Video: Finally, A Little Vermont Snow

Light snow begins to whiten up the winter landscape
in St. Albans, Vermont on December 11, 2022.

 The classic first big snowstorm of the season in Vermont plays out like this:

It had been cold for a few days, so things have frozen up. The ground is hard and frosty. Ice is forming on the edges of the brooks, and the ponds have a thin skim of ice.  

The blue sky turns milky, with a big rainbow ring around the sun. Then the clouds get lower, thicker, duller, and blot out the sun.  It's gloomy.

Then you notice the tops of the mountains get blurry and disappear. That blurriness descends down the slopes of the mountains until a few snowflakes start drifting down. 

Soon, the snow gets steadier and heavier. A dark, bare landscape finally starts to glow winter white.

Well, there was an attempt, anyway at the scenario in Vermont on Sunday. The snow ultimately didn't amount to much, but otherwise the scenario above pretty much played out. Without the end result of deep snow, but that's OK. 

Of course, I had to video at least part of the sequence.  The sky had already turned gloomy, and water in the brooks made their way past building ice. Jackson the Weather Dog sniffed at  the changed in the weather coming, and shook the first few snowflakes of the day off his coat.  

 The dark, cold, landscape gradually took on some white highlights in the light falling snow. The roads got a bit icy as cars, with Christmas trees strapped on the roof, returned from the cut your own tree farm up in Bakersfield. 

The video is a glimpse of winter's (somewhat reluctant) arrival.  But there is the chance of an even bigger storm toward the end of the week. We'll see.

If you don't see the image of the video below, click on this link to view. Otherwise, click on the image below to view the video of an attempt at bringing on the early part of winter in Vermont: 

Video: Warm, Dreary, Rainy, Foggy: Not The Christmas Themed Weather We Want

Christmas lights and car head lights try to cut through
the gloom in downtown St. Albans, Vermont on Wednesday.
Dark and dreary has been the theme lately.

 As is often the case, I take videos of the weather and nature of my surroundings. So of course I was out on a wet, warm, gloomy misty December Wednesday in St. Albans, Vermont grabbing a few scenes of the day. 

This time of year, we're really getting into the Christmas spirit and Ma Nature usually helps. We very often have at least dustings of snow in the first week of December, if not bonafide snowstorms. 

So far, at least, not this year. Wednesday was early November redux, if we ever have a normal November and December again.

Temperatures were in the mid-50s, close to 20 degrees on the warm side. It was damn dark all day, with a thick overcast, plenty of mist and fog, and occasional rain, which sometimes came down pretty hard. 

We never actually had daylight on Wednesday. It was more like a dreary dusk all day. As you can see in the video, the Christmas lights of downtown St. Albans struggled mightily to cut through the gloom. 

Next in our video, we take a trip on some local roads, to enjoy plowing through the puddles and and enjoying the gray sky, gray landscape and gray fog.

The last part of the video is when I retreated home to my very muddy yard. The piddling little stream we call the Woof River that goes past my property looked pretty healthy too.

To be honest, there is a subtle, quiet beauty in all this rainy darkness, as you can see in the video.

The dark, rainy misty landscape in northwestern Vermont
Wednesday didn't exactly scream "Christmas season."

Look on the bright side, and there are a few. The ground is still unfrozen, and all this extra moisture is seeping into the ground. 

That's plenty of water for winter snowmaking. It also sets us up for a good start in the spring, and gives us a bit of a reserve in case April and May are dry, as they often have been in recent years. 

The forecast is looking up, sort of, if you're a fan of more normal and wintry December weather.  We  Temperatures will sink to levels that are much closer to normal for this time of year.  We should even see some sun come out occasionally over the next few days. 

There's not really any snow to speak of in the forecast for the upcoming week. At least according to current forecasts. A few places might get a snowflake or two Sunday, but that's about it. However, there's plenty of time for the weather patterns to change, and provide us with a nice traditional white Christmas.

To view this moody video, you can either click on this link. Or iv the image of the video is visible below on your device, click on that.