All of a sudden, we have precipitation out here in northern California, and you’re getting some yourselves, I learned, reading in the Daily Post about avalanche mitigation at Wolf Creek Pass. Which brings to mind what Daily Post editor Bill Hudson has mentioned in his editorials, about climate cycles being one thing or another, over eons of time… with plenty of rain and snow, sometimes… and dry spells, sometimes, too.
That’s just the nature of things.
So, at least, as folks are getting increasingly depressed about COVID variants, around here and out your way, they’re getting less depressed about the drought. Hopefully, COVID won’t be sticking around for too much longer… while precipitation makes itself right at home, at least for a while.
It’s good to see reporters on TV standing in snow drifts, up in the Sierra mountains, and even making snowballs at Lake Tahoe, and whimsically tossing them at the TV camera, and doing that snow angel thing… I saw a reporter doing that, the other day, on a mountain trail, not all that far from Silicon Valley.
And there was a headline in one of our local newspapers about “relentless blizzards.”
Even at sea level, in a county near our home, water was flowing down a small waterfall.
I’ve got to hand it to a veteran meteorologist on our local Fox-TV station, who said, a couple months ago, that the projections for rainy and snowy weather were looking pretty good. I remember him saying he couldn’t have predicted, with any confidence in past years, that nature would favor The Golden State with much — if any — precipitation, but this winter would be a different story.
Who would have thought that seeing images on TV of the jet stream, and other wind currents, shifting, just enough, from their routes over the Pacific Northwest, over our way, would bring such joy and hopefulness that we might be experiencing, at last, a dent in the drought?
Looking up at — and relishing — dark winter clouds, could this be a sign that a whole lot of other things will be looking up, as well, in the New Year?