Confronted by an army of tiny, slanted pillars of frozen sand, carved by the harsh winds on the shores of Lake Michigan, nature photographer Joshua Nowicki knew he had spotted something extraordinary. The marketing photographer, who snaps landscapes for a living, heads down to the lake almost every night in search of opportunity. This particular December evening in 2021, Nowicki stopped by Tiscornia Park Beach in St. Joseph to photograph spectacular ice starting to accumulate on the lighthouse pier, but he found something far stranger. “Waiting for sunset, I was walking along the beach and happened upon them,” Nowicki told The Epoch Times of the otherworldly pedestals dotting the beach like some alien landscape. “I have found them a variety of times in the past … but these ones were larger than usual and there was a greater variety of shapes.” Getting low to the ground to capture their windswept …