The addition of a smokestack to a lighthouse in St. Joseph, Michigan, led some to describe the building as “unsightly,” per the AP. It was anything but on Thursday, after the area was hit with chilly weather.
In a video captured by photographer Joshua Nowicki, the outer portion of the lighthouse is seen entirely caked in ice as furious waves spit water in all directions on the south shore of Lake Michigan.
The video has now been viewed more than 1 million times, reports Mashable, which notes the lighthouse “looks straight out of a fairy tale,” though it was ice-free a day earlier.
“It’s so beautiful and unbelievable that it’s hard to believe there’s no CGI involved,” adds Thrillist. “If it weren’t for the seagulls flying by, it could be mistaken for a scale model,” notes a Facebook user.
Nowicki, meanwhile, says the lighthouse resembled “an ice monster” with “one gnarly ice beard.” He also shows dozens of photos of the lighthouse on his Facebook page.
The detail of the ice is more visible in a separate video shot on Friday by the Great Lakes Drone Company.
It shows the ice stretching all the way to the inner lighthouse, where that “unsightly” smokestack was added this summer to improve air circulation. An original smokestack for coal-fired boilers had stood from 1907 to 1949 following the lighthouse’s construction in 1859.
It is now “one of the Great Lake’s last remaining pier range light systems,” according to its website.
(Check out this smiling volcano.)
This article originally appeared on Newser: Frozen Michigan Lighthouse Looks Out of This World
