Being Thursday it was our day to go to town. We knew it was supposed to snow so we planned to go early and started to leave around 9. Steve looked at his app and said that his said there was supposed to be a break at noon and we should wait until then to go. Its 35 miles over a mountain pass and the weather in the winter up there can be quite bad. About 9:30 it started to snow hard here. In half an hour we had an inch on the ground. My weather app showed it getting worse and I convinced Steve to leave then just in case. So we bundled up and left about 10 AM. As we got closer and closer to the pass it was obvious that the weather was MUCH worse than we thought as this picture shows...
Our Honda CRV has snow tires and does VERY well in the snow. And Steve is a very good driver and usually has no problem driving in it most of the time. Obviously this is a LOT more than the inch we had at home just about 15 miles away! When we got to the pass we could tell they had at least a foot of snow sitting on the guard rails and it was still coming down!
We arrived safely into town and to make things go quicker Steve dropped me at the grocery store while he went to the post office for mail, UPS place for packages and hardware store for straw and feed for the chickens, duck and geese. We were only there a couple of hours. As we were driving home we reached the top of the pass. The weather was worse and they had at least another 6 inches and it was almost whiteout conditions...
Steve was driving quite slowly at this point! But the car was behaving well so other than being a bit stressful and intense it wasn't a bad drive...
We got home safely to about 2 inches.
Up to about 4 inches just before dark...We got all the groceries and packages inside. Steve took care of the birds and we hunkered down. It snowed most of the evening. About 1 AM our power went out. It was only out for about an hour. Then I woke up at 2 when the power went off again. This time it was out for about 2 hours. Thankfully we have a wood stove and a heater that's only powered by propane!
Today it's sunny and the snow is melting off the roof and falling off the trees. We lost power again around 11:30 but it was only out for about 1/2 hour. The snow is wet and the temps are dropping so the trees are heavy with what's left on them. We are fully prepared (well at least as well as we can be) for the single digit temps tonight and the possibility that we won't be above freezing for the next 10 days.
So all of you that had that crazy cold weather the last couple of weeks came back to us right on time. February 1st is usually when we start getting our worst winter weather. After being in the 40s most of the last 2 months it's a bit of a shock but this IS Alaska... And we have to be ready for this kind of weather through April so I doubt this will be the last snow we get. But hopefully it won't be any worse in the future!
Just thought you'd enjoy seeing these pictures.
Stay safe, warm and dry Cherries!
Kristin 
