Thankfully, this latest storm has brought snow to our mountains. As of 8am, a general 4-5 inches fell at the huts according to the observations and its still near or slightly below freezing at most levels. I bet many areas picked up a healthy 6-10 wet sloppy inches of snow, which is better than nothing I suppose. We are getting colder this week and then just in time for the weekend, it warms up out ahead of out next storm
.
Then next week our pattern does a 180. Keep fingers crossed.
In the meantime I wanted to share a couple interesting things from meteorolgist Todd Gross's website. There is a pic of a cherry tree in
full bloom . This is absolutely amazing.
Also, this comes from an observer who lives in Shrewsbury, Ma, also from toddgross.com.
"I live on the edge of a marsh in Shrewsbury, Ma, and last night
thought I heard a few short peeps late at night and thought " no way".
This evening my "no way" was realized. The spring peepers were out.
I've lived by this marsh for 38 years and the earliest I've ever heard
them before was March 1st. There were also honey bees out, and last
November 20th I removed 5 green frogs from my goldfish pond. This is
not good.
While others are loving this, if my apple, peach and pear trees
flower, my crop's lost when the freeze eventually comes. If this happens
to all the orchards here, there's no fruit harvest, no apple picking.
And if the spring peepers mate and lay their eggs, the eggs will be lost
when the cold weather comes and freezes the water. They will be killed,
and I'm not sure how long a spring peeper lives. And the bees, there's
been a terrible problem with mites killing whole colonies, and I'm
pretty sure the mite die in winter, usually.
I haven't heard any of the other meteorologist even come close to
thinking of these things, mostly chattering off as if this is a good
thing. Having thought of this, I 'd thought of writing to you with these
observation and thoughts. Today it was 72 here where I live, in a
protected area where it's usually a bit warmer. I find this frightening
and am not one to think global warming a good thing.
I hope you find this interesting, and maybe you might pass the
problem these warm days are going to bring us several months away."
http://www.toddgross.com/ where i got this from...
I also had something posted on the website and its below the peeper story.
We really need to pray for winter to come back, and hope that the animals are ok. This goes beyond our being inconvienced with bad hiking weather.
grouseking