No hike for me today

My front steps yesterday morning

It's kind of pretty, with the lights from various sources making elegant patterns on the snow surface covering the steps down into the parking lot. I was not going to try to drive in all that snow, but I was waiting for my friend John to come pick me up on the way to the coffee shop, in his 4-wheel-drive truck. We had somewhere between six and ten inches in our part of town. Some places got close to a foot, I heard. And it was still very cold, around –10°C (13°F). The cold snap that moved in a couple of days ago has only today broken and given us temperatures close to freezing.

Since it hadn't snowed any more and the roads were reportedly to be in good shape, I finally started my car and drove to the Senior Center, only to find that it is closed for the second day in a row. A small group of diehard hikers began to filter into the parking lot. We stood around trying to decide what we might do. Al and I both had a gym workout in our possible scenarios. I noticed that those who were left might come up with something they might want to do today, if the reluctant ones (that would be Al and me) decided to blow off hiking for the day.

As I drove away from the lot, I could see the half-dozen of them huddled together, probably coming up with something that I am glad I didn't attempt. I just called Chris, whose husband was one of the diehards, and she said they went to Lake Padden and walked the upper trails behind the lake. He was back before noon, and ate his lunch at home. So they didn't do anything terribly challenging, and I could probably have gone with them, but frankly, I was happy with my own little foray out into the snowy environment, and now I'm safe at home. It's starting to snow again. The forecast says to expect a "wintry mix" for awhile.

One of my favorite websites, Astronomy Picture of the Day, had this wonderful picture of something called nacreous clouds a few days ago. Here's what they look like:

Mother-of-pearl clouds

An excerpt from the website:

These polar stratospheric clouds, also known as nacreous and mother-of-pearl clouds, are formed of small water droplets of nearly uniform size. When the Sun is in the right position and, typically, hidden from direct view, these thin clouds can be seen significantly diffracting sunlight in a nearly coherent manner, with different colors being deflected by different amounts. 

Now that is beautiful, and much nicer to look at than old crusty snow that isn't any fun for old fogeys like me to drive around in. Tomorrow I'll head to my yoga class and hopefully make up for having missed my usual Thursday hike.
:-)