THE Carnival is in town...

and by that I don't mean me !

It was 84 degrees F the day after I hit town.  Just across Olive Ave, I saw the annual mini-carnival set up on the Glendale Community College grounds.

What better way to spend a Saturday if you're a kid than hang out at the fun fair. 

Unfortunately by Sunday morning, the temperatures had dropped almost 30 degrees and rain had moved in.

A major winter storm arrived just in time for spring and my own arrival in Glendale.  The TV weather gal was warning of huge snowfalls north of town and plenty of rain in the valley.  The definition of a desert is sparse annual rainfall and typically that's the case to be sure.

 However, that isn't always so...

Every station had ominous radar maps of an imposing cold front moving in from the Pacific.  Obviously Mother Nature does not pay attention to calendar dates.

An inch of rain for a place that sees less than 12 a year, all at once is mighty significant.

Up around Flagstaff, it was going to be worse, much worse.  Some locales were expecting as much as 18" of snow.

As it turned out, the "experts" were wrong again.

By Monday morning the daily high in Phx was in the low 50's and I 40 and 17 around Flagstaff were shut down in all directions.  The eye on the spot reporters from each station were showing massive truck and carnage on the highways!

Semi's jack-knifed, passenger cars squished and kids having fun doing something they rarely get to do... slide down hills on pieces of plastic, trash can lids and sleds!  There was even a family interviewed that had driven from Tuscon several hundred miles to relish the snowfall.

As for the predicted 18"... Snowbowl (appropriately named) had received 53" in the first thirty six hours!

On my patio was small hail and lots of rain...