This past week, I went way up north in Japan where it is very cold and snowy! I got to see many trees covered in thick blankets of snow. This is very different than what we are used to seeing on Maui, where the palm trees grow at the beach and the leaves stay green all year round. Some of these trees had so much heavy snow on the branches that they were starting to bend or even break!
The trees themselves looked like regular trees; some had kept their leaves while others had shed all of their leaves for winter, leaving only bare branches. Meanwhile, other trees had fruits still on their branches. Some were very, very tall and others were still quite small. The thing that they all had in common was that they all had a bunch of snow sticking to anything that it could on the trees.
When I first saw this, I was so shocked! I had never seen so much snow in my life and I almost felt bad for some of the trees. Snow can be very heavy, and when it collects on the branches of the trees and piles up, it can get very, very heavy for the tree branches. At first, the tree branches will just bend to hold the weight of the snow; but if it keeps on building up, then eventually the branches of the trees can snap!
