Is Spring Coming?

Well it seems like that crazy little groundhog in Pennsylvania doesn't know anything about the Pacific Northwest. Earlier this week we got another dose of winter. Or as Steve Pool of KOMO-TV described it "not a brush with winter, but more of a tickle."

On Wednesday I drove to Olympia early in the morning to take my mother to a doctor appointment. When I got to Olympia it was snowing lightly. There was a dusting already on the ground as you can see in these pictures:


All day long the weather went from snow to hail to sun and back again. Very crazy! It was the last day of February and it's unusual for this area to get snow in the lowlands so late in the year. Most people are ready for it to be over, but I was kind of excited about it. Check out this video:



I don't like it when the snow gets dangerous to drive in, though. As we drove home from Oly in the evening there was more of the snow and hail, especially between Olympia and Tacoma. This video is a compilation of 4 different snippets taken between Olympia and Tacoma.

In the first piece you can see how the hail is starting to pile up on the side of the road. In the second piece you can hear the hail as it clatters against the windshield. The third piece shows a patch of blue sky in the distance and the hail/snow blowing across the roadway. The last section features the pileup of hail on the windshield. It's so fine it looks like snow, but if you look more closely it appears like tiny styrofoam all piled up. The audio on that one features KOMO radio where they were interviewing callers about snow reports in different areas. Pretty interesting.




Once we passed Tacoma you would never know there had been anything but beautiful sunshine all day long. The road was bare and dry. When we got home to Seattle it was starting to snow again. Turns out that it was snowing heavily north of Seattle and south of Olympia. The towns of Everett (north) and Centralia (south) got 5 to 7 inches each an dof course locations to the east in the foothills (like North Bend) were also blanketed. I hear it was really beautiful, but we missed the worst of it in Seattle.

As the rhyme goes March has come in like a lion. Let's hope it goes out like a lamb!