Winter has solidly arrived – snow and aurora borealis

Posted On October 11, 2021

We can usually count on having snow that doesn’t melt away by October 31st – this year it arrived almost a month early. I’m not quite ready for Winter, logistically or mentally, but it’s here anyway so I had better get everything in order in the next few days.

The photos in this post cover a 2-week period, starting with the first heavy snow, on September 27th.

September 27th

By 10:50 when I shot the first photo, the snow, which had been quite heavy at times, had stopped. Facebook was full of comments and photos from folks in the southern Yukon. Most of of us hoped it would quickly melt away.

The view of the woodpile from a basement window. I have enough to last this winter split and stacked in the shelter and basement but I would like to finish this off.

Many of the trees still have their leaves on, making it likely that some are having branches broken off by the weight of the snow that sticks to them.

September 28th

The sun came out the next day, and the back yard was actually quite lovely.

October 2nd

My Facebook post said “I give up – time to blow the lines out and park it. And hope for a much better 2022.”

October 3rd

There was still enough warmth in the ground that most of the snow did melt away. A Facebook post on October 3rd said “I perhaps should have finished my RV shut-down work yesterday… But spending time with friends from far away has been more important the past couple of days.” I had a life-long friend drop by unannounced from Vancouver Island (!!!) and an Internet friend I hadn’t met in person arrived from Inuvik so I was very busy 🙂

October 6th

I was up very early, and saw a bit of colour in the sky. This aurora display had been good an hour or so before according to the reports in my aurora groups, but this is all I got, from my driveway at 02:10.

By 06:20 it was -10°C (with a 99% humidity!). I had actually seen -11 on my weather station a few minutes before but didn’t get a photo. The record cold for this day at the airport a few miles away was -10.6°C in 1957.

October 8th

This snowstorm didn’t last long, but it was sure heavy at noon!

October 9th

This is a very important date for our family. This is our “Gotcha Day” for Tucker – the day we adopted him after seeing the photo below on the YARN Facebook page (Yukon Animal Rescue Network) – the previous day.

That afternoon, Bella and Tucker were very interested in what Cathy and I were doing, starting our Thanksgiving dinner prep by tearing up bread for stuffing 🙂

October 11th

That brings us to this morning. I was up at 02:20 to start writing. A note on my Aurora Alert page just before 04:00 prompted me to look outside. There was a faint glow in the sky, enough to get me to get my camera equipment ready and go outside. As I was outside, the sky exploded!

I had initially just laid my camera on its back on the hot tub cover, and that’s the position the first 3 photos were shot in.

I had my tripod set up for the final photo.

Ten minutes afer it began, the dramatic display was over. Timing is sometimes crucial – few people seem to have caught this brief but dramatic how.

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Thanks to the Wayback Machine (the Internet Archives), I found about 40 posts from 2009 that for some reason weren’t in my text files. So this is now post #1,417 since the first one on April 25, 2006. Of those, 828 are now in the new format, with a total of 14,034 photos.