Always strive to learn something useful. --Sophocles

(clicken to embiggen)

Why yes, as a matter of fact, we do!

I live at 9,000' in the Lincoln National Forest, which is where the famous Smokey Bear was found ("Only you can prevent forest fires!"). I took this photo of our house two winters ago in December 2018. This was a bit of a surprise storm, it went from nothing to 3-4 feet in about four hours. Completely closed the highway up the mountain, the snow plows just couldn't keep up so they shut it down until the storm moved on, then they cleared up the mess and reopened it.

That's my Crosstrek on the left, and come to think of it, probably the last photo of Russet's Outback on the right as she hit an elk the following October and totaled it. I did take some photos of the wrecked car, so the last photos of her intact car is what I should say.

Most of New Mexico doesn't get snow like this, but it varies. Though a lot of New Mexico is lower elevation and desert-like, there's plenty of mountains and high-altitude. Alamogordo typically gets a couple of inches every year as it is at the base of the mountains that we're on, so it gets splashed sometimes when we get hit heavy. More typically they'll get heavy, sometimes freezing, rain. Las Cruces is 50 miles west from Alamogordo across the basin that contains White Sands Missile Range, and it's very rare for them to get snow, but it does on rare occasion happen. Nothing remotely like this. They're also around 4500'.

The biggest snowfall that I remember was the winter that I was recovering from my multiple pneumonias, 2009/2010. We had something on the order of 12' (almost 4 meters total, maybe more) that year. Fortunately our next door neighbor had a powered snow thrower that I could use without too much difficulty, and I wasn't going much of anywhere. He also had a quad track with a blade that he used to clear behind his cars and he had to drive up through our driveway to get to his vehicles, sometimes he cleared our driveway as a favor. He had a lot of fun riding around on that thing.

This year wasn't much of a snowfall, at least in one dump. It was also a bit on the warm side, so we'd get 4", and it would be gone in four days, this happened several times. We received one heavy snowfall that required all three of us to do some heavy shoveling, and that was accompanied by enough cold that it lasted a couple of weeks before the temperature rose enough to get it melting.

Schnee, up here and in the high elevations you'll see a mix of roofs. As you can see, ours is not particularly pitched, but it is metal. There are many houses that are A-frames and thus steeply pitched. But there are no flat-roofed residences up here, if there are any in Alamogordo, then those people are idiots who love dealing with leaks! Overall, the houses in Alamo are pitched like ours.

If you're interested in some more snow photos, I have some more on my web site here:
http://waynewestphotography.com/gallery/index.php?/tags/25-ice_and_snow

I remember going out during snow storms with a broom to try to clear the dish and the transponder. No more! Of course, the internet connection could drop, but I have over 600 DVDs and Bluerays, plus more on my iMac. And there's always books.



As usual, clicken to embiggen.

We've got a pretty big storm hitting us, dumping a consistent inch or more per hour since midnight or so last night.

A couple more under the cut.
( Read more... )