Tag: Weather

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Watching the weather

The day begins with coffee, Weather Underground, and the crossword. It’s important to know what’s happening outside as you plan the day and week ahead. The high desert  has great vistas whose beauty is in the sky and clouds.

This particular morning there was a notice of thunderstorms on the forecast app. Always on the look out for weather picture opportunities, this storm was scheduled for late afternoon and seemed too good to pass up.

Deciding to document the storm we head east toward the Fort Rock area. This part of the high desert has a great expanse of sky. The plan was to get ahead of the storm and be set up to catch the action.

We opt for the Summer Lake Wildlife Refuge, offering a perfect location, just off Highway 31 near the the town of Summer Lake and to the north end of the town’s namesake.

This put us exactly where we hoped to be…surrounded by storm clouds. Thunder never materialized and for the most part we avoided rain and hail, all the time capturing images of the three or four different storm cells pushing up against the mountains to the east and west of us.

As icing on the cake, migratory birds were paddling around in the water ways. I guess the only down side were black clouds of mosquitoes. Even then the storm’s wind helped disperse the pests.

Finally, on the way back home and closer to Fort Rock, we managed to catch a tremendous sunset. A great ending to a day of weather watching (check out newest photo essay for more images of the storm).

 

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A record snow fall

In a five day period, La Pine, Oregon received 48 inches of snowfall. 12.5 of those inches fell in one 12 hour period.. This closed schools, shut down airports, blocked roads and generally inconvenienced everyone in Central Oregon for the past five days.

Being retired made a huge difference in how we felt about the current blanket of white.

It’s beautiful.

It did mean shoveling out walks and driveways about three times a day, for three days. However, even that was done at our own pace.

Growing up in Montana shoveling, driving and living with chest high banks of snow was normal. It was also 30 years ago and we’d not seen this much snow since.

 

But this is not to curse the winter weather, quite the opposite. This winter dressing is great. Like most of the other things we enjoy about living in Central Oregon, the snow is on that list.

Shoveling isn’t my favorite thing, but it’s done in bursts. It presents time to chat with neighbors, and as stated, is done on our time with a hot cup of tea waiting on the other end.

The other and perhaps bigger issue with this MUCH snow is that poor Tip can’t really get into the woods to do his duty. But even he seems to love racing through the powdery cover, that is until it comes up to his chest.

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A week for weather

It’s been one of those weeks. By that I mean, we have had weather patterns that make it difficult to get out and do much more than just a daily walk.

Snow and rain, alternating with cold snaps, mean roads are difficult to navigate or should I say, passable only if you need to be somewhere. So why bother.

However, we can’t just sit, read, and do the crossword. Well, we can…but for a change we drive north 15 minutes to Sunriver. At the height of the season, Sunriver’s network of trails is clogged with families on bikes, making walking with Tip problematic.

Once late fall comes, Sunriver presents a nearly ideal walking location, with it’s paved walk ways (except immediately after a snowfall) which are plowed and mostly free of ice.

There are 40 miles of paths in the resort, and while most of that is around and through housing units, apartments, and condos, there is a great loop of trails branching out from the Nature Center. A nearly 4 mile loop takes you across marsh land and fields, eventually dropping down to the Deschutes River.

We also have been spending time watching the water fowl that winter over on the pond beside the Nature Center. A Trumpeter Swan, Canada geese and a heron are regulars here. So on weeks like this one, we do our walking in the relative comfort of paved paths.

 

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Summer Lake on a winter’s day

In 1843, John Freemont discovered a valley with an alkali lake. On a December day, Freemont’s survey team clammered down a snow-covered cliff they would name Winter Ridge, into a temperate green valley.

Fed by a small spring, Summer Lake has been as long as 15 miles and 5 miles wide.  However, demands from irrigators and dry Oregon winters have left a much smaller lake and large stretches of muddy shoreline.

Like the Klamath basin 80 miles west, Summer Lake valley is home to a wide variety of migratory birds. This was one of the reasons we drove down Highway 31 past Fort Rock, Silver Lake, Summer Lake and finally to Paisley, Oregon. That day there wasn’t an abundance of birds but we were treated to awesome views of the valley. It was a gorgeous day, kind of summer-like.

 

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Shoveling

Winter in Central Oregon requires you to shovel. The average snowfall in our area is two feet. Although, we got a fraction of that in 2017, the year before saw a roof-bowing four feet of the white stuff.

The previous owners of our house left us a snow shovel, which was nice of them, as it has come in handy.

So far this year, we’ve had a half dozen winter storms. One dropped nearly six inches in one day.  Currently, there is about four inches on the ground, and this morning we had a couple of new inches added. The forecast fluctuates between rain/snow mix up to a foot of accumulation.  It’s been a strange week for weather forecasters in Oregon.

Predictions for this week’s weather… looks like I’ll be using the snow shovel. It’s not as bad as I remember from the Montana winters of my youth.

That said, it is the most shoveling I’ve done in many years.  All in all, we are enjoying the snowy winter weather of Central Oregon.