Our daughter's thermomenter is more accurate than ours. She said that it was 29 degrees F. this morning, freezing ice on the water. We are at about 2800 feet elevation where we live. We have been running our pellet stove on the very lowest setting during the early evening, night, and into the morning for quite a while now. It is cool all day long lately, but the sun heats our house for a few hours during the day.
Our neighbors have disked their wheat stubble twice now, trying to work it into the soil, and chop it up some. It is definately fall here with a hint of winter coming. I lived in a place where wood was abundant and free. It was about one mile from our house where the National Park Service piled wood logs and invited all the people living in the area to get all they wanted. Each year I would get far more wood than I needed. The landlord asked me when I moved to have the place full of wood for burning in the stove. Well, I didn't realize we were going to move as soon as we did, so I had a lot more wood than he required of me. There was another person in the valley who got caught short, so it worked great for him, because I told him that wood belonged to me, and go get it, and help yourselve to all you want, and it saved his hide, because he was able to keep warm that winter without having to cut wood. These people were good to us, so I was happy to help them as well.
We live on the top of the world here, so we can see airports 30 miles in two different directions. We live not far from Grand Coulee Dam, but we can't see that direction, but we can see the lights from Chief Joseph Dam at night. We can see lights int he distance several directions. We can see the Cascade Mountains towards where we used to live in the Stehekin Valley, and they already have deep snow on them. Mostly what we have here are haystack rocks, grass, and wheat. We have very few trees on this hill that we live on. There are scattered trees various places not far away, but there are only just a few that we can see in the distance. The Columbia River is not far away one direction, and the Okanogan River is not far away the other direction, but we can't see either of them without some driving. The Columbia River is very close, like just a few miles, like maybe 10 or so. It is about 25 miles to the Okanogan River. We have a quite a large lake, for this area anyway, Omak Lake, just down over the hill from us.
Cool feels good after the heat of the summer, but it will not be long before the cool will turn to cold, and very cold, with strong winds and often minus temperatures, as well as drifting snow. We often are not able to go anywhere at times in the winter because of the deep drifted snow. Our son-in-law drives to work each day, but he has 4 wheel drive, and there are times that he has to wait for the snow plow to come past our place before he can go to work. He is often late in the winter because of that, and there are times that he misses entire days of work because of being snow bound.
