Well That Was Unexpected

 

Yesterday’s weather report called for temperatures of 25-30F degrees with partly cloudy skies…and winds of only 10-15mph. There was no prediction of any snow at all. Not even a slight chance of snow was predicted.

I was thinking…”Yippee! We’re going to thaw out around here finally”. The sun was shining in the eastern sky and the sky was a beautiful baby blue.

Apache was in her paddock enjoying the mellow morning and I was doing some barn chores, when all of a sudden…..

All Hell Broke Loose!

I felt strong gusts of wind vibrating the barn and very quickly, it became darker within. I looked outside and the sky was full of furiously blowing white snow, blowingly horizontal!

I could just barely see the eastern sky and was surprised to be able to see the same blue sky and sunshine I had just seen a few minutes earlier! But quickly my view was cut off by snow so thick that I wasn’t even able to see my house, just down the hill.

What the heck?! Where did this crazy snow blizzard come from?! Were the weather people playing video games and munching cheese doodles when this cold front storm moved across their satellite equipment?!

We totally were not expecting any snow storms yesterday!

Even Zuni was perplexed!

And the weird weather continued…….about an hour after the mini-blizzard started, the sun came out, even though the snow kept falling!

Apache and Zuni were also confused about such odd weather.

And the rest of the evening, the snow continued to blow until the sun dropped behind the mountains and the sky became dark.

Apache was very grateful to be invited to spend the night in the barn and I was worried about the appointments we had the next day.

This morning, Ranchman John, after driving home from the night shift in the morning, seeing how horrible the roads were, insisted on driving me and our kidlets to our appointments in his truck. And I was very grateful. We had only received several inches from the storm the day before, but  by morning, many of the roads in our area were covered in evil black ice and glistening sheets of white ice!

Where were the road crews that usually do a pretty good job of keeping our roads clear?

I bet they were taken by surprise from this sneaky storm, too!

The county road that goes past our neighborhood is extremely hilly and at one point we crested over a hill and we’re confronted by a sheet of thick white ice on the steep downhill side! We tried going down in low gear, but started to fish tail as we had no traction, so we threw caution to the wind and moved over to the oncoming traffic side of the road, which was almost clear of the sheet of ice. We could see all the way down the hill and could see if any traffic was coming our way, but it still felt disconcerting driving on the wrong side of the road. But the risk was much less than trying to drive on a sheet of ice going down a steep hill, with a stop sign at the bottom.

We finished all our appointments in Albuquerque, which by the way had no snow, nor ice at all, by late afternoon and by the time we turned down our county road all the treacherous ice had melted.  We were relieved, but also feeling concerned and annoyed with the weather folks for failing to report this phantom storm. They’ve always done a pretty good job, until yesterday. So this makes us wonder what other big storms they won’t warn us about in the future.

So, how well do the weather folks in your area score? Do they often make mistakes? Do the mistakes tend more towards reporting good weather when you end up with storms or in reporting storms when you end up with none?