(more photos on the Facebook version of this post)

It’s that time of year again.  Every year around the end of February / beginning of March I post all the signs of the coming spring in gardens and landscapes around The Dalles.  The past two late-winters were much warmer than this year, and thus the pre-vernal buds and flowers were much further along by this point.  In fact, we not only had daffodils in February 2015, but even a few magnolias and apricots blooming the last few days of the month!

Nothing even remotely close to that this year.  Instead of enjoying snowdrops in the 3rd week of January, they came out around the 20th/21st of February this year.  And by the 28th, both hazelnut and witch hazel specimens in town looked quite pretty:

Daffodil stalks are starting to come up, but are still only 2 to 5 inches tall in most cases.  Even if we had a long stretch of 60-65 degree days beginning tomorrow, it would take at least 2-3 weeks for them to fully rise and begin blooming, I bet.  The long, severe winter pulled things into a deeper dormancy than is normal for our climate, and only recently have things warmed up enough to begin breaking the dormancy.  And forget about magnolias:  instead of seeing flowers, the buds are still nowhere close to looking like they’re about to open.  If temps stay below average through most of March, we may well not see them emerge until early April this year:

So how did Meteorological Winter turn out?

December was 3.6 degrees colder than 30-year norms.  January was 11.4 degrees colder than 30-year norms.  February was 4.5 degrees colder than 30-year norms.  When you add it all up, it was the coldest winter at DLS airport since 1992-93.  (Big surprise there!)  It was also, probably, the snowiest winter since 92-93 with at least 48″ of total snowfall in my neighborhood, and possibly 54″ or more.  There were a barrage of major snowstorms with east wind:  two in December, three in January and then one more come early February.  Plus two nasty ice storms, one in mid-January and another in early February.

There is going to be debate over how many days of “continuous snow cover” there were in The Dalles, and whether or not we experienced a brief “melt-out” in late December.  The answer to the latter question was a definite YES for the Columbia Hills north of the river, and NO for the orchards south of Sorosis Park!  Different neighborhoods melted out sooner or later depending on the amount of sun exposure, and local topography.  I decided to use low, flat locations as the standard for measurement.  By my reckoning we had 18 days of snow cover in December and another 50 days in January-February, for a total of 68 out of 90 days this winter.  Basically we were a winter wonderland all of the three-month period except the first week of December, the week between Christmas and New Years, and the last 8-10 days of February.

One weird thing?  It never got to zero F or colder this winter!  In fact 4 degrees is the most we could pull off, on January 6, with a moderate arctic blast.  If we’d gotten the really frigid Siberian high to park directly over us?  Perhaps it would have been a much different story.  Instead…snow cover east of the Cascades played a key role in keeping the cold air locked in place.  This made it easier for subsequent snow and ice storms to develop, because we had our own “homegrown” airmass to feed on.  But you can’t get to -15F in The Dalles this way.

In any case…we haven’t seen steady snow cover like this since the 1992-93 winter, and it’s definitely in the Top Three for my lifetime.  In fact, given the “rising tide” of climate change, it’s very possible that we may NEVER have a winter this cold again in the Columbia River Gorge.  That thought passed my head a few times, beginning in mid-January.

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Meteorological Winter ended on Tuesday.  The first two days of March, true to form, have actually felt like early spring with a strong west wind in the Gorge and afternoon temps climbing into the 50s.  But in spite of the calendar, Old Man Winter may just have one or two more tricks up his sleeve, before calling it quits for good.  More on that in a blog tomorrow or early Saturday…