Minnesota's giant snow piles haven't melted yet

There is still snow on the ground in southern Minnesota.

You read that correctly. ABC 6 Meteorologist Chris Kuball tweeted a photo of a snow pile, that looks more like a rock, at Marcusen Park in Austin, Minnesota, Monday morning.

The park is a dumping site for snow in the area, Kuball says, and on June 23 there was still a pile of snow that was about 10 feet tall, 50 feet long and 30 feet wide, Kuball said in a Facebook post.

Check out this then-and-now photo:

Kuball says the bottom of the snow pile was undercut by last week's flooding.

Marcusen Park isn't the only place in Minnesota where there's still snow – the Minneapolis-St. Paul International Airport has a little snow left:

Kuball was surprised that the snow pile is still there. He told BringMeTheNews that the snow piles usually melt away by this point in June. For some comparison: In 2011, a giant snow pile that reached the top of the light posts in the Sear's parking lot in St. Paul melted by June 8.

How long these snow piles stick around depends on how much snow the area gets and how warm the spring is, Kuball notes. Austin, Minnesota, got somewhere around 60 inches of snow this winter, Kuball says, and temperatures were cooler than average for much of April and May.

Because of the cooler-than-average spring, snow and ice seemed to stick around Minnesota a little longer this year. Despite record-setting heat in Duluth over Memorial Day weekend, ice was still floating on Lake Superior, which gave Melissa Ellis and her friend Brigitta Keyler an idea for a photo (to the left), that went viral.

Chunks of ice were floating around Lake Superior until the beginning of June, which wasn't really a surprise because of the record-setting winter Minnesotans endured this year. More than 90 percent of the Great Lakes' surface was covered in ice during this past winter, WCCO reports.

In April, there were sure signs of spring when the "Granddaddy" snowman, built by a Minnesota farmer, started to melt. The current status of the snowman is not known.

Minnesota isn't the only Midwestern state that's seen the long-lasting effects of the harsh winter. Michigan's Rocks National Lakeshore, located on Lake Superior, still had snow piles on June 16.