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I know it's just we've gotten spoiled by low key winters, but I was thinking of the Vernor Vinge novel "A Deepness in the Sky", [minor spoilers] where the spider like aliens live on a planet around a start that is basically "off" for 215 years of a 250 year cycle, and the entire civilization goes into a deep freeze - it's so cold that the atmosphere condenses:

"What do you expect to see with a natural view? Most of what is sticking up is mountaintops. And farther down is covered by meters of oxy-nitrogen snow." A full terrestrial atmosphere froze down to about ten meters of airsnow--if it was evenly distributed. Many of the most likely city sites--harbors, river joins--were under dozens of meters of the cold stuff.

Parts of the book were so evocatively written that the imagery has stuck with me - aliens figuring out ways to un-hibernate early, and tromp around in ways akin to humans moon landing and exploration.

But then again, I guess you don't have to look so far for vast blocks of cold stuff - 20,000 years ago lots of North America, including the nothern United States, was under a mile or two of ice. That's scary and mindblowing.