Arctic Montana

The Arctic air has arrived in Montana and it is getting a little chilly. Today Great Falls had a wind chill of -40 F. Yeah, you see that right, forty below zero Fahrenheit. Lucky for us here in Missoula we happen to have the most boring weather on the planet and we had a high of 15 degrees with no wind and cloud cover... Zzzz. That's still cold enough to make work a challenge though, especially with a few inches of snow on the ground. My thermal work gloves don't do much when I am holding onto metal tools all day long, but I manage to stay warm somehow. After a few hours I even got a little warm and broke a sweat, which is bad news because once I sat down for lunch it wasn't long before I was really cold. Tomorrow we are looking at a high around 15 again so another day in the cold for me. Not that it really bothers me, at least not here. I am used to a Nebraska wind chill and that cold cutting air that could suck the air out of your lungs if you tried to look into it and take a deep breath. Ah, those were the days...

Laura and I went out for a drive on Sunday. We took the Subaru up Lolo Pass and took a Christmas picture. There was about two feet of snow on the ground at the top and we knew a storm was on it's way so we figured we needed to get our pictures taken before everything was snowed under. We took a few pictures and headed back for home; I checked the radar when we got home and the pass was getting snow. Monday it was reported there was 23 inches of fresh snow on the ground at the top of the pass! You can see from the picture that we were well in over our snow boots and we were nowhere near the top when we took this picture.

In 18 days we will be on our way back to Wyoming and Nebraska for our holiday vacation. Perhaps the way to say it would be we are going home for a few weeks after our long vacation in Montana. I like to think of it more like that, you can take Nolan out of Nebraska but you can't take Nebraska out of Nolan. Until again

-=Nolan=-