Our first winter in North Carolina is, uh, kind of overdelivering.
I write this on the 30th of January 2026. Here’s what that looks like at Weather Underground:
If you compare almanac data, the first 3 weeks of the year were pretty normal, modulo those wildly warm days on the 7th and 10th. A Durham January, at least according to histoyr, means cold overnights, with freezes not unusual, but daytime temps reaching the 50s. Some wetness is possible.
Now look at what we’ve had for the last week.
We were last over 40F on Friday, 23 January. On Saturday night into Sunday the 25th, of course, we got our first real winter storm. It was mostly freezing rain, but we got enough snow to make it pretty. Here’s what we woke up to on the 25th (8:25AM):
Now, the good news is that Monday got to the mid-30s and included no small amount of sunshine. Our cul de sac looked the same at 0800 Monday, but by 11:49AM we had this:
And an hour later it was this:
Again, peak air temp was still only about 36F, but the sun is very useful. By the end of the work day I thought nothing of taking the car to the grocery store to grab a thing or two.
Now, we’ve had no additional precipitation all week, so the white stuff is nearly all gone from anywhere the sun hits — BUT. That’s a big caveat. The driveway just out of frame at 9 o’clock in those pictures gets just about zero sun, and so it’s still as iced over TODAY as it was on Sunday. Why?
Because Durham hasn’t been out of the 30s for over a week, and we won’t get there until maybe next week. (Incidentally, that same problem has kept my motorcycles in the garage; there’s a patch of ice in our driveway that won’t quite go away, and we lack the equipment to banish it more actively.)
OH, and we’re supposed to get up to 6″ of snow on Saturday. But snow won’t stick around like the ice from last weekend, not least because the forecast for Monday is 40, and Tuesday will hit 48.
All this is super weird to me. I’m not exactly complaining. I knew I was getting real seasons here. I knew cold snaps could happen. But at the same time I’m kind of agog, because I am 55 years old and this week represents the longest period of time in my ENTIRE LIFE I’ve spent south of 40F.
Carry on.