Well, we still have only had that one day of snow I posted about a couple weeks ago. Easy winter. Our crocuses are six inches high already. Maybe I should plant the garden. I had the house windows open all afternoon today.

It’s been a dreary couple of weeks before today though with a bunch of inversion days and a few rainy days. Inversions are when cooler air in the valleys gets trapped/capped by warmer air above. Usually accompanied by heavy fog. It happens every winter here for a couple weeks (common in Salt Lake City too). Yakima will be in the 30s and overcast and the skiers up in the mountains will be in t-shirts and sunshine.

Here’s an example what it looks like from above (photo taken from my usual drive to field work):

And what it looks like driving into it. I guess the nice part about a valley inversion versus a big regional winter storm system is that you can drive twenty minutes down the road if the gloom gets to be too much. And look, $1.65 gas!