Snow Line

Day 85: As someone I knew used to say, "'Almost' don't count, 'cept in horseshoes and hand grenades." Maybe a flake or two fell here in the night, mixed with rain, but the snow line cuts off roughly 500' above me, and that's as close as I've been to snow so far this winter. Now you might be expecting a rant on climate change to follow those words, but in fact, this is more like a normal winter than we've seen in years. By "normal," I refer to my personal recollections and more importantly, to my meticulously kept weather records. 2023 was a bit drier than usual, coming in on the low end of our customary precipitation total, but still within range. There have been many years we've gone without any snow at all at my current location, although that's been somewhat balanced out by the years we've received two or three feet in one weather event. The Pacific Northwe't may be rather on the damp side of the equation overall, but as a general rule, our climate is mild year-'round, grey though it may be. And of course if I want to see snow, it's only a short drive to the Park and a 14,410' Mountain with all the snow you could ever want.

Pacific Northwe't

Day 52: Don't get me wrong. I wouldn't want to live anywhere else, but when people ask if I like the Pacific Northwest, the first thing I do is correct their spelling. It's "Pacific Northwe't," folks. I don't know how that S got in there, but it doesn't belong. Historically, November and March are our wet months. We were close to average in November 2023 with 6.23" of rain (that's 15.8cm to you metric types), not enough to float a battleship but definitely enough to drown a duck. Even so, it's not the wet which sends us natives mad. It's the gloom. I doubt there's one person in a hundred, maybe in a thousand or ten thousand who doesn't suffer some degree of Seasonal Affective Disorder here (that's aptly abbreviated to "SAD"). I have to tell you, I'm anxiously awaiting the solstice. My mind won't register those first few extra seconds of daylight, but my body will. I'll be cheerier by Christmas than I was on the 20th, and by New Year's Day, I'll begin to consciously note that it isn't quite as pitch-bloomin'-bloody-black-dark at 4:15 PM as it was two weeks earlier. Mornings don't bother me. I'm up well before the sun at any time of year, but when it starts feeling like bedtime before I've had dinner, I get a little grumpy. Still, I kinda wish it would dry out just a little, if you know what I mean.

Shadow On The Sky

Day 267: Several conditions have to align for the Mountain to throw a shadow against the sky, and I've been missing the event by minutes on these last few hazy mornings. Today, though, I threw back the curtains at exactly the right moment and, pausing only long enough to appreciate the bonus of fog in the foreground, ran across the road with camera in hand. As the sun crept nearer to the horizon, the shadow began to fade and was nearly gone by the time I'd snapped half a dozen photos. The haze is due to an inversion layer, not the Canadian wildfires. There is some smoke in it from local vegetation fires (Fourth of July fireworks delivered quite a few of those), but nothing like the conditions being experienced in the eastern part of the country. Still, it's been hot and dry with daytime temps in the 90s and no sign of precipitation in the forecast. Fire season is upon us. Please be careful.

Fluffball Thrush

Day 71: The Thrush is back...the Thrush are back...Thrushes are back...dang it anyway...more than one Thrush is back, and they are all puffed up to maximize the amount of air trapped by their feathers, the better to insulate them against the cold. While the principle seems sound, I keep thinking about the reason Pacfic Northwest backpackers choose synthetic-filled sleeping bags: down is worthless if it gets wet, and right now the Thrush is (are) soaked through and through with freezing rain. Watching them run out from the protection of the shrubs to grab seed, only to dart straight back in again sends the train of my thoughts along tracks cut through the Olympics, the Mt. Margaret backcountry north of Mt. St. Helens, and the Northern Loop in Mount Rainier National Park. Oh, how miserable I was, wet to the bone despite good raingear! I can sympathize with the Thrush who only leaves the safety of his natural "tent" for the most urgent of reasons, if rather different from those which compelled me into the storm on those occasions. At least I could take my meals inside.

Snowline

Day 20: So close! And wasn't it just two weeks ago that I was complaining about temps in the mid-80s? This is the view from my front yard this morning, roughly 0.2 miles away horizontally and 500' vertically. If you feel like calculating the hypotenuse, go right ahead. It's too early in the morning for me to engage in mathematical gymnastics. I do believe "autumn" lasted all of three days this year, and while a short "shoulder season" is not uncommon in the Pacific Northwe't, I suspect this one may have been one of the shortest on record. We went from bone-dry to sopping within seven days, the human population exchanging shorts and tank tops for long johns and wool socks over the span of one week's laundry. The forecast shows the white creeping downward, although it still may miss my yard by a margin of a hundred feet. Although I have yet to see a mushroom, the lichens perked up immediately following the first rains. At least somebody is happy for the change in the weather!

All Hail!

Day 184: So far, April has offered up almost every possible scenario with respect to precipitation and temperature, going from 80 degrees one day to six inches of snow 72 hours later. It also gives me the opportunity to recite my favourite bit of weather doggerel.

Whether the weather be cold,
Or whether the weather be hot,
We'll weather the weather,
Whatever the weather,
Whether we like it or not.

Never in almost 50 years of record-keeping have I logged seven consecutive days of snow on the ground in April. A flurry is not uncommon, but an accumulation of half a foot is not. 80-degree days are unusual, but not unheard of, but they have never come tightly bookended by snow. I have tried to explain to people how it is that this occurs, that hotter summers drive more moisture into the atmosphere and hold it there until cooler temperatures arrive, but sadly, many people cannot differentiate between "weather" and "climate," and despite having bought an air conditioner to provide some respite from triple digits in June, when a heavy snowfall occurs, they say, "Look, winters are getting snowier. What's all this silly foofaraw about global warming?" A week, a month, a year does not paint the whole picture. It takes decades to observe what is truly going on.

Sunny Beaches

Day 180: Last Monday, I woke up to an inch of snow in my yard. I commented to friends that it was rare to get more than a dusting in April and, true to form, it had melted off by mid-afternoon. This morning, I have four inches, which must surely be a record. That said, only a week has elapsed, and in the middle, we had Thursday when the thermometer peaked at 80 degrees. It's no wonder this little Junco is trying to find a safe space under the eaves! I thought he was pretty clever to take up a position on the roof of the House of Chirp after discovering that he didn't quite fit on the top of the garage door frame. Alternately, he shelters on the clothesline under my back-porch awning, another spot from which he can keep watch on the feeders or dart out for a quick lunch. I share his sentiments. I'm in a heavy sweater and wooly socks, and when I looked out over the winter-scape shortly before dawn, I too remarked on the sunny beach...or something like that, anyway.

Too-too-too-too-too Snowy Day

Day 132: The internet has gone a bit overboard with palindromic numbers and "special" days like Pi Day (3.14, or better yet, 3.14.15), but I figured I might as well jump on the bandwagon because this morning was "2-22-22" snowy for late February in the Pacific Northwest. A major cold front has dropped down out of the Arctic, so vast that it is affecting the entire northern portion of the US, and extending as far south on this coast as northern California. We're to have possible record lows here, although they missed last night's forecast by ten degrees Fahrenheit. I have no objections to a little snow, but if it really does hit 9 degrees (that's minus 12 Centigrade), it will be a record for the last week of  February at my station, established over thirty years ago in this location. Previous late-February lows have been 11 F. in 2006 and 14 F. in 2018. Thanks, but that's a record I'd prefer not to break!

Coming Down Sideways

Day 78: Quite literally, it is coming down sideways. We had another power outage overnight, but fortunately, the temperature had risen from 22 at 9 PM to 26 by 2 AM, giving me less cause for concern that my pipes might freeze. There are a lot of factors involved in the "worry threshold," but if daytime highs approach 32 degrees, the plumbing is generally secure to a low of 19 as long as it doesn't occur before midnight. Over thirty years of living here, my judgment call is now made largely on instinct based in a subconscious evaluation of conditions. That said, I've been wrong a couple of times and have paid for my error. Only once have the pipes frozen to the breaking point, and that was in my first year here when we had record-breaking cold over a prolonged period. For an introductory winter, though, it compelled me to question the wisdom of being a homeowner at the foot of a heavily glaciated Mountain. Don't get me wrong. I love the snow, even when it's piling up against my doorframes as it is this morning. It's the cold I find myself unable to appreciate.

Warming Up

Day 75: Perhaps I shouldn't have sung quite so many choruses of my snow song. Maybe I shouldn't have put "Let it snow!" in the mini-marquee in the hopes that it would induce a white Christmas. "Be careful what you wish for," they say. My neighbours have given up shovelling, and I've only swept paths to the various bird feeders. Sometimes, there's just no way to keep ahead in the game. Another big dump of snow is possible on Thursday, but temperatures should be rising to give us nights in the mid-teens. On the up side, I predict a drop in daily covid numbers. Ma Nature is doing what government can't: keeping the covey-spreaders home, at least here in the Pacific Northwest.

White Christmas Eve

Day 72: Happy Christmas Eve/Christmas to my readers in various time zones around the world and from top to bottom! My power is back on now after a brief outage this morning when I suspect a branch laden with wet snow shorted out a transformer somewhere. Better now than in a few days when our nighttime temperatures may fall into the single digits (speaking in Fahrenheit degrees, mind you). Yes, the Pacific Northwest is due for a cold snap, the likes of which we haven't seen in decades, dangerously cold when a mere six months ago, we experienced a dangerous heat wave. Trying to explain how this is a symptom of global warming/climate change to someone who doesn't comprehend the difference between "weather" and "climate" is not an easy task, but anyone should be able to understand that when the planet warms up, more moisture is driven into the atmosphere just like steam rises from a pan of water as it is brought to a boil. Then, as seasonal weather cycles into its cooler periods, the moisture falls back to earth as rain or snow. Hot summers are not necessarily followed by wet, cold winters (that's "weather"), but in the long term (decades or centuries), a correllation can be shown (that's "climate"). That aside, it is a white Christmas Eve here today with even more snow in the forecast for Christmas Day and beyond. As long as my lights stay on, I'll be able to enjoy it from the comfort of my living room.

Sailor, Take Warning

Day 46: Let's talk about the phrase, "atmospheric river" for a minute. It's being bandied about here in the Pacific Northwe't again while several more are poised to surge over us in the next few days. The media have only recently picked up on the term and, in true form, are using it to get people all stirred up as if it was something new and dangerous. In point of fact, "atmospheric rivers" are nothing new. They were formerly called "moisture plumes" or "warm sector jets" or "pineapple express" events, but "atmospheric river" sounds much more threatening, and that's a lure the media can't resist. They occur when moisture-laden tropical currents extend their fingers into our cooler northern latitudes. Now it must be said that if a particularly heavy moisture plume stalls over an area, that area is likely to see some hard rain and possible flooding, but these three are expected to be fairly short-lived. The first one has already passed through, and I gathered a modest 1/4" of rain, hardly enough to bother putting on a jacket when I went out to fill the bird feeders. That said, "atmospheric rivers" are often accompanied by strong winds and the inevitable power outages associated with them, so take appropriate measures in case one of them decides to stick around. "Red sky in the morning / Sailor, take warning / Red sky at night / Sailor's delight." The photo above was taken at 7 AM. I've made extra coffee and have meals I can heat on my camp stove.

Weather Humour

Day 246: I don't stand staring at the monitor for my weather station. I check it every day, record the highs, lows, precipitation and peak wind speed, and make appropriate notes on a paper graph of any significant event such as hail or a thundershower. I've been following this same routine for almost 50 years now using a succession of stations. Until yesterday, none had made me laugh out loud.

Yesterday morning was cloudy, giving way around noon to some sun. It was a pleasant day until late afternoon when in the span of a brief fifteen minutes, the skies turned dark and threatening. The beginnings of a squall shook the leaves of the Japanese maple, set the Mountain-ash to trembling. The Grosbeaks beat for cover, as if they could anticipate what would next occur. Suddenly, a torrent spilled from the grey overhead, so violent that after two or three minutes, my curiosity kicked in. I stood up from working on a jigsaw puzzle and stepped over to the weather station, observing that in those few moments, almost a quarter of an inch of rain had fallen. As I started to move away, the display changed to read, "Its raining cats n dogs." Even as I did a comedic double-take, it switched back to its customary verbiage. The downpour was beginning to abate, but continued until the display had cycled through "cats n dogs" a few more times, long enough for me to grab the camera to record the delightful weather "Easter egg" Davis had included in their software. I'm just surprised I hadn't seen it before in the year and a half I've owned this particular model.

Snow Cats

Day 137: Spring in the Pacific Northwest means weather. What kind of weather? You name it. In our history, we have had 80-degree days in February and we have had temperatures below zero (that's 26 and -18 to you Celsius types). We have had three feet of snow on the ground. We have had flood-producing rain. I've never suntanned in February, but then, this is the Pacific Northwest. "We don't tan; we rust," or so the saying goes. And conversely, we have had snow and killing frosts in June. Was I surprised to see snow on my pussywillows a few days ago? Not particularly. Was I surprised yesterday by the pea-sized hail which chattered so loudly on the metal awning over my back porch that it sounded like Animal playing the drums? Nope. I just shrugged and said, "Eh, February." Now that said, February weather is a little more consistent as you move up in altitude, and sometimes the snow accumulation on the Mountain is pretty impressive. Record snowfall at Paradise was 1,122 inches in the year 1971-72. Go on, divide that by 12. That's ninety-three and a half feet of snow (no typo there...93.5 feet)! Of course, that fell over a 12-month period. Currently, Paradise has 212 inches on the ground according to the Snotel weather station. Seventeen feet may not be as impressive as ninety-three, but you can't really dismiss its significance.

Pacific Northwe't

Day 34: There's a good reason you don't see a lot of solar panels on western Washington homes, and you can bet dollars to donuts that the houses with impressive roof arrays were either constructed by contractors from sunnier climes or are owned by inveterate optimists. Admittedly, climate change has extended our nice weather by a few weeks over the last two decades, but by and large, three-quarters of the year could be termed "gloomy" for want of a better word. It's no wonder that so many of us claim to be subject to Seasonal Affective Disorder. We only have two seasons: Tourist, and Miserable. The last week has been one wet push after another, sometimes blustering and blowing for variety, sometimes tempting us out of our dens with "sucker holes," those brief and small windows in the cloud cover where we may get a glimpse of near-mythologic sunlight. No one really believes there's a glowing yellow orb up there. That's as crazy as flat-eartherism. The trade-off is that we're abundantly and profusely green in hue. Our forests glow with every imaginable shade of verdure, never mind that the moss beneath our fingernails and lichens behind our ears may go a little brown during August. While our friends in other states are revelling in sunshine, when it appears here, we natives complain that it is too bright, too hot, and begin counting the days since our last significant rainfall. This, my dear readers, is the Pacific Northwe't, and we wouldn't trade it for all the beaches in California.

Lecanora Pacifica And Friends

Day 108: I'm taking advantage of the shelter afforded by my carport to acquaint myself with the luxurious lichen population growing on the wisteria. I'd never really looked at it closely, and therefore was unaware that its main trunk, as big around as my biceps, shows hardly any bark at all between colonies of assorted Lecanoras and some sooty-black Mycoblastus. Lecanora pacifica seems to dominate, its greenish disks often layering over one another on the shady side. In fact, I've spent a lot of this month analyzing bark and fence rails in my yard, unwilling to brave the incessant rain.

Let me put this in perspective for you. I've been keeping weather records more or less continuously since March 1975, here since 1990 and near Olympia prior to that date. Average annual rainfall at my present location is roughly 45" per year. There have been years when it was substantially lower, and there have been a few when it was significantly higher. We usually get our heaviest precipitation in November and March and occasionally in January. We are having one of those drenching January deviations. There has not been a single day in 2020 that I have not recorded precipitation in some form or another, maybe a few snowflakes or a light shower, or maybe an utter downpour. In any event, as of 1:59 PM today, my gauge shows a total of 10.38". We still have two and a half days to go.

I do not hike in the rain. I did my time in the rain when I worked at Carbon River, penetrating rain which demonstrated that the Goretex of the era wasn't quite as refined as the manufacturers claimed. I often came back from my patrols soaked to the bone and mud up to the neck (or farther). I figure I've put in my share of drowned hours, but now I can pick my hiking days according to the forecast. That's not to say I won't hike in light drizzle, but I will not, repeat not go out in a frog-strangler unless I am compelled to do so by unassailable reason. Today I am wondering: does wanting to kill something count? I NEED OUT!

Bryo Cryo

Day 53: It's cold. Okay, it's only Pacific-Northwest cold, not East-Coast cold, but it's all a matter of what constitutes "normal" for the residents of any given area. I'm sure somebody in Florida would classify 40 degrees as "cold," 30 degrees as "damn cold" and 25 degrees as "cold enough to freeze the balls off a brass monkey," but here in the PNW, 22 degrees is cold enough to justify complaining. Let it drop into the teens, and we go into full-blown weather cursing. Now I happen to know that there are a lot of people out there who believe that colder winters disprove global warming, but they are confusing two non-interchangeable terms. "Weather" is what we get daily. It rains, it snows, we have a dry spell or a heatwave. That's "weather." Climate change is, in a short definition, a long-term shift in norms, e.g., a shift toward lower annual rainfall or hotter summers charted over decades or even centuries. There may be some backsliding in the graph, downturns when an unusually wet summer seems to make up for 20 years of dried-out lakes and glacial retreat, but when viewed from farther back temporally, a shift becomes obvious. Climate and weather are not the same thing, and while thousands may lose their lives in a meteorological event like a flood, a global shift in climate will make its effects known on all living creatures.

Teddy Bear Brights Afghan

Day 131: I am not enjoying being penned in the house by weather, but at least I'm getting projects done. It's wet-chilly, the kind of clammy cold which I am convinced is under proprietary license to western Washington; a cold which goes through all your layers, Goretex, microfiber fleece, wool, polypro, epidermis, dermis, bones. It is not a cold which invites you to hike. A warming pace generates perspiration which in turn chills down without evaporating, demanding that you hike faster and therefore perspire more heavily, and consequently chill down more quickly as your clothing becomes soaked with sweat. It is a no-win cold, an unrelenting, oppressing, weighty cold, a burden not even coffee and chicken soup can lighten. The thermometer (a brazen liar!) reports 40 degrees. It feels like 20, a wet, soggy, sodden, soaking, pervasive 20, but it doesn't freeze. Freezing would be a kindness it would never willingly convey. I don't like stepping out in it even just to fill the bird feeders, so I stay indoors and keep my hands busy with yarn while my thoughts search out lichens in dimly-recalled warmth.

Snowed Under

Day 116 (catch-up post): As many of you know already, we got a wee bit of snow during the night of February 5-6. It continued coming down heavily throughout the day, and finally at approximately 3:30 PM, the predictable happened. The power went out. I threw the breakers as insurance against surges, and sat back to wait. I am always reluctant to start the fireplace because our crews usually manage to restore order within an hour or two, but around 7, cold toes convinced me it was time. I had not yet lit it this season, so what ensued was a 20-minute battle. The tank quite a ways away, and the line needed to be charged. At long last, the pilot stayed lit and I set the flame on low, just enough to take the edge off if I sat close by, "aborigine fire" since it appeared I might be in for a long siege. I closed off the rest of the house and curled up on the couch to sleep. About 3 AM, the lights came on, flickered, went off, came on, went off, came on and seemed to be going to stay on. Power lasted only long enough for me to flip the breakers and get back to sleep, and then it went out again.

When there's no juice, I am not only without heat. I am without water because I'm on a well. That adds another level of inconvenience to what should be only a minor aggravation. Recently when we've lost power, phone service has also been disrupted. It wasn't always that way. As recently as two years ago, I could call in on my land line to report a power outage. Not now. A quick check showed that phone service, both land and cell, were also dead.

During the morning of the 6th, there were several more "on/off" incidents. The longest the power remained on was about half an hour, not enough to bring the house up to a comfortable temperature. During those intervals, phone service remained down. I cooked dinner on my camp stove and settled into what I call "Mowich Mode," hearking back to my days of winter duty at 5000' on Mount Rainier's northwest corner. I put on all my climbing woolies and stayed close to my little "aborigine fire." I had put by several gallons of water for tea, and pulled out my backpacker's espresso maker to have handy when my stash of brewed coffee ran dry. Toward evening, I built a nest in front of the fireplace, stacking fleece blankets on the floor to pad my old bones, my expedition sleeping bag on top, promptly claimed by Skunk. I didn't get to use it. About 7:30, the power came on and stayed on, but even as I write this (4 PM on the 7th), there is no phone service. Other than being colder than I like, this has been a rather pleasant escape from the political situation.

Dry Snow Vs. Wet Snow

Day 64: Western Washington seldom receives well-defined crystalline snow at the lower altitudes (i.e., below 3000' or so). We get amorphous blobs of slush, aka "wet snow." On the other hand, "dry snow" is the rule in Eastern Washington, where there is less atmospheric moisture and colder temperatures. An opportunity to photograph real, honest-to-goodness snowflakes is rare indeed!

Yesterday, just as I was preparing to leave for the Park's Christmas party, a fine, dry snow began falling. In between putting loads in the car, I knelt down in the driveway. Yes, there were flakes on the moss...beautiful little pointy flakes just like those in my 1914 edition of "Water Wonders Every Child Should Know." Did I have time to set up a "snowflake studio" to take pictures? Not a chance! By the time I got home from the party, it was dark and there was half an inch on the ground, not conditions conducive to searching out the perfect flake.

This morning, the question arose: had any of them survived intact? In the interest of science, I put on several layers of woollies, added an additional macro filter (2x) to my camera on top of the 4x I usually use, grabbed a square ofd brown velvet, a foam kneeler, a poky-needle from my microscope supplies and my trusty "tripod," aka the three-volume boxed set, "The Audubon Society Master Guide to Birding." Hey, my lab's on a tight budget, all right?

I soon discovered that it was going to be impossible to identify a single snowflake where they had accumulated in number, so I made a hands-and-knees patrol of the shingle where the snow line met ground protected by trees. Over a run of approximately 70 feet, I attempted to sample several dozen individual flakes, only to have them shatter as soon as I tried to lift them free. In this composite photo, the one on the right was as closest to a "perfect flake" as I could find.