While winter threatened to wallop the northeastern US with a snowy haymaker Monday, folks in the Inland Northwest were thinking of shorts and t-shirts because of record balmy temperatures. On the usually snow-shrouded slopes of Mount Rainier early Monday morning, thermometers recorded 60 degrees 5,500 feet up at the Paradise Ranger station.
High elevation sites all across the Cascades normally deep in snow right now are bare and brown. The weird weather pattern is beginning to worry Scott Pattee, who is a water supply specialist with the Natural Resources Conservation Service. He noted there just hasn't been much precipitation - either rain or snow - in the region except for a brief flurry in December. As Pattee put it, "It's just a drizzle, that's the problem. We need blasts of moisture to even come close to catching up."
Automated snow measuring stations run by the conservation service tell pretty much the same story. In the Kootenai River drainage, for example, snow depth is only about 70 percent of normal. It's about 69 percent in the Spokane River basin, and below 50 percent in the Yakima River basin.
Further south, in Idaho's Clearwater and Sawtooth areas, snowpack is better, at or near average amounts.
Pattee said it's not too late to catch up, as the region did last year with heavy blasts of rain and snow. But he put it this way - it's a worry, that's for sure.
