SNOWY ARIZONA

 At the risk of beating a dead horse (sorry PETA), I feel compelled to tell you that Flagstaff, Arizona has recorded just shy of 58 inches of snow this month.

That's only 23 days into the New Year and it's already the fourth most snow ever recorded in a January and third place is within reach.

I was provoked by opening the blinds this morning and discovering that there was a fresh dusting, and it was only a dusting, of snow on the ground around my home.

Now we don't get anywhere near the snowfall that Flagstaff does because the elevation here is right around 5,000 feet and Flagstaff is almost 2,000 feet higher.

It is considered a mountain town but it's only about 140 miles north of Phoenix, which is considered to be in the desert.

And Phoenix is where one finds the cactus and the extremely high temperatures of summer through several months of the year.

Now I live in Prescott Valley about halfway between the two cities, even though our elevation is closer to Flagstaff than it is to Phoenix.

So we get views like this from the edge of town.

Those are the snow-topped Black Hills and not the ones that house Mount Rushmore.

Those are in South Dakota, well to the north of here.

The two highest peaks are Woodchute Mountain and Mingus Mountain.

For whatever reason, most people just refer to the whole range as Mingus Mountain.

As you can see from these pictures, the snow stops accumulating about halfway down the mountains.

I took these photos this morning and, as you can see, the sky to the north is looking dark and stormy so Flagstaff could get more snow today and tonight.

And so ends our climatology report for today.