High country hikers beware this weekend and the upcoming new week!
(posted by Keno June 26 at 1002 am)

The snow level will be at or slightly above 14,000 feet for every afternoon thru at least this weekend and there's a slight chance for snow falling each afternoon.... No new snow accumulation is expected from this and the snowpack above 11,000 feet as of today is at one inch, which is at 100% of normal for this time of year.

More important.... There's also a chance for lighting strikes each afternoon in the high country above 10,000 feet - which means that this covers all of our mountains' area.... So be aware if you are heading into our high country before the holiday week arrives here next week, as lightning strikes can and sometimes do come out of a blue sky, especially up high in any mountain range. While this is a rare event that happens less than 10% of the time, in reality, the lighting is coming from a cloud that can't be seen, and as far away as 25 miles - and sadly, these are the strongest known lighting strikes to take place (called "positive lightning", click on link to learn more on this). But believe me, you don't want to be on the other end of such a strike! Most don't survive a positive lighting strike.

(posted by Keno at 255 am on Tuesday, June 3)

On Monday, June 2, we saw a record broken for daily precipitation when I measured 0.45" for the 24 hour period. This shattered the old daily record for the date which was 0.19, set in 2009.

New weather icons are now being used on the site's forecast page
(posted by Keno at 620 am on Saturday, May 3)

As you may have noticed, I started to slowly introduce new weather icons in the local 5 day forecast, and as of today, they are now being totally used and have replaced the old ones that had been used for the last 20 plus years. These new icons come from the National Weather Service (NWS) and now show the percentage for any precip in the forecast for each day. When there is less than a ten percent chance for precip, the old icons will still be used.

The NWS actually came out with these new icons over a year ago, but there are just hundreds of them to download into my domain, as just about every combination of weather conditions and every percentage for precip (rounded off to the nearest 10) are included, and that was why I waited so long to use them. There were just too many different combos (or if you prefer, web files) to download. But while it only takes seconds to download any number of files these days, the problem was in trying to decide which ones to choose from and then download and even worst, try to organize them all into new files that I would have to create on the domain. So instead, what I'm doing, is just hot linking the icons from their online locations on the NWS's server, to our forecast page. While that might sound perhaps easy to a non web coder to do, well, it is, but it's very much time consuming with each and every icon used, since I can't just hot link to each image, but I need to recode them so they show up correctly for each time slot and at the correct size I need to use. In turn, this means I have to do this nine times for each icon spot per forecast.

So while this new set up is easy to do, it's very much time consuming. But I am retired from all other work now, other than working on this weather site and also the domain's cam sites, as my other web sites, which all were once proactive, aren't any longer (for the most part). I also no longer can go hiking up in the mountains as I used to do at least twice a week, or even hike around town anymore unless it's downhill. Since I also no longer drive or have a car, I have to rely on my grandsons to take me places (when they have the time). So, I'm home a lot these days and guess what that means? It means I have the time to do this extra work! So I don't really mind the extra work at all, as it's something to do.