HOME: WINTER? WHAT WINTER? JANUARY 2012

If ever there was a sign of the impending apocalypse, the photo above may be it.  That's my yard in Yosemite Valley at 4000 feet in the Sierra Nevada mountains.  Not one flake of snow has desended since the onset of winter last month.  Though we can have rather skimpy white christmases here, the snow has usually come and gone at least once if the holiday is green.  Last year the snow started at Thanksgiving and my yard looked like this (we got a new fence last year):

I came across this video by Steve Bumgardner, posted so we don't forget how winter looks in Yosemite.  Though lack of snow has made our day-to-day lives easier, the fact remains that Yosemite looks good in white.  The other fact that makes me a little uneasy is that the less snow we get in the winter, the less water there will be in the spring and summer. We live in a land of fierce wildfires that is forced to drain it's snowmelt for far-off thirsty cities, and sometimes there just isn't enough water to go around.  So pray to your weather gods, cross your fingers or shake your snow stick that we get some whopping storms sometime soon.