April Snow Storm

We are having a rare late spring snow storm. Here is our back deck this morning. There is 12 inches of snow on the ground, and it is still snowing lightly. It is wet, heavy snow. The temperature is 31 degrees F.

Two other late spring snow storms stand out in my memory.

One snowstorm was April 16-17, 1983, and I camped out in it. Here is the entry from my hiking journal: "Sterling Mtn., G alone, overnight. On snowshoes. Up LT. Stayed at GMC lean-to. 16" snow overnight. Down lift line. After mountain closed for skiing."

The other snowstorm was in May, on Mother's Day Weekend, sometime in the 1990s. We were in Ottawa visiting friends that weekend. While I didn't camp out in this snowstorm, one of my co-workers did. We drove home from Ottawa on Sunday through a very snowy northern New York. I later found out that one of my co-workers who lives in that part of northern New York was on a Boy Scout camporee that weekend just across the border in southern Quebec. When she woke up Sunday morning in her tent, she wondered why it was so quiet. It was because everything was covered in snow!

UPDATE 5/10/10: Nancy and I were in Maine for a long weekend, so we missed it, but there was snow on the ground at our house for Mother's Day (yesterday)! When we got home this afternoon, there was just a trace of snow in the shadows. It was completely gone within an hour. Our neighbor said there was snow on the ground for about 24 hours, from late Saturday afternoon to late Sunday afternoon. No significant accumulation, just enough to make the ground white. There was no snow where we were in Maine (Orono). Just a cold rain.