2013: The Cool Wet One

2012 began with one of the mildest winters in memory.  Here in quintessentially southern Great Lakes South Lyon, Michigan we managed to see our lowest mercury reading a chilly 6 below zero Fahrenheit, but that was a brief adventure into a winter which saw January days well into the sixties and found March acting more like July, even giving us a tornado which we would not have expected until May.  This was followed by a July that acted more like we were in the desert Southwest, complete with 105 degree heat for weeks at a time and absolutely not a cloud in sight.  A sudden frost came in mid-September, rather early for this part of the Lakes, but it was followed by sixties well into December.  This all followed a 2011 which saw extremes of daytime highs in the thirties down as far south as Miami but also record breaking rains just about everywhere.  Not so 2012, which was bone dry and brought drought even to the entire length of the humidity factory known as the Gulf Coast.  Then too, there was Hurricane Sandy, a tropical-strength maelstrom of immense geographical scope; I witnessed the edge of the outer bands passing by here in Michigan. 

Then came 2013, a year in which extremes got altogether left behind, at least this far north.  Not so down south, where tornadoes were reported in January.  Up north we witnessed neither intense cold nor intense heat, but a lack of spring, a lack of summer, and a confused fall.  A killing frost happened in late May, but the growing season managed to last without a killing closer frost in mid-November.  My birthday and the start of the third year of this blog came along with much of my garden was still in bloom, followed by a deep freeze well below normal into the single digits, a freeze that we have risen above for only a few brief days thus far.  Out west single digits blasted the otherwise mild-winter Mojave desert, with St. George, Utah being buried under well over a foot of, get this, wet eastern-style snow.  Unlike in the storm of 2008, the snow stuck around for some time.  Again, however, the rest of the year was punctuated less by extremes than by moderation.  Much of July in southern Michigan was sitting in the upper fifties, ambushed here and there by a few days of summer heat.  Summer almost never came in the first place, with snow happening well into May.  This fall we had sixties from late August until mid-November, and unlike the previous year, we had little to show for it in foliage color.  The trees just seemed to give out almost instantly and without much warning. 

All the while we had the intense drought of 2012 beaten to a pulp in all but parts of California, Nevada, and a tiny corner of south western Oklahoma which has seemed to suffer intensely for the experience.  Rain kept falling, our Lakes seemed to rebound nicely, and the snow seems to have remembered that it belongs here this time of year.  Down South I certainly encountered rain, the likes of which fell in such intensity that I have never seen anywhere else.  This made for treacherous driving, a rather humid jaunt through coastal South Carolina, and a mosquito-empowered trip through Congaree National Park. 

While it is a floodplain, the swamp along the boardwalk in Congaree is not exactly a huge body of standing water.  In this wet year, however, things were very mucky even into June.

Which, by the way, we can continue down the boardwalk on now that the holidays are over.  My dear readers, thanks for continuing to visit us here and to discover more of the continent.  Despite my lack of presence over a good deal of the year, you made this the most visited thus far.