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Describe your seasons and climate

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Southern Ontario enjoys a humid continental climate. Summer daytime high temps average in the mid 20'sC / high 70'sF; winter daytime high temps average about -5C / 21F. And there's the humid part year round. It's noticeable if you travel between here and dryer places. Our hot humid summers and damp cold winters can be uncomfortable. And then there are anomalies such as tornadoes, severe thunderstorms, blizzards, cold snaps, heat spells, hail events, droughts etc. Keeps us on our toes and guessing. What I find most interesting though are the regional differences in weather patterns. Namely the effects of being surrounded by the Great Lakes on precipitation. (You folks in Buffalo sure know a thing about that.) Where I live we often experience different weather patterns than neighbours 20 miles in every compass direction who are closer to the lakes. I'll often watch as storm fronts pass across the north, or south, or east...just missing us entirely. That means I can't trust weather predictions from a nearby city at all. I might as well be living in the next province. (Some days I wish I were. Ha.) So if S. Ontario enjoys an average middle of the road type of climate, we here in my city are really in the middle of the middle of the road; which makes me very very average? Yeah, I can live with that.
I love having 4 distinct seasons. We endured and enjoyed a cold white Christmas recently. Nice. Looking forward to a mild wet spring, hot dry summer, and a cool colourful autumn. But there will be surprises along the way. There always are. Looking forward to those too.
 
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I roommate I use to have, when winer was supposed to be over and then in may we would get a dump, I would go at the door of her room and start singing that song.... Things would start flying in my direction in no time.....
 
Winter and road construction ...that sounds about right. Karin and I both grew up in southern Ontario so we had pretty definite 4 season weather there. I was actually right across the lake from Erie so I know lake effects for sure. While I have lived in the Prairies for most of my adult life, she is fairly new to it and it was a bit of a shocker the first real winter. Winter here is not much fun, especially as you get older. This year it came early and really messed up a lot of things for me.
ONe good thing is that my spring and fall clothes last me forever as I dont get to wear them much. And of course for summer I dont wear much. Sometimes in winter I wear mukluk liners and a fleece in the house...lol.

I think the thing that is tough here is the two extremes in temperature. The cold is the hardest one to deal with.

Christine
 
Eriie, bah huh. I live in the media forgotten land, The Tug Hill Plateau, south of Watertown, well north of Syracuse, just west of the Adirondacks. Rarely mentioned as long as reporters are stationed in the Buffalo area and a few flakes are falling there. I've seen as much as 400 inches fall here in a snow season.Holds the record for snow east of the Rockies. Spring, summer and fall are beautiful, rarely hot. Not much canoeing on Tug Hill, but extensive canoe waters in the Adirondacks are only a few minutes away.

The snow level on the post is approaching 5 feet (recent photo)
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Photo taken during a previous year, my cabin is a half mile west of the post in the previous photo. Can't get there now to shovel the roof, which I hope is still standing. Have to ski in to it, but it was -30F this morning.
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I live in the hart of the Genesee River Watershed. About 2,300 sq. mi. between the 42[SUP]nd[/SUP] and 43[SUP]rd[/SUP] parallels, a swath of land about 25 miles wide from Pennsylvania to Lake Ontario. Like most of the northeast, we have four very distinct seasons, which is something I like about my latitude. We are within the plumes of weather that come off Lake Erie or Ontario so depending upon the wind direction we can receive both lake effects. Our wood stove season only lasts about 4 months but in the summer, we have no need of air-conditioning. My paddling season runs from April through October.

The Genesee River and its tributaries account for about 300 miles of navigable water within an hour's drive of my home. All of these waterways have USGS gauges that will tell me when they can be run. If the river is too low or high, four of the Finger Lakes are within easy striking distance, two of them are totally undeveloped. When I need a multi-day outing I can be anywhere in the Adirondacks within four to six hours. I like that I can wake up in my own bed and be deep into the Wilderness before bedtime.
 
Like conk I live the area and seasons, particularly the endless hardwood forests.I like flat water and wilderness. One of the blessings of living here is that I am less than an hr from the wonderful Connowango/Cassadega creeks which offer dozens of canoeing and camping options with scads of wildlife. I still haven't explored all the backwaters. My current bad knee is limiting my snowshoeing which is my favorite winter activity after deer season. 2' of snow on the ground-perfect backcountry snowshoeing if you have big shoes..
 
Where I live in Connecticut, (Norfolk, in the N/W corner) we are considered the "ice box" of the state. Our temps are always the coldest of the surrounding towns, and at 1200/1600' elevation our wind chills kick in there.
The good news is I have plenty of hardwoods on my little wood lot, we run up to 3 wood stoves with free wood.
 
Robin,
We lived on Wire Mill Rd. n Stamford for a few years, and I literally had the Rippowam river run through my backyard. Could only canoe a few hundred yards of it due to the small dams, but brook trout fishing in your back yard was nice.

I remember there was more falling hardwood than you could burn, along with some very nice cedar. I loved the fireplace time we got in there.
 
I'm wishing I were in Buffalo right now. There's a World Junior Hockey game going on right now, outdoors. And it's snowing like mad. Awesome!
 
We have five seasons. Winter is Nov through March. April is mud season. Very interesting and slicker than ice when the top inch thaws and underneath is all frozen mud. May and June are spring further subdivided into pre blackfly and blackfly season. July and August are ostensibly summer though it takes a long time for the lake to warm. We hardly get above 85 ever. When we do we whine mightily. Sept is "thank god the tourists left" season aka fall. Leaves start to change early in Sept and can drag out the foliage season till about Oct 15 the other fall month/ Beeches and oaks hang on to leaves which rattle like bones in cold winter winds and annoy us by making us do more leaf removal in May when the new buds come out about May 15 and force the old growth out.

We get our snow on a usual three day cycle.. One day to prepare ( later in the season this involves finding heavy equipment to shove the snow further in the woods) one day to hunker and one day to clean. In March there is a flurry of folks trying to get snowblowers on to flat roofs (like stores) when the realization dawns that it may RAIN and the three feet of snow on the roof will act as a sponge. We lost a hockey arena that way one year. The rest of us wield seventeen foot roof rakes through the winter. Roof Raking is not a precision sport.. the weight of the head on that long a lever arm magnifies the difficulty of landing in the right place and not on the glass of a skylight.

Our November snow is there in April. We get compaction but no real melting. You can find Miss November squashed at the bottom of the snow cake in April. Once it comes it stays like an unwelcome guest. We have no hope of getting the Christmas lights off the bushes until at least Easter.

Ice out is the third week of April in general. This leads to problems as i am wanting to paddle and like to go to Lobster Lake between Greenville and Millinocket. I keep forgetting ice out is three weeks later there. More than once I have pulled over Indian Hill in Greenville on May 10 and said ..wtf.. I forgot..

Ice in right after Thanksgiving.. The Nov thanksgiving. Snowfall about 150 inches a year. Mount Washington is only 25 air miles from us and they had the bone chilling-89 windchill yesterday. Nice to be minus 34 with hurricane force winds.. The observers have to go out hourly neverthe less. They get about 300 inches of snow annually and have the North American record of 1400 cm in one winter..( about 560 inches). Its always fun to look at the Rockpile from the nearby farm and think " gee it could be colder!" Tuckerman Ravine famous for skiing accumulates 70 feet of snow a winter as it all gets blown off the summit.

I love Florida. For a month . Last year we went for a month. Good call. One of those weeks at home we got 71 inches of snow and people were grumpy. We just didn't know. Florida is useful for breaking the tedium of the three day cycle. Like housework snow removal is never final.
Our temps are temperate. 70's in the summer for a high. 20 in the winter usually. We are working on a cold spell.. minus 24 this morning and tomorrow morning.. But these dont last all winter. I could never endure Winterpeg!

We are off to find sea smoke tomorrow. I have seen a flurry of awesome pics of it and want to get my own.
 
Have not been on here in quite a while. Over the Summer I moved from Connecticut to Southeast Georgia. Summers are warm and humid, not real conducive to paddling unless your on the coast. Fall is a fabulous time to paddle here with cooler temps.Winters are mild with the average highs in the low 60's, most locals don't paddle in the winter but I think it's great. Spring might be the best time to paddle here as everything is in bloom. The pack canoe has served me well on the creeks and swamps that are common in the area.
 

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We went to put the canoes away but I couldn't resist. I had to take a paddle. Even thou it was -8 degrees Celsius it felt beautiful to be on the water. Here is a short video of my final hours of the season.

The background music is me playing Silent Night on my Classical guitar.
 
I think Mem beat you at least yesterday.. Some of these are well known in the canoeing world. Not so much though I have had a canoe on the car on Mt Washington.. ( its got the 80 something mph wind speed). There was a marriage proposal conducted a couple of thousand feet below in Tuckerman Ravine yesterday. I wonder if they kissed
 

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- 31 F with a -51F wind chill

Windchill is Fake News! #meteoroligistsarelizardpeople So yesterday, I took my skidoo for a two hour ride. It was -30 with a windchill saying -47. I was travelling about 70 k an hour shooting across the lakes, so that should add another 100 degrees to the windchill, so I was actually experiencing -147 degrees Celcius. I must be made of tough stuff, cause me and my little tundra were snug as a bug in a rug. You'd think at those formidable wind chills, my pecker would have broken off, but I checked last night, and it's still there.

Windchill was invented by SOCS so they could pretend to have it tough when two inches of snow drops in the city and temperatures plummet to -7. O but honey, with the windchill, it's -15. Wrap yourself up real good or your pecker will fall off on your way to the car.

Ha ha, I'm just kidd'n! Sorta kiddin. Ok, I'm not kidd'n, windchill is the battle cry of the weak!
 
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