Last week we broke the record for snowfall on the Oregon coast in March, set in 1951! To northerners, a mere 8 inches of wet snow isn't much but here it is unusual and brings down trees and power lines and ties up traffic for hours. The aptly named Cape Fowlweather, which lies on Hwy 101 (the only north-south coastal road) half way between Lincoln City and Newport, was clogged with stranded cars and stranded emergency vehicles for hours, until a snow plow was finally able to make it through. Given that in the rugged mountains of the Pacific Northwest, there is often only one road inland to civilization, the few roads from the coast through the Coastal Range to I-5 (Salem, Eugene, Corvallis, Portland) were clogged with downed trees. So folks can't just take another route inland, if they are lucky not to be stranded between downed trees on the roads, as one tractor trailer was recently, they stay home as many days as it takes for volunteer and ODOT crews to clear all of the streets and roads. There are A LOT of trees everywhere here, so one is constantly in danger of having huge branches or entire trees fall on, in front of, or behind their cars and homes.
Did I mention the frequent landslides which happen during stormy weather and add to the road hazards and which take months to remedy.
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| Snow beside our RV before it got very thick |
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Folks pay $50 at Disney World to get the kind of ride we had in the 80mph wind gusts of the past few days! Sustained 30-40mph winds and horizontal rain has lashed against us for the past two days.
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| Snow later in the night |
Of course, all of this weather happens while we are experiencing a catastrophic failure of the RV electrical system, with both batteries and converter dead. The refrigerator has a propane backup system but it requires battery power to operate the electronics that sense the need for turning it on. We have electricity but none of the RV lights use it. After a several day wait to get a new converter shipped to us and the purchase of new batteries, we no longer take lights or cold/frozen food for granted!
Most of the snow happened at night and morning rains dissipated it by dawn, so our photos don't show the full extent of it.
