1st draft          <---- click there for the first draft of my essay. The following is the final draft.

 

 

"Today's forecast is for lots of sunshine"

 

by Josh Farber

 

"Tomorrow will be sunny with highs in the low to mid thirties" the weatherman said on the 6:00 news.  A normal mid-winter weekend day is about to occur.  Wake up relatively early so I can hit the slopes of Sugarbush.  A sunny day with comfortable temps, sounds good, right? 

 

 

I set my alarm for 6:45, but of course I sleep right through it.  I wake up at 9:15, have breakfast, check the snow report, shower...  The snow report says 111/111 trails, 16/16 lifts, Packed Powder,  sunny with highs in the low 30s at the base and low 20s at the summit...  I look out the window and see nothing but sunshine.

 

 

When I finally get to the mountain at 10:30 it is a bluebird day (no clouds), mid 20s for temperatures but warming, just what the weather forecast said.  I hop on the Super Bravo chair and take a few runs.  Later after lunch, a few clouds roll in overhead.  I think nothing of them, just a few clouds.  But by 1:00, things will begin to change.

 

 

At 1:00, more clouds are rolling in.  The summit is now obscured in clouds, with barely enough visibility to see the chair in front of you.  What happened to the bluebird day?  Who knows, a low pressure system forcing a high pressure system out?  Just a brief time of cloud cover?  But now riding back up the Super Bravo chair, passing lift tower 9 it starts to snow.

 

 

It was snowing and it was snowing hard.  By the time I am about to unload after tower 20, it has accumulated about an inch on my jacket, on the chair, everywhere.  Skiing down Lower Jester should be good with some fresh snow.  But it didn't look like a normal snowflake.  It looked like some soft hail we had come down during a September thunderstorm.  I think of it as odd.  Why would it be hailing out? 

 

 

I get home just in time for the weather forecast at 5:15.  Tom Messner is talking about all the sunshine we had all day with temperatures just a touch above normal.  But what about the snow or whatever it was?  Didn't it happen in Plattsburgh?  Didn't it happen at any other weather station?  Apparently not.  I hop on the computer and send Tom an email:

 

 

Currently in Warren at 6:00 pm

Temperature: 29.0 degrees and cloudy...

...New snow: 2"

 Here in Warren it was snowing since about 1:00, but it wasn't really "normal snow".  It sounded like graupel, the description in the Weather Glossary Gib gave me during my Job Shadow, soft hail or snow pellets a few millimeters in diameter...

 

 

No, it didn't happen anywhere else, just Warren and Sugarbush.  When I was at my job shadow, Tom said there is always the chance for mountain snow showers. I guess this is because the mountains cause moisture in clouds to fall to the ground as precipitation, and not happen in the valleys.  The mountains always get more snow than lower elevations do: Sugarbush still has snow even on non-snowmaking trails (elevation: 3000+ ft), while my house only has a few inches here and there and snowbanks. (elevation 1500 ft)