Where's snow? Try Upstate New York.
20.05.12
Hold back the sun; I’m on my way.
The past few winters in Washington, we didn’t need a full team of experts and eyes to track the snow. You’d simply look up at the sky sneezing a flurry of flakes or down at the white duvet cushioning your feet. But this season, I had to recruit other people, and states, to achieve the simplest of frosty feats: finding enough snow to build a snowman, -woman or -child.
What a sad, sad winter we are having. Even the National Weather Service says so: Many of the lower 48 states logged warmer-than-average temperatures in December and January; the first two months of winter rank as the fourth-steamiest on record countrywide. In Washington, we’ve trotted out our mukluks for a measly 1.7 inches of snow, almost 10 inches below the norm for this period. And Wednesday’s teaspoon of snow hardly sated my winter cravings. I want to construct a snowman, not a snowflea.
For help with my quest, I contacted NOAA’s National Weather Service, which pointed its antennae at Upstate New York. (I was short on time, so road-tripping to Alaska or Colorado was not an option.) To lock down a specific destination, I called Syracuse native Pat DeCoursey, who runs two snow-accumulation contests: the Golden Snowball Award , which crowns the snowiest of five Upstate New York cities, and the Golden Snow Globe , which expands the competition to 60 U.S. cities with populations of 100,000 or more.
Source: Washington Post