Even though the astronomical calendar says we still have 10 days to go, I think most of us in the Pacific Northwest can now agree that summer is over and done with. We’ve been having consistently cool nights for a couple weeks now, with temps dropping into the low 50s whenever there isn’t too much wind in the Gorge. This morning was the coolest so far, at 48.

Yesterday’s high temp was only 73 in The Dalles, and 69 in Portland. Places in the Cascades and westside, had their first significant rain showers of the season. Yesterday I took a drive from Dufur, Oregon up to Camp Baldwin, and then down to Highway 35 and on to Hood River. (One week prior I took my grandpa up the eastern half of that road, turning around at the boundary of the Mt. Hood national forest.) It’s a great drive that shows you the transition from semi-arid wheat fields to High Cascade forest: first the dry Dufur Valley, then the pine-oak woodlands of the east slopes, and finally the Douglas firs begin to pop up as you move into cooler, wetter climes.

The dry-to-wet transition looks a little different at high elevations than it does driving along I-84 through the Columbia Gorge. That’s because the terrain is more rugged, higher in elevation, and generally colder.

There were even a few small larches growing along the roadside, near the 4,500 elevation. You can tell because the needles are deciduous, and thus a fresh crown grows every summer. Larch needles never get the chance to thicken up like evergreen needles do, giving them a fresher, softer look. As of September 11 I was seeing faint signs of premature color change in a few larch specimens, but it still looks a few weeks away from their fall peak.

Perhaps the most impressive trees, though, are the massive ponderosa pines that grow at higher elevations. These pines are native to the entire dry half of the state. But in cooler, wetter mountain regions they tend to grow especially tall and majestic, and their red trunks really stand out from the surrounding green. Some of the trees along the Camp Baldwin road must have been more than 150 feet tall!

Temperatures during the afternoon up there were probably between 55 and 60 degrees, about what you’d expect high on the east slopes on a day like that.

In any case, we have more cool, unsettled September weather on tap for the next 6-7 days at least. Not extremely wet; there’s one more good chance for showers this Saturday. But there’s no sign of a strong ridge either. We’re going to get lots of cool air coming in off the Northern Pacific. That usually means below-average temps even if there isn’t a whole lot of rain.

The signal is clearly cool through about the 19th or 20th of the month, then it becomes a little more blurry. But there’s no clear sign of any sort of fall warm spell, on the horizon. The fact that the pattern isn’t too wet, also raises the likelihood of chilly nights and possible frost in higher elevations. It won’t get really cold at night in The Dalles if it’s cloudy, damp, and/or windy. But in mid/late September it doesn’t take much for the west wind to die out and for temps to bottom out. We’re only a few weeks away from the onset of “East Wind Season” in the Gorge!

So you can probably count on putting away any hot-weather paraphrenalia for the year. Plan for chilly weather if you have any fall camping plans. And if you live somewhere up high, chances are your summer vegetable garden could be about done for. We appear to be headed into a ‘classically cool’ Fall this year, something we haven’t really experienced in quite some time.

Enjoy, because I’ll probably be taking a break from weather blogging for a while. Depending on what exactly happens with Hurricane Florence, I might do some kind of summary on the whole event. But I’m not a professional meteorologist, and tropical storms are not my area of focus. So I’ll definitely be winging things, if I decide to write about it. All I can say for now is…this storm looks VERY scary, mainly because of how long it will linger along the Carolina coast and dump multiple feet of rainfall.

I don’t have access to the really sexy ECMWF images, so this GFS rain/pressure model will have to do. The storm center really “bombs out” to 933mb, just before hitting the coastline on Friday. I feel we’ll be hearing plenty more the next few days!