay Area office captured a time-lapse video of dense fog rolling through the North Bay Interior Valleys on Jan. 18, giving the appearance of a flowing sea.

CLICK HERE FOR THE FREE ACCUWEATHER APP

Farther north and to the east, at Tiffany Falls in Hamilton, Ontario, temperatures dipped to 3 degrees below zero, freezing the waterfall solid. While the sight of a frozen waterfall was an incredible feature of the season, so was the attempt made by several visitors to scale the frozen curtain of ice.

Tiffany Falls in Hamilton, Ontario, froze completely solid on Jan. 16, after temperatures dipped to minus three degrees Fahrenheit. Onlookers watched in awe and some even tried climbing the frozen falls. (Vivian Zhu via Storyful)

With all the cliché jokes, whimsical views and ill-advised adventures that winter can bring, the northernmost location in the continental U.S. is making a name for itself for the second year as its residents rely on an opportunity presented only during the winter months.

The cold doesn't bother business owners at Minnesota's Northwest Angle, who found it to be a unique solution to just as a unique scenario. The land of the region is solely connected to Canada, separated from the U.S. by the Lake of the Woods, so when the pandemic caused the U.S.-Canada border to close to non-essential visitors, it also cut the population of a little over 100 residents off from roadway access to the rest of the U.S. It also cut off businesses in the area from most of their customers.

But the winter season means icy roads -- which was exactly what the community needed. A 37-mile road of irony and ice traverses the frozen Lake of the Woods during the winter, providing a lifeline to the community's economy. As of January 2022, foreign nationals, including those from the U.S., are allowed to enter Canada for leisure travel, but only under strict conditions.

Dubbed Minnesota's Ice Highway, the road provides access for residents to the rest of the U.S. without cutting through Canada, as well as for travelers looking to stay at the area's ice fishing resorts.

"They maintain the road very well, and without them, it would be impossible for folks like my wife and I to come up and fish," Jim Jones, a traveler of the ice highway, told AFP.

It takes about two hours to travel from start to finish with a speed limit of 20 mph. The road also closes at night as well as when weather conditions make it too treacherous to cross.

The Minnesota Ice Highway opened for the second year, allowing people to cross over the frozen lake to get to Minnesota's Northwest Angle. (Kerem Yucel/AFPTV/AFP)

There is a financial price to the ice though, as the road costs an estimated $1,500 per mile to maintain, and it costs $250 per car for a round-trip.

The winter season is long from over, especially with the potential for another snowstorm across the East Coast in the days ahead.

The storm begins with a fresh injection of Arctic air plunging into the Northeast, mid-Atlantic and Southeast Thursday night into Friday. Farther south, a stalled boundary is set up from North Florida into the central Gulf Coast states -- a catalyst for the storm so long as enough energy is present.

"Now here's the key: the stronger that energy is, the stronger that storm will be and the more likely the storm will come up the coast and not out to sea," AccuWeather Chief Video Meteorologist Bernie Rayno said.

"No matter what scenario we see, we have to be very concerned about snow and ice once again across the Carolinas. That would be Friday night into Saturday," Rayno said.

With that said, is now a bad time to add Elsa broke out of the Pickens Police Department's custody?

For the latest weather news check back on AccuWeather.com. Watch the AccuWeather Network on DIRECTV, Frontier, Spectrum, fuboTV, Philo, and Verizon Fios. AccuWeather Now is now available on your preferred streaming platform.