Warm winter

I was driving up the street to my house the other day and looked up at the hills and realized how nice they look. Las Vegas is a big city aligned along the bottom of a big valley. There are mountains all around us, our streets are wide, and there aren’t many big imposing trees to block the views. California and Nevada have some of the best wide vistas anywhere, with open blue sky and mountains in the distance.

We live about ten miles from Red Rock Canyon National Conservation Area . You can see the striped red hills from anywhere in the Vegas Valley, with the colors appearing to be quite bright at certain angles of the sun. The other morning the red strip down the road between the trees was just brilliant, but faded out for the photograph.


We’ve had a very warm winter; I think there was only one day when nighttime temps dropped below freezing. Living in the high desert we usually have twenty to thirty degree swings (Fahrenheit) between nightly lows and afternoon highs, even in the winter. So a freezing night still leads to a sixty degree afternoon. Well, most of this winter it’s been around 45 at night and 65 in the daytime (5 – 19c), with some days over 80 most of February and March. This has led to a lot of our flowering trees and bushes to get confused and bloom early. The big yellow ones around town are now all bright and full off bees, the ones in our yard give off a marvelous fragrance.


It just makes me wonder how hot a summer we will be having to compensate for this.