The snow is falling fast and furious. Schools and businesses are closed. Northern Michiganders are arming themselves once more with shovels, snowplows and snowblowers. Nevertheless, the feared ice storm and threat of mass power outages that meteorologists warned us about appears not to have materialized—at least not in Leelanau County.
The first half of January was brown and green in Leelanau County. According to the National Weather Service (NWS) in Gaylord, we’re on pace to set a record for lack of snow this month. Even with a few white flurries late in January, we may still eclipse the previous mark. NWS measures snow accumulation in two County locations—Maple City and Northport.
Much of Leelanau County is still without electricity following Friday night’s massive late-winter snowstorm that snapped trees and left roads impassible all over northern Michigan. Expect a story later this week about how Leelanau County residents fared during this 2012 “Snowpocalypse” — one of the worst storms to hit the region in decades.