Where I live, the average is a mere 32 inches or so. This year, we ended up with 42 inches. Plus, it's cooler here than say, Oklahoma, although it can get hot. The weirdest thing is how dry this winter has been so far. By this time last year, and the year before for that matter, we were running out of places to pile snow. One of my kids moved to Olympia, WA recently. That locale seems to be getting plenty of moisture lately! I think 'effective precipitation' is really the key, as others have already pointed out. Overall, I think we're seeing fewer "three day rains", where it comes down slowly but for a long time. It's all big downpours now, with the accompanying runoff. But with this current drought, gotta wonder where we're headed for the next growing season. +oM

Sherry, If you go to see the giant redwood/sequoia trees, please realize that there are dozens of places worth seeing them along the coast from the CA/OR border to central California and in the Sierra Nevada Mountains along the CA/NV border that each have their own unique appeal. It would take a week just to explore all of the big tree NP's, SP's, SRA's, SNR's and Monuments in CA alone. When I lived in San Francisco, Russian Gulch, Big Basin SP and Mount Madonna were favorites, but after I moved to Carmel it was all about Polo Colorada Canyon and the many spots around Pfeiffer Big Sur. I'll have to tell you about my very rare and unique coffee table made from a Polo Colorado Cyn giant and Bixby Creek driftwood sometime. Yes, "mesa" is a term loosly applied to any landform in the arid west with a flat top and verticle cliff sides, and they are quite common. They are also referred to as table mountains, buttes, potrero or tuya depending on how they were formed and their characteristics and can vary from small ones like those in the BDW to the Grand Mesa in CO which is the largest in the world at around 500 square miles on top. Sometimes plateau is also used wrongly. They don't always have the verticle sides and are much bigger covering huge areas up to millions of square miles. Yes I could move back to St.George I guess, although in many ways the cost of living is higher there than Vegas. I'm sure some of my old friends are still there and kicking. But since my Dad lives there now I wouldn't even consider it.

My first DH and I starting camping when our son was about four. My husband bought a used van and we remodeled the inside and used it as our camper. Then we had to chance to buy a VW camper that had never been camped in so we bought it and sold the van. We used that for about a year. It had absolutely no power to climb mountains so we ended up selling it and started tent camping. When our son was nine, some friends that moved here from the NW talked us into sewing/building a teepee. That was quite an experience but the end result was some wonderful years of primitive camping, good times and great memories. After DH died, I passed the teepee along to our son and he still alternates between using it and tent camping. It's been 31 years since DH and I made it. I remarried and my current DH had one of the old VW campers when we married and we sold it a few years ago and bought a Class C motorhome with a slide. We've also got a two room tent that we keep on hand in case of family/friends over flow when we're camping. We've camped up to three months at a time. For the most part, I don't mind the cooking or camp clean up. Packing and unpacking is certainly not as tedious with the motorhome but the yearly maintenance & insurance can sure be a budget crunch. We keep threatening to sell it and go back to tent camping or a small travel trailer. I certainly don't see us giving up camping because we enjoy it too much to not do it. We've made a lot of great memories while camping and had some wonderful and awesome experiences that we may never have had otherwise. That's not to say that we don't enjoy trips and nice hotels because we do and most of those trips have been memorable in their own way. Thinking now...we may just be wanderers and adventurers at heart but we're the happiest with mother nature surrounding us.

Yup! I'm a cheap date! Now..."Uncle"! lol There are other remarks I won't go into here...LOL Gwen - in rainy, gray Murphy today...library time! But, Misty Mtn Quilt show tomorrow with quilt friend, Lucy, yeah!