Midlands 2015-#5N

The snow on yesterday’s mountain was merely a portent of things to come. I had a 9am meeting in Launceston today necessitating a 6am departure on a very chilly dark morning. As I headed out past Bagdad in the pre-dawn light I noticed patches of white on the hills, and by Dysart it was pretty obvious that the snow had fallen to very low levels. At Spring Hill—the highest point on the Midlands Highway—there was snow all around, although the traffic had been sufficient to keep the road clear even in the early hours. I stopped to take a few photos, although low light levels and my failure to compensate by adjusting the ISO settings made my shots blurry. This was the best of them.

At this point it started to snow, with the strong winds giving the flakes a horizontal velocity, although it wasn’t so heavy as to make driving difficult (the roadworks in this section provided two advantages: a posted low speed limit which stopped people being silly, and a loose gravel surface). There was snow everywhere around the Jericho and Oatlands sections of the road, and I wondered how far north it would extend. Once beyond St Peter’s Pass, however, the snow cover all but disappeared and the day ended up being surprisingly sunny in the north (apparently it was a miserable 8°C for those I left behind in the south).

By the time I returned around 4:30pm almost all the snow had gone.