Snow In Portland Yesterday 12-14-2016

[Coss]

Talk about a mess, it seems Portland freeways all have some kind of construction going on; but when the snow started coming down yesterday, Portland became the largest parking lot on the west coast.
Eugene, OR didn't get snow, they had to be different, so they got an inch of Ice.
Portland got about 3" (yes, that's all it takes, there are a LOT of hills here) but it started at 2:00pm and the parking lot started shortly after. Here's an email I send to a friend in Indiana last night:
What a mess in and around Portland last night. Some of the schools didn't let the kids out early, and they got stuck in that traffic. They said some weren't home until 9:00 or 10:00 that night. Some other schools had the kids stay there, at a couple of them, they had to stay overnight. There was one stretch of I-5 that it was taking 4 1/2 hours to travel 14miles. Eugene, OR (100 miles south of Portland) got a little over an 1" of solid ice.
We ended up with 3/8" of an inch and now everything is frozen solid. The schools here knew better and let the kids out at 12:30 and they all got home before anything heavy came down. In Battle Ground it's pretty flat, but just outside of town proper it's all hills, some pretty steep (we're in the foothills of the Cascades).
There was one news van that got stuck in the traffic and in an hour they had moved 500'
Just one big parking lot. They had people running out of gas, and rather than trying to push it out of the way, they just left it where it was.

 

[BilgeRat]

Ye gods... What a mess. They couldn't get the Yugo with the snowplow fired up?

Seriously though, I've seen it get that bad here, too. Coming home from a Woodward Governor class in Fort Collins once, I was trailing a pretty big storm headed east. Delayed a day in Omaha, and spent two days with friends in Cedar Rapids before moving on. Hit the Mississippi at the Quad Cities on I-80, and it looked like we didn't own snowplow one... After fifteen miles or so, I quit counting semis in the ditch, and cars were just too numerous to even bother with. A long, slow drive home. Ice is no joke either. Having been in Paducah after their big ice storm in January of 2009, it looked like a weird hurricane had hit town; mountains of tree branches down. An inch of ice is paralyzing in areas where it happens regularly.

 

[Coss]

Look what I woke up to today

The kitty in the picture is the baby (Sandy), she's 9 months old and 12 lbs.; so this is the first experience with Snow (she hates rain) as you can see by the trails, she's having a ball. Where is at is the top of the stairs that drop down 2 feet; no matter, in the snow, she's Super Kitty!!

 

[Coss]

How about a couple of other shots

According to the news I got about 10" of the white stuff, plus it's 28 degrees, and not supposed to get in the 40's till Saturday, so the Snow is here to stay for a while. Think I'll take Stubby (My Dodge Nitro) out for a while and see what the roads are like; yes, she does have 4 wheel drive.

 

[Ekh]

Nice photos. If you can, instruct your camera to overexpose by two thirds of a stop. In sunshine go up as much as 1.5 stops. Your pictures are running dark because the auto exposure system in your camera tries to even things out, and what it sees the most of his snow. So if you override it you will get better exposures.

 

[Coss]

That was at 7:00am and no coffee yet, you really think I'm going to remember that, let alone set it up. Just getting up that early was work.

I'm using a 10yr old DSLR Pentax K100 with a 18 by 55 lens on it, just remembering to take the lens cap off was a chore

I like that camera, and I got it cheap off of eBay; paid like $280 for the body and lens. Bought a 50 X 200 DR lens for it about 4 months after I got it for $195.

Before the Pentax I used to use a Yashica 35mm SLR that I still have. I used to play with the F-Stops on that one all the time, and boy, did I go through rolls of film. But when the DSLR's came out there was no going back

 

[W. WIllie]

My "Brownie Box" takes excellent pictures without any adjustments.
Now if I can just find some film.

 

[Coss]

My "Brownie Box" takes excellent pictures without any adjustments.
Now if I can just find some film.

And a place to develop it.......

 

[RUCRAYZE]

I'm happy where I am, thanks- my kids on Vashon got some, but NOTHING close to yours.
I bet ya can't wait for the overcast days in the low 40's.
Amazing enough, we lost power here for 4 hrs Monday.
Reminds we when I was doing my under grad work in Oswego- 10-20", and the schools were open, back then you had to put a tennis ball on top of the radio antenna,'cause the intersections had show too hi to see.

 

[Coss]

We lost power twice last week when it was really cold here (in the teens)
But what's crazy; all of the wires are underground, except for the main feeds coming into town, and that's where the problem was, a tree got hit by a truck and knocked the tree down, onto the main feeds, No power for 4 hours. House is super insulated, so it only dropped 3 degrees in 4 hours.