Flagstaff Snow Day!

Sometimes my heart just aches to experience the changing of the seasons. After growing up on Ohio, with the full range of sights, sounds, and smells of the season, I just miss it so much that I need to get somewhere out of town. I especially feel the tug in the Fall and Winter. We get our own share of Summer and enough of a feel of Spring that I don't miss that too much.

The last few weeks there have been so many reminders of snowy winter, especially last week with all the snow that they got in northern Arizona. I started thinking about a road trip to Flagstaff probably on Thursday, but the storm continued thru Saturday which made it dangerous to drive up there before last Sunday. So that morning we got up and decided to hit the road.

It was a perfect day! The roads were totally clear, the traffic was light and the sun was shining as we headed up the mountain toward Flagstaff. This was our first glimpse of the snow in the distance.

We drove thru Starbucks in Cottonwood on the way up and Terry picked up an apple fritter with his coffee. He didn't want me to take a picture of him eating it (he's supposed to be watching his carbs, you know.) But I think this is incriminating enough.

Next we started to see snow on the ground by the road...then we really got into snow country! Look how heavily it was covering the trees.

Look at this gorgeous shot (below) of the mountains coming up from the south of Flagstaff.

Not sure if you can tell (below), but we're actually parked in the road. The off and on ramps were plowed, but not the road that they lead to. There was a 6 foot pile of snow in front of the car from the plow blocking the road, so if there was anyone living down there, they wouldn't have any way to get out unless they had a snowmobile or something.

This is the sign that goes across the road. I'm not thinking that anyone's going to get anywhere in that direction on something with wheels.

Here's Terry starting up the hill. You can see that it was thigh high in most places.  Fortunately it was pretty good packing snow and there were a few paths that were packed down enough that we could walk on them without sinking down too deeply. There were a couple of times that I "fell in" and Terry had to pull me out so that my camera wouldn't get in the snow (which happened once). It's so funny because there's just no leverage to push yourself up, since your hands sink down in it too.

It had been so long since we'd been in the snow that we forgot to bring extra pairs of pants.  Fortunately, we didn't get too wet and we did have dry socks, so we were o.k.

It was so sweet to hear the crunch of the snow under our feet!  I love the SOUND of Winter.

And look how amazing the trees were!

We watched showers of snow coming down from the branches very regularly.  Fortunately we weren't beneath any of them.

Isn't it cool that there were icicles hanging from the tree's needles?

When we first got there, the only people around were a couple with their little boy.  I'd guess him to be around 5 and he was having a blast...so were his folks.

Then just before we left we were joined by a young family from Phoenix with 3 boys who had NEVER seen snow!  What an exciting day that must have been for them.  And the littlest one couldn't have been more than 3 years old.  As they were trying to climb the hill he kept sitting down in the snow and his mom kept telling him to stand up.  Then the dad suggested that maybe he couldn't stand up with all the clothes bundling him up.  He was SO adorable!  That's him coming down the hill on the sled all by himself.

It brought back some great memories of our snowy adventures with the kids in years past.

After playing in the snow there for a bit, we started driving toward town then decided to head toward Lake Mary to see if we could get there. Our prospects didn't look good...