Scenes from the Big Drip

January 15, 2025

The ice notes (2022)

Splashes of light from the inland Northwest’s uncommonly liquid winter

It is mid-January. My snow boots are still in the closet. That’s unusual for where I live, in Spokane, in a zone between the high desert and the Rocky Mountains where the dreaded fire season of late summer and fall usually ends (none too soon) with a blast of snow and a bite of arctic air. November was one of the wettest Novembers on record. When you add in December’s rains we were about 2.5 inches above normal for the two months, with even more rain arriving in the first weeks of January. That may not seem like much when you consider Seattle averages close to 40 inches a year. But the low winter sun is too weak and too mercurial to induce much in the way of evaporation. The light is damp and muffled by fog, and what freezes overnight has, as often as not, melted by noon. The resulting greenery (primarily from an explosion of lichens and, yes, even grass) is surreal. I would wish this for Los Angeles.

Frozen drop on mahonia

Rain-drenched mule deer buck in a rimrock meadow west of Spokane

Red-breasted nuthatch out on a lichen-laden limb

Staghorn lichens

Hairy woodpecker at work on a lichen-laden pine branch

Lichen-encrusted pine on a shady slope

Water-vapor exhaling from soaked pines during a rare sun break

White-breasted Nuthatch plucking a seed from the trunk of a Ponderosa pine

—tjc

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