This is what Wildlife Trail looked like Friday morning when Leah took the dogs out.
The footprints are mine and Zeke’s from when we walked down Wednesday morning. Someone with big, lugged tires drove down to the dead end on Wildife after we got back. Someone always wants to be the first to drive on fresh snow.
I mentioned earlier seeing what I am pretty sure were crow tracks behind the house. Here they are from Thursday morning before I left for Huntsville. I think the crow landed in the middle, circled twice, and then walked away. It’s probably a coincidence that it circles exactly around the ashes from where I burned some limbs a few weeks ago.
I could have changed the overall color cast of the snow photo to make it look more like what I remembered it looking like, namely, white. But then I realized that the early morning sunlight was yellowish and that’s exactly what the snow actually looked like – kind of yellowish. My brain corrected the color cast when I was looking at it Thursday, and I saw it as pure white.
I mentioned that it was 16F at the house when I left Thursday morning, and 1F at the bottom of the mountain about five hundred feet lower. On a calm, clear night we are often as much as 8 or 9 degrees warmer than the lower areas, but this is the first time I have seen a 15-degree gradient from the lowlands up to our house.
That strong inversion (an inversion is a condition where the air temperature increases from the ground as you go up to higher elevations, instead of decreasing as it does most of the time) is a result of having snow on the ground. Snow is very reflective to sunlight, but it emits heat very efficiently. If you could look at snow in the infrared (the wavelengths where heat is radiated) it would look almost black. That means that at night snow gets very cold very quickly, and the air next to the snow gets very cold very quickly, too. That cold air is dense and wants to sink to the lowest level it can. Up here that means it wants to go down to Huffaker Road at the bottom of the mountain. The cold air displaces warmer air (if you call 16F “warm”), which wants to go up when pushed away by colder air. Up, in this case, is where we live. So, we get a strong inversion.
Kali and I live on the “lip” of a steep valley whose floor is about 100 feet lower than the rim. When the conditions are right, it’s very possible to feel the temperature get lower as we walk down the hill toward the bottom, but I doubt that the differential is ever 15F. Of course, I assume that the elevation distance between Wildlife Trail and Huffaker Road is probably greater than our 100 feet.
Scott — back in the old days when I rode a motorcycle I could feel the air temperature change as I went up and down the dips and rises in the road, even on summer mornings. I have also noticed up here that if I walk the dogs around sunset I can actually feel the breeze as the cooler air goes down the hill.
The crow tracks are very cool.
Robin Andrea — Yes, I thought the crow tracks were cool and kind of strange. There must be something going on with the ashes beneath the snow. I noticed later that something, maybe an armadillo, had dug into the ash mound.