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RIC_WX

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Everything posted by RIC_WX

  1. We like extremes right? Visiting Tuesday night and Wednesday. Not looking forward to flying across that boundary though…
  2. Taking my son to WISP tomorrow and telling him to expect his last turns of the year. Shame the high expectations for this season didn’t entirely pan out.
  3. All things considered, we’ve actually done pretty well this year given how warm it’s been. We’ve basically scored every single time it got cold. Only problem is it hasn’t been cold much. It’s rotten compared to our expectations but unless March-April is wall to wall torch we should be within striking distance of climo, or at least a respectable season.
  4. 33/16 at Deep Creek 46/not quite sure and heavy traffic on I70 in Hagerstown Lets do this
  5. Very, very very few forecasters earned anything close to a passing grade this season and I would bet many of the ones who did were contrarian just to bet the long odds, not to have any scientific reasoning behind it. The reasoning was sound but the outcome ultimately, was wrong.
  6. But you can't have a lot of snow without days that feature some cold air. At Dulles, 57 days have been AN and 17 days have been BN since 12.1. And that is against the 1991+ normals which are way warmer than recent past decades. Its been an overwhelmingly warm and wet winter, blame it on whatever you want but we have seen Nino's like this in the past and should only expect them to be even worse today given the overwhelming warm bias to begin with.
  7. Enjoying the last weekend of deep winter up here before we relax the pattern. Its been ramping up all day long, the last couple squalls being the best to watch. When the wind eases up, its eerily quiet outside with all the snowcover
  8. December looked sweet as modeled on November 19. But climo won. Just saying
  9. It was ripping at 5A and probably a while before. Sorry you missed it. Cleared my truck off and it was covered before I could get out of the driveway.
  10. Just in from 3 hours of crust busting shoveling. Haven’t touched the deck yet, may save it for tomorrow as I am beat. The driveway and ingress/egress to cabin however are open for business. 22/12 with wind gusts to about 40 and steady upslope snow showers. This is about as wintery as I have seen it up here since the arctic front on 12.23.2022
  11. There are some pingers mixing in at DCL too but holding on to mostly snow…for now at least
  12. 25/21 and rain here, but mixing back with snow during the heavier returns
  13. 26/16 DCL, 2595’. The valleys on the ride in this evening were 19-23 on the car thermometer. The woodstove is ripping now too
  14. It’s arguably what I did - pre cast superior wall foundation and ordered modular construction unfinished. At the time, this was actually the fastest of the available alternatives. It actually got a lot harder in 2021-22 because of the Covid and supply chain backlogs. I finalized my design and order in September 2020 and the box sections were delivered in April of 2021. People ordering a few weeks after me waited 12-24 months. The problem is it still took 2 years to finish it and by the time it was all set up I was already a year in. I suspect it could be easier today because of interest rates throttling some of the demand both for local labor and the factory built box sections. But it’s pretty difficult to find contractors that want to work on any projects less than seven figures anymore. At least here. I learned a ton doing this and would do it again in a heartbeat, just not in a location quite so isolated as this.
  15. January 07 suggests we’ll need shorts before shovels. All these years did flip eventually which is encouraging, still skeptical of the 20th century analogs.
  16. Timing is everything. House across from me sold in 2019 and he believes he can sell for 2x the 2019 price. And I think once interest rates level off a bit he probably will. Agreed the short term rental market is robust and definitely justifies the valuations. Those $500K townhomes are examples of that. I suspect plenty of homeowners there take 6-8 weekends a year, rent out as many of the rest as they can and still probably make money or at least break even. I did go for cable rail around my deck, including 2 full length staircases and admittedly that was expensive just for the materials. I did not do Trex however and will have to refinish every couple summers I suspect. With any luck the cable railing will survive the climate up here and look good for a long time.
  17. It certainly busted low on temps for the Potomac Highlands this past entire week from a lead time of 3-4 days - it had snowshowers here starting 12.26 that in actuality will maybe occur on the 29th or 30th. I actually agree you are correct though, I do think areas in the eastern portion of the subforum did see perhaps legitamately colder temperatures at times during December than you might have reasonably anticipated, blunting recognition of just how disasterous the pattern evolution actually was the final 10 days of the month.
  18. Not really overpriced. I doubt I could sell my place for a whole lot more than what I put in it. And this is not accounting for my sweat equity, which was substantial. I did 100% of the HVAC, floorcovering, painting and trim installation, 50% of the drywall install and finishing, at least 50% of the electrical / plumbing rough in and finishing. I rented heavy equipment and cleared 90% of the lot - because it was covid, because I had the time, because there was no one else to do it and I wanted it done! The big outsourced projects were things like well and septic, roofing and gutters, exterior siding and soffits, etc. Eventually, frustrated with our pace of progress my wife convinced me to outsource having a deck built around the cabin perimeter (like almost every other place up here has). It cost $46K and took almost 9 months to complete. No doubt this could have been completed for maybe 50%-70% of this cost in Leesburg and maybe taken a month. Because there are contractors everywhere, there is immigrant labor, there are building materials available on demand, the weather is benign, makeup any excuse you want. Go drive through basecamp, or even the comparatively cheaper properties irrespective if they have lake access or not. There are empty lots everywhere ready to build. Now ask the realtor trying to sell you these lots why. They won't tell you. Because if you heard the honest answer, most people would conclude they could never pull it off, because...most can't. Either because they don't have the time, or the patience, or the capital, or the expertise, or whatever. And that's why, when you find a property for sale, it appears overpriced.
  19. Being conscious of my tone, we should probably be very cautious when referencing analogs from what was objectively the coldest decade of the entire 20th century and attempting to apply them to modern times.
  20. The consensus in the 1970s was we were heading into another ice age and not much would stop it. 50 years later now look at us. If it was about to turn hard in another direction again how would anyone know? And if it’s cold again in 50 years but we’re all dead anyway does it even matter? Probably not
  21. It doesn’t really look like it will be cold enough to fire the snow guns before Sunday night either. I am sure they are going to try and stay open this weekend at wisp but this fog and mid 40s temps is for sure going to eat the snowpack alive, whatever is remaining over there. A sad reprisal of 2021 it appears for new years.
  22. Deep creek hasn’t even been below freezing since Saturday morning. They are also on track to finish December at 50%-75% of normal precip which is only noteworthy because of the positive anomaly 100 miles east. There are many ways to score but and east storm track and a generalized torching of the source region north and west isn’t one of them.
  23. It's really only bad like that a handful of weeks a year, and very predictable. Most of the time there is hardly anybody around. Once away from the lake its even sparser. But yes, on a 3 day holiday weekend in the summertime, you can't even get cell service. And boy do the city dwellers get mad when they show up and can't find anywhere to charge up their toy cars.
  24. If you decide to build at Deep Creek, recognize that it’s a 3 year process that is difficult to expedite under almost any circumstances. The contractors here are a very tight and closed network, and care more about steady work than starting or finishing anything on time. And there is an acute labor shortage here unlike anything you have observed in the city or suburbs/exurbs. Anything already finished and for sale usually will require significant renovations, especially if it was previously rented, and often carry significant price premiums making new construction appear competitive (until you actually try and build something). We bought our lot in summer 2020, and had provisional occupancy (read: unfinished) in Summer of 2021. I was an active participant in construction and did about 40% of the work myself and subcontracted as much as I could. That said, there are still significant areas of my project that remain unfinished to this day which I think is typical for up here. The pace of work has slowed considerably, mostly just due to demands on my time and the fatigue of a multi year build. I still think many who I talk to would argue my outcome is on the better side of average balancing what I have invested and what we’ve managed to get finished thus far.
  25. Its not snowing in the western highlands. It hasn't snowed in the western highlands for a week. It's no longer forecasted to snow in the western highlands before Friday or Saturday or Sunday or Monday. In fact, it's the same temperature in the highlands as it is in the lowlands nearly this entire week, which lends itself to +15 or greater departures out here. Go back and look at the models from December 10 / 15 / 20-/ 24th for the highlands and tell me the can hasn't been kicked. It's kicked out of the medium range every time this season except for maybe the underperforming event December 18-19. I am sorry that ground truth is defeating the modeled predictions for more favorable conditions in the medium range.
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