Record snowfall.
Last week, Wenatchee saw a record snowfall: 24" overnight (within 12 hours). According to the Wenatchee World:
Wenatchee received roughly 22 inches of snow between Wednesday evening and 7 a.m. Thursday.
It was the most snow to fall on Wenatchee in 24 hours since 1996, and the weather service indicated it could be the most since 1971. There was a fascinating post about the storm on the Inland Northwest Weather blog. One to two inches per hour of snowfall is impressive. The only place I've seen that is while climbing and skiing in the mountains (and maybe last February at Cosmo's place in Montana?).
That yardstick was on the sidewalk outside our front door. The snow was like powdered sugar.
Backing up a bit, we had started watching the weather a few days prior and were getting excited. First up was the announcement of a Winter Storm Watch.
This aerial photo of Wenatchee from the Chelan County PUD was taken a few days before the storm. We already had around eight inches of snow on the ground.
On Wednesday, the watch got upgraded to a Winter Storm Warning. With the upgrade, the snow totals leapt up as well.
True to the forecast, the snow started falling Wednesday evening.
Before it did, from what we already had on the ground our balcony looked like this:
As we got ready for bed, it looked like this:
When we woke up Thursday morning and looked at our balcony we just burst out laughing. Everything was completely buried and looked pretty comical. The snow was still absolutely dumping. Also, that 18" ruler in the photo above was nowhere to be seen. Proper.
By ten o'clock it started lightening up and we ventured out. K loves to shovel so she got to work in the front. Despite the light snow it was a process.
When she finished that we tagged each other and I went to work on the other sidewalk.
Our vehicles were, well, buried. Luckily the van isn’t going anywhere until spring. The car, however, needed to be dug out.
Time to get to work and carve out a single-lane path down our driveway. Have I mentioned K likes to shovel?
Once we got a path for our vehicles, J demonstrated for us how light and deep the snow was.
The house was buried-ish. It was cool seeing two feet of snow piled up on all the rooflines.
As night fell, we were still out shoveling the driveway and then sledding in the backyard. I noticed the lights of Wenatchee looked cool first bouncing off all the snow and then reflecting on the low cloud layer. I walked up to our cistern to set up my tripod. As I was doing that, something came at me from the left just over my head. Silently, an owl swooped right above me and flew over to land on the light pole next to our neighbor's house. Super cool!
It really was an epic snowfall. The next day, Friday, was sunny. Right about the time for our afternoon espresso the wind kicked up. There were chunks of ice and snow blowing off Old Butte, the little peak behind our house.
Evident in that photo above are some pretty impressive avalanche fracture lines on the left and just under the peak. The new snow was so light and deep it didn't take much for it to slide. Kind of cool seeing avalanches right out our window. Heck, our backyard was avalanching.
That afternoon, as the wind died down the sun slipped lower on the horizon. It was still stormy north and west of us, which provided a dramatic backdrop to the still-sunlit mountains around Wenatchee.
To the south the light was less dramatic; the soft, pale light of winter.
I noticed a deer watching me intently and the Columbia continued on its way to the ocean.
A little over a week later, we have about a foot of snow on the ground and the plows are still moving it around. After being disappointed and not getting much of a winter last year (also in comparison to the two years prior), this winter is shaping up nicely. I don’t want to jinx us, but it's only the middle of January. We're hoping for more of the goods, even if they don't get delivered at the same quantity as this already memorable storm. I can hear ourselves asking, ‘Remember the 24" dump of 2022?’
Yep, we will.
