Season of Storms

We were hit with a winter of storms. Any one of them would have been the centerpiece of any other winter and talked about for years. Instead, we had them back to back to back.

November had floods. Two of them, a week apart. The first one was a smaller flood and the weather men said, "That was just a practice run for what we're having next." Nice.

December had subfreezing weather, followed by snow. And more snow and a blizzard. We've never had the dry, dry powder snow here for days on end before. It makes for amazing sledding, but was a complete nuisance in other ways.

Then, we had January. In January we had a flood that was as big as both of the November ones together, which blocked probably a hundred roads or more in western Washington, including I-5. Where I live is along a stretch of highway 202 which was washed out in one direction, and had a bridge threatened with a slide in the other. In the middle, next to us, the creek which runs across our property decided to barf up several tons of rock onto the highway. The result was that no one was going anywhere for awhile. After things calmed down a bit, it was suddenly 15 miles to go into the town 2 miles away. Very annoying.

Since I took way more pictures than I could possibly post on one page and since they are all related in subject matter, I decided to make a dozen or so pages about this winter of storms and have this as the page that they all link off of.

Do enjoy.

Personally, I'm just really, really glad that they're *over*.

Photos: Rowan Ainslie Chisholm (if photo is not otherwise cited), Will McCafferty (Nov 7, Dec 14, Dec 22, Jan 8: Big Flood, late Jan, straight stretch, falls), Meryl Shrenker of the Seattle Post-Intelligencer (aftermath).