Quote:

---

03:29 PM Mon Oct 17, 2005 EDT


136 mph.

34 inches of snow.

Wow.

Looking outside it could well be February. That is not a figure of speech, it really could be.

Fins of ice 2ft tall stick up from the deck. A fall in the winds would really hurt now. I wailed a knee on one yesterday while they were still small. It hurt.

Portions of the tower have more than 3ft of solid ice on them. Deicing the instruments has been constant and utterly exhausting. My arms are jelly from swinging the crowbar. We'll all be buff by the end of the winter at this rate. That is of course if we stop gorging on the feasts prepared by Judy Richardi in the kitchen. It seems she has kept pace with the storm baking a loaf of bread for each time the winds gusted above 120 mph, which was a lot.

There is a drift near the precip can that is gargantuan. I've never seen anything like it. It stands well over 10 ft tall. Stranger still is the composition of the snow. It isn't really snow at all. It is ice pellets. Do you know how hard it is to accumulate 34" of ice pellets?? This is simply absurd. The result is a very dense pack with little "fluff" factor. There is little to no air space stored inside and tremendous water content. At the height of the storm last night we received 9.2" in 6 hours. The water equivalent was 3.84." That just ain't right.

I've always heard of crazy October storms up here. Now I've lived one.

Neil Lareau - Observer

---