The Most Fun You Can Have Sitting Down
Nothing screams fun like tubing down a snow covered hill at exhilarating speeds!
We are the only tubing park in the Poconos with family-size tubes, so your family & friends will have the time of their lives flying down the mountain, together!
Our Snowtubing Park offers up to 22 lanes that are over 1,000 feet long with 3 lifts to take you back to the top.
Snowtubing closed
Snowtubing is closed, thanks for another awesome Winter Season!
3, 4 or 6-hour sessions are available, determined by the day of the week.
Monday - Thursday a 4-hour session is available 5pm to 9pm.
Friday, Saturday, Sunday & Holidays 3 and 6-hour session formats start every hour on the hour.
Advance reservations are highly recommended to ensure tickets for the session you prefer.
Please call Guest Services for more info
610.826.7700
No experience is necessary, just be prepared to have FUN!
Riders must be 36" or taller.
What to Wear Be sure to dress in warm layers.
Snow pants & jacket, boots, gloves, a hat, scarf, good socks, a base layer and mid layer (non-cotton) are recommended.
No ski boots are permitted.
Single vs. Family-size TubesRide alone in a single tube, or with a group in one of our family-size tubes!
Family-size tubes hold between 4 and 6 people.
You don’t even need to be actual family members to ride in a family-size tube.
* Single & Family-size tubes are available Friday - Sunday.
Single tubes Monday - Thursday.
Tubing Release Form
Save time & fill-out the Release Form in advance. This release is required for all tubers, so you may as well do it now!
Take a Spin
There's more than one way to go tubing at Blue Mountain.
From family-size tubes to the solo speedster, you've got to try them both!
Head straight down for a speed-record, or ask for the BIG spin if you're looking for a wild ride!
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Snow Means Death
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"Blondes make the best victims. They're like virgin snow that shows up the bloody footprints."
There are many ideas associated with snow: Tranquility, purity, cleanliness, beauty...
So naturally, many people are shown dramatically dying in the snow. It may have something to do with how red blood contrasts so sharply with white snow, especially when gentle snowflakes are falling around a scene of carnage. It may have something to do with the way the snow seems to try washing away the unclean corpses and ruins. It may have something to do with how it looks like a beautiful and peaceful way to die, just letting the cold embrace you as you fall asleep. It may have something to do with how snow melts on living bodies, but coats those that have passed on.
And then there's the symbolism.
As beautiful as snow is, it also signifies winter, associated with the death of the year (in the temperate latitudes at least), the death of crops, and the death of the sun. , and in Eastern cultures, white is the color of death (as it was until a few hundred years ago in Slavic states as well).
Whatever the reason, using snow is a great way to portray a character on the verge of dying or a place torn by war in a very artful manner.
A sub-trope of . For a different interpretation of snow, see . See
for a similar trope, only applied to clothing instead. May or may not be related to .
Not to be confused with .
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&&&&Anime and Manga&
In , the first scene involves two hands (we are to assume they're Teito's) holding snow. Just as the line The snow was so beautiful...and so merciless appears, the snow immediately turns into blood. We later learn that this was foreshadowing to Teito's 's death.
In , Mitsuru dies when she wears her old dancing kimono and dances "The Evening Crane" in the snow and ends up freezing to death.
In the 2006 version of , this trope is so prevalent that it's hard to pick out which examples fit it the best. The lyrics of the
("Last Regrets") practically announce it. Yuuichi's repressed memories are first hinted at in how much he hates snow. When Makoto dies, the illusion of a green field fades to show that the surroundings were covered in snow. Snow is practically a central theme for Yuuichi's meetings and conversations with Shiori, who is terminally ill. Snow is arguably the cause of the subverted
incident when Akiko's hit by a car that appears to be skidding out of control, and the imagery of the red strawberries thrown into the snow where it happened is painfully evocative. The same symbolism is made brutally real shortly after, when Yuuichi finally remembers what happened to Ayu years ago: she fell off a tree and was left comatose: unable to take any more, Yuuichi runs out into a snowstorm calling for A he runs past the place where they used to play without recognizing it because it's covered in snow. With the snow now falling furiously all around him (just as the deaths seem to be), he lays down and waits to die. The upbeat
about someone trying to find their way home seems to contradict the trope, showing Ayu happily running through the snow - until you find out where she's been all along.
by , makes use of this trope on several occasions. As a young child, Nagisa nearly dies in the snow, thus
events years later in ~After Story~. She dies soon after giving birth to U not only is it snowing at the time, but the snow-clogged streets bring about her death in that they made it impossible to get her to the hospital or to get a doctor to her in time. A few episodes later, when Ushio dies, it is not because of the snow (most likely) — she's been ill for a long time — but the scene does take place in the snow, and immediately afterwards her stricken father Tomoya dies of grief. In addition, in the Illusionary World, the little girl (who is Ushio after her death, minus all her memories of the real world) essentially freezes herself to death in the snow.
by Key with
but on a smaller scale. Yuzuru Otonashi's sister Hatsune expires after her battle with an unknown illness on Christmas Eve.
In , the flashback origin story of Kuze takes place in the Korean winter. Let's just say it sufficiently explains how he became the terrorist leader.
Pulled a 4th time by Key, though much earlier on with . In the finale, The closing scenes of the game reveal that the rain has stopped and the snow is finally falling which represents hope not only for the Junker, but for humanity.
The incident in
where Nanoha was unprepared for a sudden ambush. There was so much blood on her white Barrier Jacket and the snow-covered terrain, while Vita tried to keep her awake in the gently falling snow.
And then there's Reinforce's last moments in . Also snow.
intro. A city in ruins and an , all covered in a sheet of falling snow.
Endless Waltz actually shows how it happened (Heero accidentally blew up an apartment building during a mission... and a little girl and her puppy, whom he had befriended the day before, were among the victims); as the realization sinks in, snow starts to fall.
anime has this one. It starts snowing just as Naomi lets down her guard enough to reveal her real name to Light, who sentences her to suicide. The snow continues as she walks to her fate.
Also doubles as a massive amount of luck on Light's part, as the snow makes Kira Investigation member Aizawa get out his umbrella, obscuring his vision. The guy literally walks right past Light and Naomi without noticing either of them. 'cause, you know, if he did see the two of them, Light's little reign would've ended then and there.
In , the deaths of Zabuza and Haku are marked with the falling of snow. Though this is also partially because Haku's name means white, and he comes from a snowy village...
The first Suzaku Seishi to die in —and by extension the Seiryuu Seishi he did the death-battle with—does so after a bloody battle in a field of snow.
Also invoked when Suzuno and Tatara get . It's snowing in both worlds as this happens, and their souls are reunited in a snowy forest.
Snow falling in summer is taken as an omen of Happosai's impending death in . (He recovers, though.)
to Sara meeting her brother Ralph in the snow in
appears just before they prepare to fight to the death in the present.
In , Tomoe dies in the snow. More exactly, she attempts to help Kenshin during a very unfair fight but he accidentally strikes her alongside the enemy, and she dies few afterwards in the snowy fields.
In , it's snowing once Mitsuki has learned of Eichi's death.
Episode 13 of , as Gren's ship crashes in a snowy field. He doesn't die there, but he starts coughing up blood and is clearly a goner.
At the end of the Galaxian Wars arc of , it starts to snow in the mountains where Phoenix Ikki has just been defeated by the other Bronze Saints. While Seiya and the others hold off Docrates' forces, preventing them from stealing the Sagittarius Gold Cloth, a dying Ikki regards the snow as a symbol of his purification... and then gets up and
to save the Saints' lives, burying everything and everyone in rock and snow. Then again, he IS the
The Asgard
arc happens in a very snowy environment in the North of Europe. All but one of the Asgard Saints die in the snow. Saori herself almost kicks it too trying to sub in for the
Hilda, but she lives to tell.
Similarly, another filler has the Crystal Saint dying in the middle of a snowy and icy scenario, with Hyoga desperately beggging him to live and Yakov and Seiya sadly watch over them. Later, Camus and Hyoga's duel in the Aquarius Temple leaves the whole place covered in ice - Camus dies, Hyoga almost kicks it too but
heals him.
The winter scenes in
portend doom: when she first meets and falls in love with the artist he' later during WWII she's imprisoned for helping him and he gets c during the 50s she tries to find him in the snow fields of Hokkaido and nearly dies. During her actual death
occurred over the course of one snowy night.
The last episode of
for various reasons, Sato and Misaki both attempt to commit suicide at a snow-covered jetty and realise they love each other.
At the end of , the doomed lovers commit
in the snow.
there's a scene where Quent, thinking Blue is dead, lies down in the snow to die. It's a subversion because Toboe saves him by sharing his body warmth. In the final two episodes they and others end up dead anyway, and snow covers their bodies before the titular rain finally shows up.
The death of Tsukiyono's brother in .
scene (which scarred many Latin American children in ) of Nobody's Boy Remi (, based on French novel "Sans famille," by Hector Malot), when the performing monkey Jolie-Coeur dies of pneumonia after forcing itself to perform one last time on the snowy streets.
It soon gets worse, since the already terminally ill
also dies in the snow few later, in an
to save Remi and Cappi (the only survivor out of the animals) from perishing with him. Remi and Cappi ultimately survive since a local family finds Vitalis's lifeless body just in time before the offered protection isn't enough for them.
Stella's burial in . As Shinn carries her corpse around and then , it's snowing.
to The Dog Of Flanders, which can be read about .
: the deaths of Souren Araya and Lio Shirazumi, both villains. Narrowly averted with Shiki Ryougi, who gives up on living right after revenge-killing the latter, thinking her boyfriend was dead.
It snows in
during the deaths of Youko Machi and Kanji Yoshikawa.
In the first
series, the final confrontation with the Dark Kingdom takes place at "D Point" near the North Pole, and the penultimate episode in which the Senshi all die facing the Doom and Gloom Girls is appropriately snow-covered. To fit with the theme, each one of them also happens to die on a mountain-like structure of spiked ice. Usagi herself battles the Metallia!empowered Queen Beryl while standing on a similar ice structure and defeats her, but dies as a consequence of releasing the whole potential of the Silver Crystal. They all get better when said Crystal, acting on Usagi's last wish, revives them (as well and Mamoru) but with temporal .
's last three episodes happen in the middle of Winter. A minor secondary character commits suicide by walking out into a snowstorm, and the truce going on since the first episode is suddenly broken and war finally comes to the small town our heroines are deployed.
In , Sakurako dies this way, slitting her wrists open with a katana and then drowning self in a pond as the snow falls...
: Immediately following Alyssa Searrs' defeat, the Searrs corporation ordered the "termination" of the project Alyssa had been created for due to her failure. This involves firing missiles at most of the main characters. No one actually dies from this, but it begins snowing immediately after. What happens next, you ask? Miyu, the robot girl, flees with a weakened Alyssa, who gets shot while Miyu is fetching water for her. So Miyu takes Alyssa's body, walks into a nearby pond with it, and freezes the two of them at the bottom.
Shows up in episode 10 of
which deals with Sho's sudden death. Shot of falling snowflakes against night sky is used repeatedly.
Mitsuru in
commits suicide by freezing to death in the snow.
The entire Northern Campaign in
. Most emotional was when
scenes at the Tucker house are often shown with the three kids playing in snow. Nina gets turned into a human/dog chimera with her pet Alexander by her father and subsequently killed by Scar, who also kills Shou.
In , the main character kills himself in a snowy night. It also snows when his
Rosemarie visits his grave.
In , as Yurin L'Ciel is dying, she shares a psychic vision of her time on Minsry with Flit. As the vision of Minsry's forest ends, the scenery changes and it starts to snow...
is a series where people fall dead in almost every episode, there are many murder cases that happen in the snow, and where footprints and other signals happen to be totally vital as clues to reveal who killed the victim of the week.
One of the most emblematic cases is The Ski Lodge Mystery, where a
organizes a ski trip with her workmates... to murder two of them, in punishment for
. Both murders happen during a snowy night... And then Conan finds out and unmasks her through Ran. (,
Also weaponized in a filler case, where the
of a famous actress kills her boss via drugging her, putting her
that offers no protection against the cold and burying her in the snow, thus causing her to die of hypothermia. The killer then impersonates her boss until it's time to discover the woman's body in the snow, trying to make everyone believe that she was ... Until Conan (through Kogoro) discovered her trick.
Even more meaningfully, said actress's
was the one of... a Yuki-Onna, who throws herself off a cliff. We even get to see bits of the movie at the start of the episode
Invoked again when Officer Takagi, while he's visiting an old friend's grave in the very snowy Hokkaido prefecture, is captured and put in a very cruel
inside a construction site — where he will either freeze to death, be blown up by a timebomb or be strangled in a makeshift gallow. He spends almost two days like this, and while , he's said to have suffered frostbite and thus had to stay in the hospital for some days. , when Satou, Megure and Conan arrive to rescue Takagi in an helicopter, it actually begins to snow. (And then it switches to , as not only
is the one who rescues Takagi, but once he's saved ...
: There's a legend in a Hokkaido village about a woman and her baby who died in the snow after failing to find shelter. She is then reborn to take revenge during harsh snowstorms.
Toube from
freezes to death after fighting Kamikiri and his pack. The next day, the Ohu soldiers find him...literally frozen to death.
Subverted in : the
Anju Kitahara has a massive heart attack during a snowy Christmas, but she survives. (Barely).
In the final episode of , it was snowing when Renton and Eureka were burying their firstborn infant daughter.
In , the most severe beating that a tiny Soichirou Arima got from his
was during a snowy and cold day. She later threw him out of the house and the poor kid was found bleeding severely in the snow-covered streets by his father Reiji, who immediately took him to safety and then decided to
with his older uncle and aunt.
In , Ryu's mother died when he was young after her car crashed into an electric pole in a snowstorm. It goes on snowing for pretty much the whole chapter in which this takes place.
Barely averted in . When
crosses the
after the accident that took away both
and , she goes to the rooftop of a building in the middle of a snowstorm and attempts to throw herself from it.
catches on her intentions, however, and .
manga, Toulonchamp's goons dump the injured Jeudi and her pet bird Printemps in the middle of a snowy and abandoned place, hoping she will freeze to death since she can't walk away due to her injured foot. She does her best but ultimately gets lost and then a snowstorm rages in. A kind villager and his family find Printemps and then Jeudi just in time, taking care of her until Lundi and General Guisan come for her. As Lundi and Jeudi hug happily, the trope becomes .
In , when it looks like Himari Takakura will actually be , her brother Shouma and his
Ringo quietly lean against each other in the snow.
Mikoto kills the colorless king, and
during the first snow of winter. Moments later Mikoto himself dies.
Ann's mother Miwako commits suicide and is found dead on top of a mountain in the winter when it's snowing quite badly.
In the second season of , the major battles that open and close the series take place during snowfall. All that lovely snow, and bodies of mooks everywhere.
In , Nuriko's demise at the hands of Aishitaire takes place in the snowy north.
In , it was snowing when Donquixote Rocinante, the second "Corazon" of the Donquixote Family, was shot by his older brother Donquixote Doflamingo. As he lay dying, he clung to life as long as possible to ensure the "spell" he put on Law to keep him unheard stayed so Law could escape. He finally died when the falling snow completely covered up his body, while Law's cries could finally be heard, only to be drowned out by the sounds of the battle between the Donquixote Family and the Marines.
The Going Merry's death at the end of the Enies Lobby arc.
In , Kousei retrieved Kaori's letter from her parents in front of her cemetery under the raining snow.
by Victorian sculptor Edward Onslow Ford. A reclinining female nude either asleep or dead in a bank of snow. Because this turned out to be Ford's last work (it was completed posthumously by an anonymous artist) it's often seen as foreshadowing his own early death in 1901 - possibly from suicide, which if true would never have been made public in those days.
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The most famous example of this trope in Argentina is Hector German Osterheld's magnum opus, El Eternauta. There, the first sign of the alien invasion of the Manos and the Ellos is glowing snow that kills within contact with the skin, forcing the protagonist, his friends and family to don radiation suits in order to survive.
The Question in . Renee Montoya drags him through the snow, leaving a question-mark-shaped trail.
The final chapters of , for the big reveal on Laurie's past, and the final fate of one of the mains.
. That Yellow Bastard.
had a bloody elf-troll battle in the frozen north.
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In , this trope is fairly prevalent, as some major character deaths occur in the winter:
In 20XXI, we have Flandre, who dies of hypothermia, after she sets out to find Chen, who had run away, and, later on, we have Eirin who commits suicide in the winter afterwards. It would be worth noting that Reimu was virtually dying of starvation during the winter before Flandre passed away.
In 20XXIV, we have Sakuya's death of radiation sickness occurring in the nuclear winter and later on we have some of Ran's pups dying, as well as the fact that she also miscarries them. On that note, Ran almost died as a result of pregnancy complications during said nuclear winter.
Played with to a degree with Ran and Chen during 20XXIV, in that both attempted suicide in the winter at different points but both survived through some intervention, however, though the latter wouldn't have otherwise.
doujinshii , Ukraine and Belarus's lands are attacked and they have to run away in the middle of the snow. A child!Belarus
for nations, and Ukraine apologizes as she buries her in the snow and keeps running to reach for Russia. She's ultimately caught and cornered by the enemy... and then the trope is subverted as
teenage Russia , but does so via a bloody
against the enemy. The three young nations ultimately survive, despite all the .
"As he wept, my sweet little brother swung his sword. He was just like a winter storm... a winter storm that takes everything".
In the aptly titled'', we have
Rei's suicide.
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Used somewhat more literally in when she uses a cannon to start an avalanche and wipe out the Hun army. Mostly.
Mushu: Did you see those Huns?! They popped outta the snow! Like daisies!
There's snow on the ground of the massacred village. It also starts snowing after Shang creates a memorial for his father.
In , it starts snowing when Leafie sacrifices herself so the weasel could feed her young.
One of the more famous examples is from
in which the titular character cries out for his mother during a heavy snowfall after she is shot dead.
In , there is snow on the ground when Sitka and Koda's mother meet their ends. More poignant, however, is the scene where Kenai confesses to Koda that it was he who killed the cub's mother, and as he does so, the snowflakes being falling around them...
&&&&Films — Live-Action&
In the movie , the protagonist, Joseph Turner (a.k.a. Condor), notices that Kathy Hale photographs and displays only scenes of winter (bare trees, lifeless snow). He comments to her that she is focusing on death, which she confirms.
Not a straight example, but the snow globe in
should get an honorable mention.
The Chinese movie
has the servant Yan'er kneel outdoors in winter until she dies from the cold, while snow flakes fall around her.
also enjoys picturesque death on the snow. Few consider getting the top of one's head lopped off anywhere near picturesque... but
The end of
went from brightly sunlit to a blizzard, just in time for the dramatic death scene.
! ends with the defeated Duke walking through a snowfall, leaving the theater in which the heroine Satine has just died
, where several people die before a snowy background.
Subverted in . Jack does freeze to death, but his expression is anything but peaceful!
Played straight and subverted in . The first time, some survivors have fallen asleep and froze to death while sleeping. They look peaceful. The second time is the naysaying policeman, whose frozen expression is rather pained. But that's what you get for .
One segment of Akira Kurosawa's
features the story of a mountain climber who, trapped in a blizzard and suffering from frostbite, either hallucinates or experiences a visit from a yuki-onna - a snow demon who takes the form of a beautiful woman.
A yuki-onna figures in one of the stories in , an anthology film adapting several Japanese folk tales.
In the 1989 film of , Valmont gets stabbed to death in a midwinter duel. This is pretty much entirely so the director can have a cool shot of his blood splattered across the snow.
is the cinematic tribute to this trope.
depicts children in a horrific bus accident, caused and contrasted by the peacefulness of the snow around them. Snow and cold are used throughout the movie to symbolize the original serenity in the town.
: John shoots himself in a snowy field.
In , the boys are seen in a snowy feild after learning of Neil's death. The sense of hopelessness that scene brings the rest of the film really is incredible.
A less obvious but more literal
moment in DPS is that you see through the window that it's snowing just before Neil shoots himself.
, in the film, after getting wounded in a skirmish between her pack and a group of humans, White Fang's mother limps to her den before collapsing in the entrance, her pup goes out and she gives a farewell lick to him, then it starts snowing.
In , the last two survivors of an expedition to find diamonds in the Siberian forests are already in desperate straits as they are staggering toward the river that offers hope of safety. Then it starts snowing. Not only is the Siberian winter very bad in and of itself, Tanya notes that the winter might freeze the river. Soon after, Tanya dies of hypothermia.
In , where the scientist's wife's funeral is on a snowy day.
The ending of anti-Western
in which John [=], having been shot three times, manages to kill the assassins who are after him. Without the strength to drag himself indoors, he curls up in the snow and dies.
Played with in the 2001 movie . Lou, the heroic beagle, is basically at ground zero right as the main storage tank in a Christmas flocking factory goes bang, generating an artificial snowstorm, and is dragged out of the factory by another dog, Butch...lying motionless on a Christmas Wreath. This movie being intended as a comedy, he got better.
Used subtly in . The movie ends in the snow after the brutal murder of Mr. Baek. White is also used actively to symbolize purity, which is what Geum-ja is trying to move toward.
similarly ends in a field of snow after a similarly bloody climax. It may be used as a symbol for leaving the past behind or renewal.
: is made of this trope, even if it's used for horror and comedy instead of explicit beauty.
In Kunio Watanabe's 1958 version of , the whole film builds to the epic battle in a snow-covered courtyard.
is full of this. Considering it takes place in ...
In , Jack and Jackie are visiting a snowed in graveyard.
An interesting subversion in . The snow stops after George wishes that he'd never been born and only starts up again after he decides that he wants to live again.
takes this literally. The characters are climbing one of them most dangerous mountains in the world, and quite a few of them die, either in an avalanche or on the mission sent to rescue the first team. One of the points stressed by the movie is just how dangerous a thing climbing like that is.
Averted in a Soviet movie : the protagonist is stabbed with a knife, falls to his knees in the blood-stained snow... but he sruggles to his feet and walks away, disappearing in the snowstorm, and we never see him dead.
later stated that the protagonist survived.
In , a few battles set in winter, with corpses covered by snow.
the entire movie takes place in snowy weather, and most of the films violent scenes happen outside in the snow.
In , George's lover, Jim, dies on a snowy road due to an accident.
Both the deaths of a whole band of Shinsengumi and Hama in
take place on snowy evenings.
subverts the trope during the poppy field scene. Dorothy and the Cowardly Lion are overcome by the poppies and it is indeed peaceful...Until snow comes, sent by Glenda, which kills the poppies, wakes up Dorothy and the Lion, andsaves their lives.
In , Jedi master Ki Adi Mundi is leading the clonetroopers in a charge on a snowy planet as
is issued to the troops, with Mundi trying and failing to fight them off.
Soviet film
follows two Russian soldiers that belong to a partisan unit fighting the Germans during . It is deep in the Russian winter and snow is everywhere, which fits the mood of a grim film about death and despair during a pitiless war.
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As already mentioned, Malot's
has Jolie-Coeur and Mr. Vitalis
"" by . The main character gradually falls asleep in the snow after his fire is put out and dies of hypothermia.
The Little Match Girl, which makes , and filled with so much .
The Little Match Girl version is deconstructed in Terry Pratchett's , where Death (who's filling in for the local equivalent of Santa Claus) saves the archetypal Little Match Girl, dismissing her death as needlessly cruel, in the midst of his
a number of Christmastime tropes.
In , the dark pagan origins of the Hogfather (the local expy of ) explain the choice of colours in his clothing: red and white from blood on the snow, ultimately coming from druidic human sacrifices in midwinter to make the sun come back.
- assassinations, murders, attemped lynch and war - happens during the heavy winter.
James Joyce's "The Dead" (from ) may end with the definitive example of this trope. As the protagonist slowly drifts to sleep, thinking of the dead man his wife once loved, snow covers his window and his thoughts. The closing line: "His soul swooned slowly as he heard the snow falling faintly through the universe and faintly falling, like the descent of their last end, upon all the living and the dead."
and her pack encounter a whip-tailed sauropod on a snowy mountain near the end of the book. It does not end well.
The death of Snowden obviously had quite the impact on the narrator of , so much so that the first page of the book asks the question: "Where are the Snowdens of yesteryear?" (a reference to "Ballad of the Ladies of Bygone Times" by Francois Villon). Snowden's last words are, "It's cold." Considering everyone else's name is symbolic, it's fair to see this as an example of this trope.
visits his parents' graves for the first time in Deathly Hallows, accompanied by Hermione. It so happens that they do this in December, and the graveyard is covered in snow. Harry, of course,
(and neither can many readers).
implies this. The
of the series is President Snow.
In Christina Rossetti's , Lizzie reminds her sister of Jeanie, who ate the goblin fruit, but sickened and "fell with the first snow" of winter. (Since Laura has already eaten the fruit, this lets readers know just how much time she has left.)
In , One of Bluefur's kits, Mosskit, freezes to death in the snow when Bluefur is taking them to Riverclan to stay with their father, Oakheart.
In , Smilla sees Isaiah's body in the snow, and her description of his funeral is punctuated by her observations about the snowfall. Of course, the book takes place in Denmark, it's winter, and the narrator is a bit obsessed with snow in general.
Nello and Patrasche in
freeze to death on Christmas Eve.
In My ?ntonia, Mr. Shimerda commits suicide during his first Nebraskan winter.
In pretty much every adaptation of , there is snow in the churchyard when Scrooge discovers his (future) grave.
: "Winter is coming", along with the living dead. And seasons can last for years in Westeros.
In , Kallik had always thought that snow meant plenty of food (especially ). But then she learns from Toklo that for the other bears, snow means less food.
has used the trope on occasion. In addition to
as mentioned above (more so in the book than the film), there is a significant scene in
when Ben is walking home alone on a very cold and snowy day. He meets Pennywise the Clown in his Mummy guise.
takes place during a heavy blizzard. So does . The Maine "norther" weather features heavily as a backdrop. Subverted with
wherein it's a mid-winter thaw that brings death.
&&&&Live Action TV&
In the Joan of Arc miniseries starring Leelee Sobieski, it begins to snow at Joan's execution. Notable because her burning took place in the middle of May.
Spoofed in . In snows the night before Father Jack's funeral. Ted gives a monologue about how it's snowing all over the island. On all the living, and the dead...Then
tells him to Shut the feck up.
Jonathan Kent's funeral in .
by , in which Angel's First Evil-inspired attempt to kill himself is foiled by an inexplicable snowstorm in southern California.
Joss later played it straight in , with Tracey's funeral.
The above is a meta-example, since it was also the very last scene shot .
Brian's Dad's funeral in .
The Cybermen gatecrash a funeral in the snow in
The Next Doctor.
After he has seen Rose in a beautiful white snow scene punctuated with multicolored string lights, the Tenth Doctor struggles over to the TARDIS for his regeneration while the Ood begin to sing to him.
In , after Miyuki Ozu's supposed death, snow fell.
David's funeral in the first episode of Rubicon.
Two episodes of
occur on an ice planet: during these two episodes, Aeryn drowns when her ejector seat lands in a frozen lake, Diagnosan Tocot is killed by a Scarran operative in the cryogenics facility, two Peackeepers are shot in the frozen corridors... finally, the Scarran agent himself ventures out into a blizzard, only to be shot repeatedly by the ressurrected Aeryn and stabbed to death with an icicle.
Averted in any episodes that take place in
, which is essentially a large iceberg floating in a sea of wormholes. In the first visit Einstein does warn Crichton that he might be forced to kill him, but most of the carnage of that episode takes place in the thoroughly non-snowy
Einstein displays.
The brutal, bloody final battle of
happens on the snowy slopes of Mount Kuro.
and Gabrielle on a snow capped mountain in season 4.
"Was it snowing on Mt. Amaro?"
The climactic death scenes on several episodes of . Very tragically, the victims succumbed to hypothermia after having been previously injured and thus passing out in the snow.
episode "Timeless", Voyager crash-lands on a frozen planet after dropping out of the quantum slipstream, killing everybody on board, and is found 15 years later buried in a glacier.
&&&&Music&
The song "Tuonela," by Amorphis, deals with this theme.
"A Dark Congregation" by The Hush Sound mentions mourners throwing roses onto a snowy grave.
by Evanescence
Roman, the 5th album in
is all about this trope given the main character Hiver died as a stillborn baby in winter.
"South Side of the Sky" by , about a party of mountain climbers that freeze to death.
song White Winter Hymnal:
...and Michael, you would fall/ and turn the white snow red/ as strawberries in summer...
The classic French pop song "Les Neiges du Kilimandjaro": "[The snow] will make you a white blanket/Where you will soon be able to rest" (implying that the "rest" in question is of the eternal kind).
"The Blizzard" as sung by Jim Reeves makes explicit one reason why snow is often a death symbol among those who know it: "There's a blizzard coming on, how I'm wishing I was home, for my pony's lame, and he can hardly stand. Listen to that norther sigh, if we don't get home we'll die. But it's only seven miles to Mary Ann's."
In the video for 's "Oh Father", the death of the girl's mother takes place in winter.
&&&&Myth And Legend&
speaks of the Yuki-onna, a female snow spirit that appears during the snow storm and leads travellers astray to die of exposure. Sometimes she might spare them, and once she fell for a young man and married him... but once he discovered her identity, she left in the middle of a snow storm.
Froslass is based on this.
gave us Persephone, daughter of Demeter (goddess of the harvest), both kidnapped by her uncle Hades to be his bride in the Underworld. The rules stated that anyone who ate in the kingdom of death would be trapped there, so even though her mother successfully sued for her return, she had to spend some time there, having eaten some pomegranate seeds (four, five, seven, it varies). So each year she returns, and each time she does, Nature dies. Thus winter. When she comes back, Nature thrives. Thus spring.
In most parts of ancient Greece, they considered Persephone to be gone during the hot, droughty summer, returning during the rainy winter.
Researchers of
believe that the winter was together with death and nightmares a domain of the goddess Morana, in a rather clear association of the snowy season with death in the mind of an inhabitant of central-eastern region of Europe. Inversely, coming of spring was (still is) celebrated with drowning an effigy thought to represent her.
In the myth of Saint Eulalia of Barcelona, when she finally died after all the
she was subjected to, among other alleged miracles snow fell on her torn and mangled corpse to cover it from her executioners's eyes.
&&&&Video Games&
goes on his killing rampage while snow constantly falls down around him.
In , Zelos gives a detailed account of his childhood, culminating in him witnessing his mother's murder in the snow. You get a really clear mental picture from it.
Elise Deauxnim, best known as Misty Fey, Mia and Maya's mother, in the fifth case of : Trials and Tribulations.
The series has a few cases set in the snowbound winter, and since Phoenix's cases are ...
Sniper Wolf in .
And Crying Wolf in . Interestingly, this occurs on the . (However, the entire first game takes place on an island in Alaska, so there's snow in every outdoor area. The first fights against Vulcan Raven and Liquid Snake also take place in the same snow storm, and nobody dies.)
The snow and fog used in the
games (and the ice in ) might be a use of this trope.
Scourge of
make their base in the frozen north and are thematically linked to ice and cold, doubling as .
In , In one of the many endings that feature her death, Kana tells her brother that she will make it snow when she dies. And of course,
White Len, the "evil" counterpart to Len in , specifically makes her zone snow with her dream powers.
The prologue of
initially appears to be . The main character, Hisao, meets his
on a snowy day for a confession of love. Unknown to anyone, . He barely survives, but his old life is over.
: "For the first time in 120 years, snow had fallen on Santa Destroy."
In , if you beat the final stage of Liu Bei's scenario, Cao Cao is seen dying in the snow, with Diao Chan kneeling beside him. Though, there was never any snow on the battlefield before or after this sequence.
Yuyuko of the
is the Ghost Princess of the Netherworld and has the ability to induce death. Naturally, one of the things associated with her is snow, with her game taking place during a long winter. Even the weather effect assigned to her in Scarlet Weather Rhapsody is snow.
the Normandy SR1 crashes onto the surf in one of the DLC missions you can revisit the wreckage and walk through a chillingly beautiful snowscape littered with debris from the original Normandy while collecting the dogtags of soldiers lost in the crash and placing a memorial statue to commemorate the ship.
It's not actually snow, but the way Shepard catches falling particles of the Genophage cure in
is clearly meant to evoke this as a memorial to , , and/or , depending on your choices during Priority: Tuchanka.
takes place over the course of four seasons. Spring and summer are relatively cheerful, fall is when
hits, and winter is when .
In the short adventure game Ulitsa Dimitrova, the
is first a yawn, followed by a shiver, and falling asleep on the ground, before a localized snowfall starts.
In , just after Claire returns to 10 years in the past to die in the lab explosion, it begins snowing.
Snow rather literally means death for everyone in : Dire Grove, where an ancient curse is going to freeze the entire world if it can't be stopped.
Similarly, the broken heart of
threatens to turn the world to ice in the third game of the
In , the player finds themselves in a resort that was emptied due to an unforseen avalanche. It turns out that Otto, one of the people you meet in the game, caused the avalanche via explosion.
In , Mahnya is killed during a battle in the snow.
In , it is discussed by
when Batman, infected with the clown's poisoned blood, approaches the Steel Mill for a second time on his search for the cure. In his intercom speech, the Clown Prince of Crime says he's locked the Steel Mill, then says something along the lines of, "I dread having the thought of you lying dead in the sno-. " Given that it's winter in Arkham City, he seems to be making a point about it.
In , the official fanbook
the executions for all of the kids in the game (some of which were used in the game itself). In one of these prospect executions, Byakuya Togami, dressed up as a hobo, would've been in a snowy place after being stoned by Monokuma and ended up
in the snow as a result of a combination of his wounds and the exposure to the freezing cold.
Red is able to invoke this near the end of , getting admin privileges to a
that allows her to make it snow
after the Process have pretty much wiped out all of Cloudbank.
Averted repeatedly in . The entire game takes place on a perpetually snowy island, and the main character nearly dies in the middle of the forest near the start of the game, but ultimately makes it through. Other than that,
Snowe's parents are instead killed on a floating island paradise completely void of snow, and the bad ending where a possessed Snowe kills everyone happens on a ship fleeing the island (where, if you wanted to interpret the trope differently, Snowe really did mean death.) Then again, as you start uncovering people's backstories, you start finding out that the island has had a very dark and bloody history, possibly making it an indirect use of this trope.
In , if you do not build a heater when winter arrives, your survivors will die from the cold.
In , this is present in the Prologue,
, and Bury the Hatchet.
Similarly, in , when CJ returns to Liberty City later in the game, he shows some Italian mobsters how to have fun in the snow, Grove Street style.
&&&&Webcomics&
: Sakido's death occurs during wintertime on the surface.
On the other hand Rhea, killed during the fall, is resurrected in winter.
During Aggie's
dream in , snow falls. This is significant in that we never otherwise see snow in the comic.
In , snow begins to fall just as Miho prepares to meet her death.
: When the deceased Vriska and
in a dream bubble memory, they are outside John's house in winter with a light snowfall ongoing. In this case, both of them are dead.
A Jade dies well after her land thaws, despite it initially having been covered in the stuff.
&&&&Western Animation&
In the Rankin-Bass
special Nestor, The Long-Eared Christmas Donkey, the title character's mother dies after covering him with her body and keeping him warm for all night during a blizzard.
- black snowfall, caused by the soot put out by their ships, heralds the arrival of Fire Nation forces at both the North and South Pole when they attack the Water Tribes.
&&&&Real Life&
The Battle of the Bulge in .
Captain Scott's ill-fated Antarctic expedition.
Similarly, the various brave idiots looking for the Northwest Passage, most famously Sir John Franklin.
Also Ernest Shackleton. Although he subverted it by being badass enough to get himself and all of his crew out alive.
The day following the Halifax Explosion brought a huge blizzard that only helped to add to the the death toll.
A popular image associated with wars involving Russia, especially invasions of Russia, although averted and subverted more often than many people think.
Averted when Mongols invaded Russia.
King Charles XII's invasion during the Great Northern War ended in utter failure, but the great defeat came in the battle of Poltava, in the summer.
During Napoleon's , the Grande Armée sustained much greater losses on the road to Moscow — partly in battles, but to a much greater degree due to dysentery, typhoid and exhaustion — than on the more iconic Retreat from Moscow.
The biggest and costliest winter battles in World War I occurred in the winter of 1914/15 in territories belonging to Germany (the Winter Battle of Masuren, won by the Germans) and Austria-Hungary (the Winter Battle of the Carpathians, won by the Russians).
When the Soviet Union invaded Finland in the Winter of 1939/40, their forces sustained heavy losses. On the other hand, during the Russo-Swedish War of 1808, a Russian army succeeded in marching across the frozen Baltic Sea from Finland to Sweden.
The Battle of Stalingrad started in August, but in movies and on pictures, you will almost always see the last weeks in January and Feburary, when snow only added to the bleakness of the whole situation.
In Finland, mentioning a drunken person and snow in the same sentence is almost always interpreted as "froze to death", and it is regularly used as an example when explaining to teens why drinking outside during an arctic winter is a .
There is a proverb in Finland Tulis talvi ja tappais k?yh?t (Wish winter would come and kill the poor) which is effectively .
The Wounded Knee massacre, which happened on a snowy December day in South Dakota.
December 29, 1890, to be exact. And South Dakota is known for extreme weather, so when it's hot, it's really hot, and when it's cold, it's really cold.
Heavy snow fell on rescue and relief operations in eastern Japan five days after the March 11, 2011 Tohoku earthquake and tsunami.
Throughout much of history this trope was subverted in that when it snowed the armies couldn't march so countries at war would call an armistace in winter.
"Starlight tours" in Saskatchewan. Sounds poetic.
It's not a coincidence that two of the , January and February, are in the middle of winter. Winter is where movies go to die at the box office.
was fought during a snowstorm, with both armies wading through knee-deep snow drifts. Some estimates claim 28,000 people died there, at a time when that would account for 1% of England's entire population. It was perhaps one of the nastiest battles ever conducted by B even the lower end casualty estimates of 9000 dead are higher than the Battle of Antietam, fought 400 years later with rifles and cannon. Towton, by contrast, was fought face-to-face, with swords and axes and fists.
The Battle of Eylau in 1807, where the snow was also lethal to Marshal Augereau's VII Corps and both sides lost about 50,000 men altogether. Later on, as he came back on the same battlefield in spring, Captain Marbot found it hard to reconcile the beautiful greenery with his very vivid memories of the carnage, and the knowledge that he would have been one of the corpses buried under a bed of grass and flowers if not for a series of lucky coincidences.
The BBC Scotland documentary
presented by
ends with a euthanasia in Switzerland and afterwards Terry walks out of the house, and regards the snow. And remarks it is "good snow, fitting for what has just happened."}