It's Official, Winters Here!

I got up this morning and it was obvious that it snowed last night. Not a whole lot, but enough to leave about 1 1/2" on my truck. I made plans with my nephew to go out to his house in Wasilla (about 40 miles away) to install a gate across his stairway in his house. He needed to keep the little ones from taking another tumble down the stairs. It didn't look to bad here in town so I didn't think much about going out there. I loaded up the gate and my tools and took off for the valley. Following is pics that I took as I went to Wasilla.

This is what it looked like when I first left town

This is what it looked like by the time I hit Eagle River (about 10 miles from my house)

10 miles before I hit Wasilla

This is the gate that I built and installed

So needless to say, I think we can say goodbye to summer and hello to winter. Now to get my head all wrapped around the idea of 6 months of snow yet to come.

Significant snowfall due starting tonight

Well, winter is definitely here. It snowed enough to stick Sunday. Made a solid white blanket on the ground. Some of it had melted off by this morning. Here is what I found on our newspapers website today:

As reported by Julia O'malley , reporter for Anchorage Daily News.

Two to 6 inches of snow will accumulate over the next two days, according to the National Weather Service. And it's arriving more than 10 days earlier than the average first snowfall date --- Oct. 17.

Snow totals will be greater at high elevations.

Along with early snow, it's cold. Temperatures have been a few degrees lower than usual.

"Pretty much all of (the lows) are below normal," said Sam Shea, a Weather Service meteorologist.

As much as an inch of snow is expected to fall overnight, and the rest will fall tomorrow, Shea said.

Snow should taper off on Wednesday and could be gone by the weekend, when temperatures are expected to rise back into the low 40s.

The earliest first snowfall on record was on Sept. 20 in 1947. 1950 and 1944 tied for the latest date of first snowfall, Nov. 11.

Winters A Coming

Mornings are a little crisper. Ice crystals are on the car windows in the early morning. You don't linger getting to the car in the morning. It all didn't really hit me until I looked up at the mountains and noticed that the snow is slowly making it's way farther down the mountain sides. It is no longer just at the very peaks and in the deep shadowed crevices. Sadly, summer is over. Fall is coming and going in the blink of an eye. Actually, I don't think that you can say we had a fall. The weather went from summer (such as it was) right to winter.

Some say we'll have snow in Anchorage by Oct. 10th. Some are forecasting a bad winter this year. All I know is, it's going to be cold and more snow than I've seen in a few years. I just moved back up here from North Carolina where the snow hasn't gotten deeper than a few inches in the 9 years that I lived there. It was in 1994 that I last was up here. So my blood is going to have to thicken up a bit.
They are calling for high temps of upper 40's this coming week. I think that I'll throw another blanket on the bed tonight. Well, I was tired of the heat in NC so I'll definitely get cooled off!