Freezing Fog

I grew up in the Los Angeles and the Dallas area.  Outside of the occasional dreadful ice storm in Dallas, neither region is known for its winter weather. 

Eastern Washington has an honest-to-god actual winter.  Ameliorated by being within a few hundred miles from a honkin’-big body of water (the Pacific Ocean)  our Palouse winters don’t hold a candle to, say, North Dakota, but it has taken a while for this former Texican to sort of get used to multiple variations of frozen water.  There’s snow, of course, which comes in a lot more varieties than seem possible, from big wet sticky flakes that glue themselves to the leaves of the old spruce tree near our house and bring branches down to graupel, also known as soft hail.  Look it up on Wikipedia, ‘cause graupel isn’t the topic of the day.  Freezing fog is. 

Winter has been incredibly snow-free so far. I see on the news that the east and mid-west are getting their full dose of winter this year.  We had a spell of bitter cold in early December and a single day when we had about 5 inches of accumulated snow.  Since then, most of the snow has stayed east of the Rockies.  And they are welcome to it, as far as I’m concerned. 

The MLK weekend was so nice, with no significant precip in the forecast for at least a week, I hauled all my ring gates and jumps out of the garage and set everything up in the yard.  Sure did feel great to be outside working with the dogs instead of in the small loft in the garage. 

But back to the freezing fog.  The fog’s been rolling in an out for a couple of days, mostly acting like normal, above freezing, fog.  Last night, the temperature was low enough and the fog heavy enough that it became freezing fog.  The moisture in the fog freezes on trees, fences, and everything else above ground, coating it all with a fuzzy layer of ice crystals.  The fog has stayed all day, with the temperature hovering close enough to freezing that the frost melts away from some surfaces, then returns. 

All in all, this was a pleasant dose of freezing fog.  The surrounding black-soiled farmland was softened to gray.  The noise from the highway a mile from our house was damped out, making our normally quiet country yard even quieter. 

You see, the first time I experienced freezing fog, I was enthralled with the way it turned the world into a soft, quiet stillness.  Outlines of trees and fences are blurred with their fuzzy coating of white.  The green of the conifers and the yellows of the winter stalks of vegetation are muted to grayish. Then, one winter three or four years ago, a winter when we had plenty of snow and the fields were covered with a blanket of white, the freezing fog rolled in.  And stayed. And stayed, and stayed, for nearly two weeks.  White snow, white air, fuzzy white-gray tree branches.  All sound muffled into cold silence.  No wind.  No horizon.  White sky, white ground, light-gray ghostly trees, barely visible across the yard through the heavy fog.  Very cool the first day.  And the second.  By the third day, it had started to get a little old.  After a week, I was feeling like a subject of one of those sensory deprivation experiments, where they put a person in a soundless, dark room on a padded bed, with their hands wrapped in padding so they can’t feel anything.  Those people start hallucinating after a few days.  I was getting there. 

It the years since that long spell of freezing fog, I have gradually come to like the muffling, cold fog again, although in the back of mind is always the possibility it will settle in for a long time.  Today was pleasant.  The fog got thicker all day until the hills outside the yard were blurring.  But, it didn’t bother me, because Weather Underground says it will be bright and sunny tomorrow.

They had better be right.