I've decided that I'm never going to get caught up on blogging the way I'd like to, but if I don't do SOMETHING, the situation is just going to continue to get worse. For this post I've been collecting evidence and data for a while now. Most of you southerners (meaning everyone in the lower 48) will really like this post. I'm going to complain about the weather. Ya'll know it doesn't happen often, so you might as well bookmark this one so you can find it back again later.
I'll start with this past summer since I'm still in "catching up" mode. It was cold. It was wet. It was frequently both at the same time. I confess I didn't keep track carefully enough to be certain, but I do think we had snow every month this year. When I say we had snow, that doesn't mean we had inches and inches. We didn't even get it under our feet. But that is Victory Peak in the front, Anthracite in the back and both of them had a dusting more times than I care to admit. And if they had snow, it means that it sure wasn't 60 degrees a couple hundred feet below. This picture is from early July.
But we did get some really pretty rainbows! And in this case we even had a double! Pretty stuff!
Not every day was cold. There were a few warm ones as noted below. For some of you, this doesn't even qualify as warm but for me, anything over 70 is a waste of degrees and by the point noted for the record, I'm thinking about air conditioning. That said, I wouldn't have minded a few more days closer to that 70 mark.
The really surprising thing about the weather this year was that it just kept going! We had record snowfall last winter which then melted off in rain this past spring, then more rain this summer, hurricanes this fall and a cold, almost snowless winter so far! Here's a news article about the back to back hurricanes:
The result of all that water was falling rocks, flooding, landslides and roads collapsing. Long Lake had a number of slides and people's cars hit by rocks. The plow trucks stayed busy all summer keeping the roads clear of rocks.
Yes, that's a roof out in the middle of the river.
This slide was particularly interesting.
It occurred just days after they put up this sign. Maybe they shouldn't have put the sign there. Too tempting for the slide to occur once they did that! ;) They have new signs now in addition to these. They say, "Lane edge drops next 21 miles." Those are our roads they are talking about. They don't normally do much road construction through the winter, but the roads have gotten so bad in spots that they are digging up parts of the road to fix where it has washed out underneath. It sounds like they'll start working on permanent repairs this coming summer which will make the trip in to town take longer, but it will be well worth it in the long run!
Apparently we used up our quota of precipitation for the year already though because after the three hurricanes early this fall, we pretty much stopped having any precipitation worth measuring. It just got cold. Which was somewhat fun when the lakes froze. Hard. With no snow. That means you can see down, down, down. That was just plain COOOOOOOOL!!! It was so much more fun to look down through the ice than to skate! We didn't figure out that you could really go out on the lakes until the day before I left for NY so I really didn't get a lot of pictures. Apparently we could have been out there for a while though, because they were driving on it within days of my leaving! We do have a little snow now, but not enough to even go snow machining! We could use a LOT more, both for ground insulation and for snow machine fun!
Evelynn just cracks me up! :)
Despite the wet summer, we didn't miss out on too much gorgeousness! I'll leave you with a few lovely shots and promise to come back with tons more scenic shots next time!
