We don’t need this! As of 3 pm it’s raining. In North Pole, Alaska, in January. Pity the poor voles. And the snow “curtains” in the second photo have collapsed.
As of 8:37 the temperature is at the freezing point and we have intermittent freezing rain and snow. It is way too warm for this time of year!
The sun will “rise” at 10:30 this morning and “set” at 3:30 this afternoon for a whole 5 hours 5 minutes of alleged daylight. We’re gaining almost 6 minutes a day, now, and the sun is 8 times its diameter above the horizon at noon. I should be able to see the sun from the south windows, once the clouds clear up. Like maybe the end of the week?
We’ve finally had a little snow, though not enough to make up for the settling. It’s also turned warm – too warm for this time of year. No actual icicles yet, but my thermometer was up to 30°F yesterday, which is far too warm when the roads are covered with snow and the forecast calls for mixed rain and snow. I stayed home. Sadly, because yesterday was my critique group – but it’s half an hour away, and the driving conditions were too bad to risk.
The moderate warmth last week caused the thin piles of snow on the raised bed hoops to start clinging together and at the same time weakened it enough that it gradually began to sag over and hang from the underside of the hoops. It didn’t look quite as striking yesterday, as the new snow on the beds just about eliminated the space between the bottom of the hanging snow curtain and the top of the snow beneath it. It’s hard to see from the photo, but the snow here falls so vertically that those thin plastic tubing hoops leave grooves in the snow on the actual beds, as they keep the snow from reaching the bed beneath them. The snow on the two by fours atop the lattice has leaned over on both sides of the lattice this year, giving a scalloped look.
I received the second round of slide digitizations, and once again found out how poorly sorted my slides are. And how much some, but not others, have faded or developed blurriness. I tried to clean this one up with iPhoto, as it’s one of the few I have of Chanty (Deryni Enchantress.) She was only about 6 months old in this one.
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We talk about ‘typical’ weather but I’ve decided there is nothing typical about the weather this past year. Record weeks of rain in the spring, record weeks of heat in the summer… neither of which are usual around here. We haven’t had our usual ten days of cold-for-the-south-coast weather yet either. Today it hovered around zero celsius and snowed lightly for the entire day without accumulating more than a cm at our “higher altitude”, while Surrey and Coquitlam received a significant albeit sloppy dump.
Change of topic. Are you right in North Pole? It’s been decades since I was in Alaska via something other than a cruise ship, but I still have a delightful tree ornament bought in the Christmas store there. I don’t imagine the store has changed much, but probably the area has.
The store’s still there.
I live outside the city limits of North Pole, near Badger road which loops from North Pole to the edge of the army base on the Richardson highway.