21. more snow

As you probably saw from my last post, we were relieved to get through our first snowfall of the year. We were still nervous, however, because it wasn't a huge storm and we didn't know what it would be like after the snow really started to pile up.

I'm relieved to say that we are feeling much more confident after this past week!

Last weekend we started getting dire warnings about a MAJOR snow system coming our way from Tuesday through Saturday. I took it slow driving home on Tuesday night, and also left plenty of extra time driving in on Wednesday. It wasn't too bad, as long as I wasn't tempted to go faster than I wanted when other cars came careening past me! I wanted to be safe, thank you very much. On Wednesday I got a hotel room in town, and I was glad I did because there was a multi-vehicle crash on the bridge leading out of town. On Thursday I again took it really slow, particularly as I anticipated each bridge. Terrifyingly, I saw an accident that had just happened (I didn't witness it, but the family was still in the vehicle and totally shook up when I stopped to call 911 for them), and about 3 more crashes (all on bridges through the canyon) before I got to my parking lot to switch from my Impreza to my full-size pick-up with the studded tires. But getting up the mountain was a breeze!

Thankfully no one was hurt!

Friday I again took it slow (and slower still on the bridges), but I ended up having a delightfully uneventful ride to/from work. And when I got home from Friday night, I proclaimed that we would not be leaving the mountain until work/school on Monday. It was so beautiful!

Kid and Dog spent lots of time sledding

We visited with several neighbors today, and cautiously tried to probe about how typical this amount of snow is. (We had to have gotten at least a foot.) Thankfully, we were reassured that this much snow is VERY unusual for any given storm, and that we could still expect the Chinooks to melt the snow at least a few times throughout the winter. One neighbor showed us photos of the January that he broke ground on his house and there was no snow on the ground until the February photos when they were putting the walls up!

We know that weather can be fickle, but we are definitely relieved that our trucks handled the snow just fine (although we did put the chains on today, just to make sure we knew how to do it, even though it wasn't really necessary) and that my little Impreza will be fine as long as we're cautious on the interstate. It feels like a huge hurdle crossed to realize that we don't have to worry quite so much about winter snow any more!