Life in a three-dimensional climate

Well, everyone lives in three dimensions, of course. But not everyone thinks about their weather in three dimensions. Weather.com certainly doesn't. When I log on to find weather conditions for my area, there is no way to get the system to distinguish between weather at the airport versus at our house, 400 feet higher. Or on the incline, 2000 feet higher. Never mind atop Pike's Peak, just a few miles west but over 1.5 miles above us.

In this ever-changing, between-seasons month of May, these differences have been striking. Coworkers come to work from homes at slightly different elevations and report different degrees of difficulty (ice-scraping to none) getting out of their driveways. The differences are sometimes visible on the surface of the mountains themselves, as on a couple of days when the snow line was not on the peak but much lower, right across the hills above our heads, a stark difference evident between the dark green-black and the sudden white that cuts across hiking trails we frequent or across neighborhood street patterns.

I'll have to start getting some photo documentation of all this. But whatever my day is like, whatever I'm facing, I can count on a moment of joy as I round the curve to the west headed out of our neighborhood and am presented with that morning's particular combination of temperature, air quality, precipitation, and light as it plays out on our gorgeous mountain view.