Birch trees at the front of the Birch Ridge Inn covered with snow and backlit by lights on Killington Road.

Birch trees at the front of the Birch Ridge Inn covered with snow and backlit by lights on Killington Road.

Somtimes it's lemons. Other times it's lemonade. For this mid-January holiday weekend, Killington was given tanker truck loads of lemonade in the form of heavy wet snow.

The weather forecast the last couple of days was problematic. While the forecasters were calling for heavy r@!n on Sunday, there was a mention of snow in the higher elevations. The National Weather Service forecast was schizophrenic. Cats, ice, dogs, r@!n, snow....the kitchen sink could have fallen from the sky and they would have forecasted it. Such is the variability of mid January storms in the mountains when there is a bubble of very cold air to the north, and warm air to the south. But it all turned out good in the end.

Winter wonderland in the forest behind the Birch Ridge Inn at Killington.

Sunday was already called for with the NFC and AFC championship games on television, so the weather outside, while being a curiosity, was not high on the list. What started as ice at mid day made a brief transition to r@!n before settling into a gentle heavy wet snow storm.

At midnight, before calling it a night, I went outside to shovel off the walkways in front of the inn. The afternoon and early evening as a couch potato watching the football games had left me with a little too much energy to try to call it a night and get to bed early. After a couple of shovels full, I realized that the snow blower was the way to go. 3-5 inches of heavy wet snow is no problem for my 9 1/2 horse snow blower... While walking out to get it, I could not help but notice how nice all of the trees looked covered in snow and back lit by the street lights on the Killington road; hence the primary picture for todays blog.

When I got up in the morning and went back outside to clean things up, everything was still beautiful. Mother Nature had given Killington lemonade for MLK weekend. It was nice to stand quietly outside and just drink it all in.

Let it snow!