What? A blizzard named Gandolf? And Alycia and I are huge Lord of the Rings and Hobbit fans? Awesome!! OK, so the spelling of the blizzard is slightly different than the Lord of the Rings character, but that's OK.
Leading up to this blizzard on Friday evening, we've had some wacky weather. Thursday night was rain. Yes rain in January in North Dakota, not quite unheard of, but dang close. I asked Alycia if she ever remembers rain in January growing up here and she never had.
So it rained pretty good for several hours, but since the ground was mostly frozen, it wasn't really absorbed. Some ran off into the gutters, but a lot pooled in various low spots, or in tiny glacial lakes formed by snow banks, and then later on Thursday night when the temperature dropped below 32, it froze. About 1/3 of the backyard is now a skating rink, the rest has patches of frozen mud and smaller frozen puddles, thousands of slippery spots waiting to take us out. The footing is very dangerous everywhere.
And after the blizzard on Sunday:
Blizzard Gandalf was a dud, only about 3 inches of snow (2.5 inches officially in Grand Forks), but the wind did blow the snow around pretty good. All things considered, last Saturday was a pretty good day to stay inside.
The legacy of blizzard Gandalf won't be its unfulfilled expectations, this happens often enough with storm predictions around here, but the thick layer of ice on everything from the rain that preceded the blizzard. Walking was and continues to be treacherous.
It's now Friday morning and here's the 7 day forecast.
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