It Couldn't Last: Arctic Cold To Return To Vermont (And Stay Awhile)

Our January thaw is tapering off and coming to an end.

The thaw around my house in St. Albans, Vt.
revealed where I compacted the icy snow
a couple weeks ago when I walked from the house
to the shed.  

And it's going to turn cold again. Very cold.

On the bright side, this might be the clean slate I'd hoped for. The big thaw melted much (but not all) of that awful ice from the freezing rain of late December.

Now, maybe, we can start piling up some powdery snow, as I'd hoped.

There's no big storms on the way, but we might get flurried to death, as we often do in the winter.

A couple of little storms will come through this weekend, each dropping one to three inches of new snow, with a little more than that in the mountains.

Next week, it will turn very cold, with some days only reaching the single numbers in the afternoons and then getting below zero at night.

It looks like the cold will stay around for more than a week, and there's signs another intense "polar vortex" could hit us with way, way below zero weather somewhere around the January 27 or 28. (That's not certain, but there are signs)

The cold pattern will suppress storminess well to the south and east of northern New England, so I don't imagine we'll get any big dumps of snow. But light snow and flurries will probably occasionally freshen up the thin snow cover during the cold spell.

Hey, at least it will be too cold for freezing rain.