We're having our first snow of the winter. It's almost too warm to snow--it melts on the sidewalks while sticking around on lawns. It's relatively heavy, too--I figure we might get as much as an inch or so by the time the sky gets tired of pissing on the city.

An inch isn't much, unless you consider that it is a: October, and b: Calgary. Calgary's dry months are its winter months. It isn't unusual for this city to stop getting significant rainfall by the second week of July (it picks up again in March, with June being the wettest month).

I've been thinking about snow and the various cities I've lived in. The first was Seattle, where yes! It does snow! I remember tobogganing on the little hill a block from our house, waaaaaay back when. It was a treat and everybody was out in the white stuff. It went away in a few days and left us with grins and memories.

Alaska was different, even though Anchorage, like Seattle, is a coastal city. That means that it got its precipitation in snow rather than rain. But more than that, the cold created different conditions--for one thing, snow changes the landscape. A path you're familiar with isn't the same path when there's two feet of snow on top. Seattle didn't have that. Snow didn't stick around long enough to do that.

Also, walking on snow crusts is something you just don't do in Seattle. It is something you can do in Calgary, but here, too, there are differences. Anchorage got COLD... but then, so does Calgary. But Anchorage was also humid; snow crusts were frozen in place there. In Calgary, which I once read was classified as a 'sub-alpine semi-arid desert', snow crusts are usually packed in place by either wind action on drifts or by the thaw-freeze cycles the city gets. Wind-pack is sort of like solid sand, and as a kid, I used to try to make igloos with chunks of the stuff. Freeze-thaw has an icy character and just isn't as much fun to work with.

It's supposed to go to -5 C tonight. I expect we'll have quite a lot of freeze-thaw snow crust by this time tomorrow. No wind-pack, though--that only happens when the weather is decently freezing and it stays that way--below -8 C, at least.

Dunno whether I have a point to this, but hey, post! It'll do.