"The sharpshooters on the roof of the White House look like yetis."

By Matt Frei BBC News, Washington

On Independence Avenue the traffic lights are still soldiering on. Blinking circles of green, red and amber are the only flashes of colour in a landscape of furious white with fading shades of grey.

Apart from the traffic lights, nothing and no-one else seems to be working.

The federal government has shut down for the third day in a row. The sharpshooters on the roof of the White House look like yetis.

Even if someone did try and take a shot at the seat of power, where would anyone aim their rifles in this white-out?

When you can eventually make out the White House it looks distinctly off-white.

Dogged snowfall has triumphed where even terrorists have failed: to close down the government of the most powerful nation on earth

It has become the Beige House, its whiteness upstaged by the virgin stuff tumbling from the sky.

We saw a lone visitor on cross-country skis - the only reliable form of transport in this city these days - a policeman who was determined NOT to leave the comfort of his vehicle, a shivering crew from Japanese TV, and Concepcion Picciotto.

You won't have heard of her but she is a Washington stalwart. She has been living on the pavement outside the White House since 1981.

Whether a Democrat or a Republican has been in the White House, a Reagan, a Bush, a Clinton, another Bush or an Obama, Ms Picciotto has been keeping guard in her rag igloo on Pennsylvania Avenue, protesting the nuclear arms build-up and railing against imminent Armageddon.

I asked her how she felt about "snowmageddon".

She looked disappointed, as if Mother Nature had stolen her thunder with a joke.

Huddled in a burka of blankets and plastic sheeting with only her eyes peering out behind a curtain of icicle eyelashes Ms Picciotto continued her diatribe against weapons of mass destruction with only a single intrepid crow for an audience."

Ms Picciotto was not deterred by the inclement weather

"My day will come," she hissed. We made our excuses and left.

Dogged snowfall has triumphed where even terrorists have failed: to close down - completely - the government of the most powerful nation on earth.

My colleague Kevin Connolly, who used to live in Moscow, was astonished that the city had stopped ploughing the roads. If they did this in Russia, the cities would be deserted for months.

The American capital has been abandoned to the elements. It will make tomorrow's clean-up that much harder.

The unmistakeable silence of snow now reigns. The partisan food fight of politics has been replaced by a mass snowball fight on Dupont Circle.

The usually busy M St is a slide-show of a few intrepid slithering SUVs. A conference on the migratory effects of global warming had to be postponed, which is a delicious irony for some.

Some could not resist the temptation of a snowball fight

McDonald's closed its doors at 3pm, which has never happened before. My wife is at home with the children nervously surveying the weighty branches that hang over flimsy power-lines like too many Damocles' Swords.

And the cable weather geeks are staying warm with record breaking hyperbole: 54.5in (138cm) of snow and counting, the most in a season since records began, which was about the same time as they invented the lightbulb; as bad if not worse than the Knickerbocker Storm of 1922... now there's a comparison to conjure with.

Matt Frei is the presenter of BBC World News America which airs every weekday on BBC News, BBC World News and BBC America (for viewers outside the UK only).

And you can hear Matt present Americana on BBC Radio 4 and the BBC World Service every week.

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