The Spring Equinox was about two weeks ago, officially ending winter. This is sometimes known as the “astronomical” start of spring, as it is based on the position of the Earth in its yearly orbit around the sun.
The equinox marks the day when daytime starts to get longer than nighttime.
Meteorological Spring, according to NOAA, starts on March 1, and is based more on annual temperature changes.
Whichever one you choose, the important point for most of us is that March is the month when things start getting noticeably lighter and warmer.
American author and humorist Mark Twain lived in Hartford, Connecticut from 1874 to 1891. He made many jokes about New England weather. He especially liked to joke about spring in New England, once saying in a speech, “The people of New England are by nature patient and forbearing; but there are some things which they will not stand. Every year they kill a lot of poets for writing about ‘Beautiful Spring’.”
Most famously, he said, “If you don’t like the weather in New England now, just wait a few minutes.”
If Twain had spent time in Enumclaw in the spring, he would have made that joke about spring on the Plateau. For sure, Connecticut spring weather was changeable and windy, but not as much as here.
An ordinary March day, can start sunny and warm, devolve into a wind-driven sleet storm that only lasts ten minutes, and then become sunny again before another brief but wild storm — this seemed extraordinary to us. On a hike up Mt. Peak during my first March here, I stopped to put on a raincoat when sleet began pelting me. By the time I got the raincoat on and shouldered my pack again, the storm was over. Nobody else thought this was unusual.
The dramatic stormy skies have been a treat here on the Plateau. We are fortunate to live in an area with both mountains and wide open sky views. The skies with patches of bright blue between huge puffy white clouds, with charcoal gray skies nearby, and streaks of gray where the rain is coming down look like something a Hudson River School artist would paint. Except these are real. And they will be back again in a few days. Maybe there will be a rainbow, too. Spring storms and wide open spaces make rainbows more common here than in other places I have lived.
This morning I got a text message from a New England friend that included a picture of his snow covered backyard. Here in Enumclaw, I see people fertilizing their lawns and the fruit trees are beginning to bloom. I would much prefer to work on the lawn than to shovel snow.
There are also people power washing their driveways. I don’t think I ever even heard of doing this before. I thought “Evergreen State” referred to the trees. It seems like moss is the real evergreen.
March will probably be the end of the ski season for me, although skiing in April is a possibility. I’m an occasional skier, and certainly not an expert, but I do enjoy it. A lot. I can get to Crystal Mountain to ski with a 50 minute drive. What a treat!
This is, by far, the biggest ski area I have been to. A similar drive from my old house would bring me to Butternut Basin ski area.
I used to like it. Now it seems awfully small. It has a vertical drop of 1000 feet; Crystal boasts that its vertical drop is 2600 feet. Butternut has 110 skiable acres; Crystal has 2600 acres of skiable terrain. I would have needed to drive more than 3 hours to get to Killington, a ski area that compares to Crystal in size.
The second thing New England skiers notice as an advantage of Washington skiing is that it is warmer here. The average ski season temperatures at Killington range from 8 degrees to 32 degrees. At Crystal, we can expect temperatures 20 degrees and 40 degrees — that’s far more comfortable.
But Washington skiers seem hard to please. They refer to their snow as “Cascade concrete” because it isn’t as fluffy as the powder snow in Utah. On the chairlift I often talk with the other skiers, and it’s pretty common for them to refer to “icy” conditions. In New England we would call that “packed powder”.
We have enjoyed several snowshoe hikes here in Washington. Until this year, we really enjoyed driving over to the Longmire entrance to MRNP. The Paradise area is like nowhere in New England! On days when the winds were too strong for an enjoyable hike at Paradise, we would go to the Ricksecker Point Road, which doesn’t get plowed.
It was a real disappointment when the park service decided to only open the road beyond Longmire on weekends – a decision covered by the Courier Herald lat December. I try to stay away from the National Park on weekends.
Winter hiking can be dangerous, of course. I used to climb at least one Northeast peak each winter, carrying enough equipment that I could probably have survived an unplanned night out in the mountains. I thought I would continue with some winter summits, but caution has begun to overrule adventure as I get older. My only winter summit this year was Suntop Mountain, which is a long snowshoe trip up a Forest Service road. Only at the very end does the trip get above the treeline. It was a rewarding trip, but it certainly never felt dangerous.
Two near mishaps have made me more cautious. Once I lost the trail on the descent from Crystal Lake, by stupidly following the boot tracks of a group that turned out to have been off the trail. It took a while to get back on track. I didn’t feel that I was in danger, but I was surprised at the dumb decision I had made.
A scarier event – probably the one that has really made me more cautious – happened when I traversed a small snowfield on the way to Panhandle Gap without any trouble. But on the way back, the microspikes on my boots did not hold on the packed snow. I started to slide down and jabbed my hiking pole into the snow to stop my sudden descent. The pole broke in two.
Luckily, the shortened pole that was in my hand worked well for arresting my slide. I have turned back on three occasions since then when the way forward looked hazardous.
Speaking of hazardous conditions, three hikers from the Northeast were killed by an avalanche near Leavenworth this year. This was an experienced group, doing more severe, more technical and more dangerous hiking than I ever do. Climbing might be a better term for what they were doing.
As the winter season ends, thoughts turn to summer activities. More golf this year? Maybe it’s time to get a fishing license. I still have to go to Kelly Butte. Maybe I can hike the Wonderland Trail. So many possibilities.
