I think I broke it down to my buddy Matterdays one time that the seasons in the Pacific Northwest are the wet season, the cold season, the cold and wet season, and OMG INFERNO season. West of the Cascade Range, at least, the winters are pretty mild, except for a week or three every year where it drops down below freezing and stays there, and everyone goes OH GOD WHEN WILL IT RAIN AGAIN AND END OUR TORMENT? After a while, it warms up enough to rain, and the people are briefly grateful before they go back to grumbling about the eight months of rain, and eventually summer gets here and it’s briefly just gorgeous all the time before we spend a week or two in the triple digits, and again everyone goes OH GOD WHEN WILL IT RAIN AGAIN AND END OUR TORMENT? and then sure enough it rains, etc, etc, rinse and repeat, you kids know the drill.

We didn’t get much in the way of snow, this year, at least not in our neighborhood. (Note: I’m fine with that. Snow is a huge pain in the ass if I have to drive anywhere.) We did, however, get a weird, strangely localized ice fall all over everything pretty consistently on the days it got below freezing at night. Like in the photo above: right on the other side of that building in the background, there was no ice at all. Turn in the other direction, and it covered everything as far as you could see.

In talking it over with some of my coworkers, we came up with what was probably the most logical explanation for why ice crystals only seemed to fall all over and cover the ground for only a mile or so along this stretch of the suburbs. A fair bit of this part of Hillsboro is taken up by high tech manufacturing, notably the large Intel fabs. Making semiconductors involves a lot of water, so the plants along these roads give off a lot of steam. On the colder days the steam cools and falls and blows away closer to the ground, and doesn’t get very far at all before it freezes and covers the ground as faux snow. The moisture in the air also makes for some really cool looking frozen spider webs.

Our days are a bit warmer now, and I’ll have some more photos of the spring up soon, but in keeping with my new theme of the least current events on the web I thought a few photos from January seemed appropriate for now.