By now a few hundred thousand people have probably seen the photograph of the Jeep Cherokee nose “ice imprint” that we published on the Offroad Xtreme Facebook page last week. It was all over Twitter, and a few other social media sites, and went absolutely viral within a few days. But was it real? Where was it? What’s the real story behind it?

Well, thanks to the Objects In The Mirror, the blog for FCA (Fiat Chrysler Automobiles) we now know exactly where it was, what it was, and that is was not some Photoshop illusion. Yes, it’s real. But even the person who shot the photo didn’t believe it was real at first.

“It did not look real,” said Trista Stiles, a critical care nurse at the Vidant Medical Center, Greenville, North Carolina. “I thought, ‘Woah! This is epic. It’s very, very cool.’” We wonder if Stiles knew at the time she shot the photo, how crazy viral it would go. It was sent to the website of a local TV station, and that’s probably where it began to get its long-distance legs.

It turns out that the Jeep Cherokee belongs to one of Stile’s colleagues, Teresa Lynn Hill, an assistant nurse manager at Vidant, who had left work about 30 to 60 minutes before Trista saw the iced imprint around 4:30 p.m. Hill had warmed up the Jeep’s engine for just a few minutes to get the heater going before backing out of the parking space, and it was enough time to free the ice from the Jeep’s nose, but not enough to melt it.

Trista was just getting off work when she saw the iced imprint and, even though it was about 7 degrees outside, she took some photos and stood looking at the amazing sight for about 10 minutes. “I must say that the kid in me wanted to kick it down” Trista told us, “but I left it up for others to see. It was crazy.”