I just have to share this!

I'm sure you'll all be as delighted as I am, to welcome the first SNOW here in the Great White North.  Actually in a small southern corner of the country, and it will probably melt again in a day or three.  But I've always enjoyed it when that first snowfall arrives!

This is what we woke up to, 3 or 4" of fresh white stuff, thickly plastered on the northeast side of all the smaller trees and shrubs, and covering the grass.

Certainly not enough to worry about shovelling or snowblowing, especially then the forecast calls for 10°F in a day or two.  But meanwhile, our 6' tall ornamental grasses are completely bent to the ground.

Mysteriously, the snow was clinging to everything under about 20' tall, but not to the tops of larger trees.  Must have been some interesting meteorological conditions to account for that.

I took my camera when the dog and I headed out on our morning walk.  She was even more excited than I was to see the snow return, and spent a big chunk of the day outside, lying in the fresh snow.  These are all young ash trees, snow plastered on the north-east side.

The sun came out between the clouds briefly at the end of the road, lighting up the landscape.  That gap in the trees on the right is the old woods road where I sometimes snowshoe.

It was just like a fairyland of white on the black trunks and branches in the woods.

And that dark cloud off to the right is a 'snow streamer'.  The second half of the snowstorm consisted of our typical winter snowfalls, long narrow streamers blowing south off Georgian Bay or east off Lake Huron for 30 or 40 miles.  That's what one looks like when you're not underneath it!  Underneath it, it's snowing.

And just for interest, we headed north to Meaford for the Hospital Bazaar later on, finding that the snow all ended once we went down over the escarpment about 10 miles north of here, leaving the last 10 miles off Georgian Bay snowfree - even though the stiff north winds were still blowing in off the bay there, as you can see.

The reason is that we live on the 'higher lands' of Grey Highlands, and with an early snowfall like this, there's just enough of a temperature difference that they get rain, while we get snow.  I'm fascinated by meteorological observations like that.