With how much we’ve been talking about the weather lately, you’d think that nothing else happens around here. When I last posted, I mentioned that we had gotten about 6-8 inches and it was still snowing…well snow it did – when it was all said and done, from that storm we ended up with around 25 inches of snow. That’s a lot anywhere to come down at once, but especially here where that happens very rarely. We’re right on the Georgia Straight (part of the Pacific Ocean that passes through the channel between Vancouver Island and the mainland of North America) and up against a mountain, so we get a nice little warm air bubble that rarely seems to pop. The rest of the island could have snow and we’d get rain, thanks to our little bubble.

Anyway, we ended up with a lot of snow, which meant many, many downed trees and which led to nearly 40 hours without power. Let me rephrase that…nearly 40 hours without heat. It was quite an experience. We had to move into the main lodge here at the camp where there is good insulation so that the cold was at least bearable during the two nights that we were without power.

Then, a couple days later it started snowing again and we ended up with an additional 6-8 inches of the fluffy white stuff. All said, we received somewhere in the vicinity of 30+ inches of snow last week. The temperature stayed well below freezing for over a week, which is extremely rare here, which allowed time for the ground to freeze solid. Just in time for the temperature to warm up into the 50’s (it actually reached 60 earlier tonight – it’s currently 50 degrees as I write this at half past midnight). So, you can imagine the mess that 30 inches of rapidly melting snow is, especially here at camp where nothing is paved – everywhere we walk and drive is normally gravel/dirt and is now mud.

It didn’t stop there, though. No, with the extreme warm-up came extreme amounts of rain. And I mean extreme – it’s estimated that we’ll receive 25% of our annual rainfall in a one-week period. That’s more than the city of Calgary receives all year. We live in a rainforest (literally), but even in a temperate rainforest environment, we’re used to receiving the majority of that rain over the course of several months, not a week. Not on top of 30 inches of snow.

It sounds like I’m complaining. I’m not really, especially in light of how much worse things could be, and in light of other areas of the world currently. I just wanted to share with you what life has been like in the past couple weeks. Cold, snowy, even colder, even snowier, then warm and wet. Strange weather we’ve got here on this island. Oh, and the forecasters are calling this "phenomenon" a "tropical punch". I found that amusing. Enjoy these couple photos (click to see them larger). We’ll post about something more interesting soon.