On February 7, I was wandering around Hamilton, Ontario in jeans and a t-shirt. In early March I had to borrow a windbreaker from a friend because everything I’d brought to wear during my winter stay in Canada was too stiflingly warm to wear.
Don’t get me wrong, there have been days during my Winter Of 2016 stay in Ontario that were cold and snowy; however, overall it has been downright balmy. It’s been more like the Great Brown North than anything else.
Several Canadian cities have had to import snow in order to hold their annual winter carnivals, which many locals attended in shorts and tank tops.
Okay, that last bit was something of an exaggeration. Yes, some towns did have to truck snow in for their winter fests, but the shorts and t-shirts thing, well, not so much.
That said, whenever I tell people that I’m a writer from Southern California writing about what it’s like to spend a winter up north I hear a lot of, “well, you picked a really mild one, eh?”
Light jacket days early March, 2016 Owen Sound, Ontario.
And, they aren’t kidding. While official totals haven’t been fully tabulated for the 2015 – 2016 season, I can anecdotally say, with some confidence, that prior to my arrival in Canada, I experienced nearly as many snowy, below-freezing days with family over the holidays in Fort Collins, Colorado , as I have since being in Ontario.
Shortly after New Year’s Day, I drove to Owen Sound, chased and occasionally overtaken by blizzard conditions created by a Lake Effect snow squall blowing in off Lake Huron.
The morning after I arrived in Owen Sound I begin my search for a short term apartment rental only to find the roof of my car under 61 cm/24 inches of snow and surrounded by drifts up to the door handles. Needless to say, that day was spent conducting my search via the Internet.
Within a day, streets and parking lots were plowed and snow was piled up in what looked like a series of Alpine mountain ranges all around town. Owen Sound had clearly settled into what it perceived would be a normal Bruce Peninsula winter; weeks of snow squalls off the still warm waters of Lake Huron followed by nearly as many weeks of dry, near-Arctic temperatures after the lake froze over.
It never happened.
By the end of January, with only an occasional light squall or two, temperatures around southern Ontario had been so unseasonably warm that only the dirty remnants of the largest mounds of plowed snow remained.
February came in like spring.
By mid-February, we did get visited, briefly, by some arctic air, now annoyingly referred to most often as the Polar Vortex. The super frigid conditions, which only lasted about four days before being pushed out by more unseasonably warm weather, gave rise to a veritable winter wonderland at the tip of the peninsula where the mists blowing in off the still unfrozen surface of Lake Huron across Georgian Bay created forests of spectacular, frosty, frozen sculptures.
Short lived Winter Wonderland courtesy of the Polar Vortex, Big Tub Lighthouse, Tobermory, Ontario.
That’s been it for winter weather in this part of southern Ontario. The rest of the time it was an almost even mixture of cloudy days, sunny days, windy days, and occasionally rainy days, and the temperatures for the most part were above freezing, which, for those of you playing along at home, are above 0º Celsius and above 32° Fahrenheit.
They wouldn’t have to play so hard if you did it right.—Kenneth
True, had I stayed in Palm Springs I’d have spent a great deal more of my time in t-shirts, shorts, and flip flops, as it appears the highly anticipated El Nino of the Century turned out to be somewhat disappointing in Southern California. I have friends in Palm Springs who attended the International Bear Convergence (IBC) in February and I was treated to a week of FaceBook timeline pictures of large hairy, bearded men, stripped to the waist in and around the pool at the Palm Springs, Hard Rock Hotel.
I don’t want to open that whole can of worms known as the global climate change debate, however, as I’ve gone through an entire Canadian winter mostly bereft of winter weather I can’t help but recall the image, last year, of Oklahoma Senator James Inhofe holding up a snowball on the floor of the United States Senate using it to illustrate his contention that there was no such thing as global warming.
Perhaps I should send him a copy of that sunny February Sunday picture of me, out and about in Ontario, Canada in jeans and a t-shirt, and ask him where the snows of the winter of 2016 were.
That was the winter that wasn’t. Hamilton, Ontario, February 7, 2016.
