We were supposed to be getting up to 10 inches of snow today, so I decided to track the accumulation using the stone ram in our front garden as a snow gauge. At the top is at 10:30 this morning, when flakes started falling. I set my phone to go off in an hour, but nothing much happened, as you can see.
In spite of ominous predictions, there was still very little accumulation into the afternoon. Then at 5:00 the wind and snow picked up. I went out on the high meadow behind our house to watch the storm roll in. The mountains across the valley were completely hidden in snowfall and what looked like fog. All color was bleached from the landscape, so that everything looked either black or dark sepia and white. At the bottom of the meadow, down on the valley floor, I walked along a road that skirts a field that cows are pastured in in the winter as part of their rotation. I saw a few cold-looking cows with snow covering their backs. As I walked along the road I noticed a few very small calves among the cows. One baby was dancing and running like a dog, typical of calves, but surprising on such a day. Then I walked through the woods for about 20 minutes-- beautiful!
I got home at 6:00 and drew the ram with his new accumulation. I had expected him to have a pile of snow on his head and back, but was surprised to see that he was also getting buried in the rising snow on the ground.
By 7:30 he was approaching snowman state, and at 9:00 he was draped in a snow blanked and had turned into a lump in the landscape. The snow is tapering off now as the storm moves north. It's in the low 20s here, but no ice as far as I can tell. No one's out on the roads around here, including the snow plow.
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